7 ms·

The design thinking movement is absurd (2018)

105 points by Lutzb 3y ago

julienreszka 3y ago
I studied this, it looked very nice in the abstract but when we had to apply it to actual design it was terrible way to do things. Way more important was learning to do project profitability estimates based how each feature would contribute to increasing revenues, increasing expenses, decreasing revenues, decreasing costs. Simple as
- gls2ro 3y ago
  what did you study specifically? Like what resource did you use? Design Thinking is not about the actual design. Is a method or process to understand user needs, generate solutions and then review those solutions with the actual users. Why I ask this and add the explanation is thar design thinking is not a project management metodology so it is not concerned with estimation, profitability, revenue, expenses, costs as a main focus. It can add those as constraints on the convergent phase but it is not about managing those. Or at least this is what I know about it from my experience.
kitd 3y ago
Author spends a lot of time complaining about Design Thinking, and worrying about it "infecting" education, but he doesn't actually say what is wrong with it. He quotes a few woolly phrases that look like the introductory sentences in an Overview section, then extrapolates from those as a detailed description of the whole topic. No wonder it looks vapid to him. I'm not a design expert but AIUI, Design Thinking brings empathy with the user to the forefront of the design process and makes it a first-class factor. My own experience of the outcome of this process (writing software to such designs) is very largely positive.
- MPSimmons 3y ago
  He also doesn't actually describe what it is. I don't think he knows any more than the people he's complaining about.
  - whydoineedthis 3y ago
    He eventually quotes someone as: “It’s an approach to problem-solving based on a few easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious:‘Show Don’t Tell,’ ‘Focus on Human Values,’ ‘Craft Clarity,’ ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ ‘Mindful of Process,’ ‘Bias Toward Action,’ and ‘Radical Collaboration.’” All of those are pretty sound principals proven to be effective by most innovators though. Screaming at people is easier than actually learning to be effective, and I suspect is the root of his outrage.
  - GuestHNUser 3y ago
    Really? I thought it was pretty clear that the author thinks Design Thinking is composed of vague ideas and vapid phrases. Moreover, the author cites a significant number of noteworthy designers that make compelling arguments that Design Thinking is nonsense that produces a skewed picture of the design process. I think your comment dismisses the article without giving a compelling reason why.
- qsort 3y ago
  Stanford's website is apparently unable to explain it either: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exec-ed/programs/design-thinking-bootcamp https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exec-ed/programs/design-thinkin... Judging from the "participant profile", it sounds like the kind of thing you do when you have money to spend before the end of the year.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    No better at MIT/Sloan. The illustration under "Here’s what you need to know to get started" is utterly generic and trite. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/design-thinking-explained https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/design-thinkin...
  - Centigonal 3y ago
    I'm gonna take a stab at this because I don't think it's that complicated. Design thinking is a methodology for designing things, often products. It has 5 steps: 1. Empathize. Find your intended user and try to understand them, their expectations, wants, needs, and fears. 2. Define. Based on understanding your user, what are you trying to actually do? What are the problem(s) you want to solve for the user? 3. Ideate. Get a bunch of people in a room and have a no-judgement brainstorming fest around solving the problem(s) you defined. Come up with a ton of ideas! Then look at them all critically and remove the less priomising ones. 4. Prototype. Make MVPs for a promising idea or ideas. 5. Test. Take your MVP to your target user. See how they react. Go back to prototype and adjust the idea based on feedback, or pick a different idea out of the ideation process if this one is a bust. Repeat until your prototype is good enough that you're confident to scale up. Within each of these steps, there are a few tools/techniques you can learn to structure them more if you like. There are also no shortage of experts and consultants who will take your money to expound on the finer points of each part of the process. You can go as deep into the rabbit hole as is useful.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Isn't all that just the standard process of design/development? Have I been engaging in "Design Thinking" all these years without even knowing it?
- Jorge1o1 3y ago
  The problem with Design Thinking is that Design Thinking has become a cargo-cult of meaningless buzzwords and hot air. The same can be said about Agile -- it's just a collection of buzzwords loosely connected into a "framework" or "approach" or "school of thought" but it's certainly difficult to put an exact pin on what exactly DT and Agile entail. But if we can't agree on the specifics -- at least we can agree on the broad points right? - Agile is about iterating quickly, making smaller changes more frequently, etc. - DT is about empathizing with the end user, considering the problem before solving it, and then attempting to fix it and asking for feedback The problem is, once you cut through all the bullshit, you're left with what is really just common-sense wisdom. So they're faced with a choice: - Either you teach the core concept sans-BS, which can't be monetized. - Or you build an entire ecosystem of hot air, buzzwords, tooling, artifacts, blog posts and rituals around your obvious wisdom, which is how we ended up with Stories and Sprints and User Points and Epics and JIRA and Scrum and all the other crap. You can now sell $12,000 bootcamps, $100k software, etc.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > Agile is about iterating quickly, making smaller changes more frequently, etc. Agile is about revising the plan frequently to adjust it for reality. All of those things are tools, not the goal; and if you do all of them but still don't revise the plan, you won't get any of the benefit.
    - Jorge1o1 3y ago
      Good point actually, thanks.
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
        Granted, it's even a bit hard to make fast iterations without revising the plan, so it's natural to ignore the difference. But some management structures achieve just that.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    Agile is clearly defined below Design thinking is letting user requirements and their actual use cases dictate product definition and execution rather than feature cram and technology momentum. It's literally the base of Steve Jobs most famous speech before launching the iPod -- it's not about Mips and Bips, it's about the experience users wants. Something the author of this gets insanely wrong. Like the author, you complain about something rather simple and obvious to understand -- then just sort of... rant.
- choonway 3y ago
  > Design Thinkers giver their students power without knowledge, “creative confidence” without actual capabilities. this is the problem. a lot of curicculum time has been taken away from basic/fundamental skills in order to do DT.
  - heisenbit 3y ago
    And to make matters worse a much better way to learn true design is applying these basic/fundamental skills to problems for real. Opportunity costs matter in education and are swept under the rug by every promotor of new content.
afpx 3y ago
Those are some strong opinions of design thinking. I always thought it was just requirements and design but done by specialists from service design backgrounds. I’ve seen the results of workshops, and although very expensive, are very useful because they put the project focus’s on the users rather than the technology. And, if someone has hired design thinking specialists, then you at least know that the leadership has a commitment to usability and not putting the cart before the horse. For instance, I’ve seen results of design thinking result in drastically reduced savings because they avoided buying technology that they didn’t need.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  You may want to edit this, unless you see an upside to "drastically reduced savings."
notmypenguin 3y ago
In addition to the usual Medium related complaints, I spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling a giant polemic against something I didn’t even have a notion of a definition of, only knowing thst it was supposedly bullshit, whatever it was. This article needs work.
wgx 3y ago
Over the years, organizations look inward. Their products, features and practices become more self-serving and less user-serving. Design Thinking aims to flip people's mindset to re-focus on user needs over and above internal corporate needs. That's pretty much all there is to it.
karaterobot 3y ago
The way I see it, Design Thinking is an idea is older than Agile, and has followed a similarly problematic evolution. At the core of both, there are a number of insightful and meaningful observations about how to approach difficult problems, and both offer some useful tools. But once both ideas got into the wild, people just mutated them until they were barely recognizable, made them incomplete and, okay, absurd. Consultants took them over and turned them into products: got a dysfunctional engineering team? Just add Agile. Need creativity? Sprinkle some Design Thinking on it. That's just what people do. But I work in an organization that is still building its product side, and this stuff is not obvious to them. I talk to a lot of smart people who don't know that you should build small things and iterate on them. I meet a lot of people who don't think to question the assumptions of the problem statement. I assumed all this stuff was natural, because I came here from tech startups, where it's been in the air for twenty or thirty years. But, it turns out it's not all obvious, it has to be taught. I guess that, whatever faults they have, Agile and Design Thinking have nudged a lot of people in the right direction, when nothing else is apparently doing that.
- version_five 3y ago
  All these frameworks are ways of turning what should be common sense into bureaucratic procedures that can be used without needing to think independently and thus more widely used. "Lean" is another example of this. They serve the dual purpose of sounding better to leadership types who don't like the idea of just studying the problem and coming up with a solution, and requiring less experience and autonomy to execute.
  - whstl 3y ago
    I mean, you're not wrong, but the problem isn't with the frameworks themselves. The problem is that there is a cottage industry of companies, consultants and individual contributors trying to sell those ideas to everyone else, but common sense doesn't really pay the bills. So they must package "Agile" or "Design Thinking" or whatever into something that actually costs a lot of money and makes them feel important and authoritative. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" doesn’t pay and actually saves money, so things like Agile naturally get lost in the translation.
JohnClark1337 3y ago
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VyseofArcadia 3y ago
I used to work for a company that makes CAD software for architects. Quite a lot of our customers and potential customers that I'd bump into at conferences and the like were insufferable. They think of themselves as "designers" not "architects", and they wore black turtlenecks and talk about Changing the World through the power of Design. It's like a cult. No one can talk specifics, no one can point to a design that will change the world, just Design in general, and they even have their little uniforms. I had to sit through so many goddamn talks about Design Thinking and how it's Revolutionizing Everything. Three years in that job and I still don't have a clue was Design Thinking is. It reminds me more than anything of those useless "collaboration frameworks" that HR keeps coming up with.
- mocha_nate 3y ago
  I empathize with that as I went to grad school in a school of architecture. Ended up specializing in software in their department of urban planning. Calling yourself a designer instead of an architect is just a way to be more inclusive to landscape architects, interior designers, material engineers, and everyone else who works in a the design software space. Design thinking is just a concept for thinking about problems. Whether you're a plumber or a fashion designer, solving your problem with software first is the antithesis of design thinking. It's just a philosophy of first principles built for anyone who creates physical or digital products.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  I wonder how much money I'd be making by now if I always wore nothing but black turtlenecks. There seems to be something to it in terms of convincing others that one is more competent than they are.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > Three years in that job and I still don't have a clue was Design Thinking is. The things you create must have a form derived from how the people that interact with it think and what problem they are trying to solve. I'd say it's Bauhaus adapted to complex products, but then, Bauhaus themselves were just adapting the idea too. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody has some source for the idea from Ancient Greece.
Centigonal 3y ago
To me, this is a weird argument to make. I'm a product manager, and I use design thinking as part of my approach all the time. Does that mean I'm reducing all product innovation to a linear five-step approach? Hell no! I think the best way to use design thinking outside of a pure design agency context is eclectically, not as a religion. The point of methodology is not to take the humans out of the process - it's to give humans tools that they can then consciously use to define and adjust the process according to their own needs. If you go pay $12k for a design thinking bootcamp and expect that that's somehow going to make you design radically different or better things, that's off-base. What you're getting for your time and money are a few new tools/approaches you can whip out when appropriate. This is similar to a lot of the complaints I see about Agile/Scrum from teams who've had it forced on them in a very rigid way by PMs, scrum masters, or corporate policy. If the process is causing more pain than it's preventing, we should change it or remove it. If we can't do that, the process is a prison, not a helper. IMO that's what "people over process" means. Aside: Two quick rebuttals to points the author made: - There's no room for "crit" in design thinking. That's just wrong - what do you think the "converge" step is about? - The Post-it notes. My workplace is 100% remote. When we do in-person gatherings, we sometimes use post-it notes for ideation. Otherwise, we use Notion, Google Docs, and Figma. Again, I think the problem is the author is working with design thinking zealots who are taking the methodology to an inflexible extreme.
_the_inflator 3y ago
Innovations are hard, UI and especially UX even harder and establishing a successful product in the market - you get the superlative. That said, I have never heard that DT has established a product that is widely popular (Wikipedia features only minor and highly unspecific use cases). There are some cases within a larger project, were DT might bears fruit. Innovation is an iterative process which costs money independently of the approach you take. Is the company willing to do this? In most cases the answer is no. So how could DT help then? Using interdisciplinary approaches and methods? Then you might have a communication problem in general which won't DT solve. Why should a team magically work differently, takes care of other views and perspectives? My experience with DT (IT domain) has always been negative. You apply 10 minute solutions to hard problems - this does not work, it often made things worse ("Use DT! I don't get why it takes you so long while DT is a matter of minutes to hours."). In my experience it is the "feeling better but not getting better" approach to problems.
Gualdrapo 3y ago
My graphic design bachelor thesis for uni was a exhaustive usability&a11y study on all my uni had for web at that moment. From that work we built and made a redesign for all of its web portals and websites and co, which somehow still stands today, almost 10 years after. Back then I was told _that_ was design thinking. Kind of a scientific method approach to do things. But over the years I felt it became another buzzword. Everybody started to talk about it, everybody was allegedly doing it, but everybody got ahold of their own definition for it, so now it seems it lost its meaning.
whydoineedthis 3y ago
Yikes. I had to dig deep to read that rant. Ultimately, the best definition in the article defines Design Thinking as such: > “It’s an approach to problem-solving based on a few easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious: - ‘Show Don’t Tell,’ - ‘Focus on Human Values,’ - ‘Craft Clarity,’ - ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ - ‘Mindful of Process,’ - ‘Bias Toward Action,’ and - ‘Radical Collaboration.’” I'm not really sure why he is ranting though - these are the principals espoused by some of the most successful VC's, founders, and world renowned Architects. Does anyone understand why he is so angry?
- HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  The whole design thinking mania in the early 2010s was just annoying for actual designers, having to fend off more entry level ideas that have already been considered and rejected. Just because you did a workshop in astronaut thinking doesn't entitle you to start planning spacewalks.
- rendang 3y ago
  There seems to be a certain type of personality/intellect that tends to develop a powerful aversion to oversimplifying abstractions.
dockrizppl 3y ago
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strongpigeon 3y ago
After reading this, I’m still not quite sure what “Design Thinking” is? It seems like a fancy term for focusing your design on the user, but then I don’t understand the hype nor the hate. Maybe it’s just hype hate? What am I missing?
- Spooky23 3y ago
  The way I've interpreted it, when done well, it's usually focused on designing experience first (ie the "what") and then focusing on the "how" afterward. Think about a well designed mobile app with thought out user journeys vs. a circa 1999 VB6 app, which was focused on whatever IT nonsense was were doing first. When done poorly, it means you get trapped in a room with some folks with religious zeal and a set of post-it notes in various colors, sharpies, and colored paper sticky dots for a few days. Afterward, you get... not much. It's just like agile.... if the "practitioner" is hyper-focused on the rituals and ceremony, it's easy to miss doing actual work. My personal beef with the concept is that the ceremonial aspects mean you need a special UX/design/etc specialist, who comes in and leaves. Usually the "design" processes focus on 80% solutions, and nobody comes back to finish the other 20%. You used to notice this when people built out responsive websites -- key functions that weren't in the "Top X", would just disappear on mobile.
  - strongpigeon 3y ago
    So I guess it’s almost like the “Scrum” of the design world. It can help you focus on the right thing, but just following the process won’t magically give you good results.
  - alaskamiller 3y ago
    A realistic portrayal. Always amusing when I step into a conference room and the little cubbies or trays full of post it notes and sharpies and markers left behind telegraphs how the next few hours in talking with the stakeholders will go since it's clear now I'm here for the "how". Then when I started leading the design thinking sessions all I can think of is how silly all this is. When we went remote during covid, introducing in virtual whiteboards like Miro and Figma, made the rituals and ceremonies more tolerable and more importantly actionable. After all this time weaving through Stanford where this all went down, the corporate war rooms all over, settling down now, ultimately I think it just comes down to this: design thinking is really just empathetically solving problems rather than apathetically solving problems (as in working off requirement documents or best practices or protocols or just because you're told what to do). All the little ceremonies and rituals is inclusivity of everyone to empathize and feel good about each other, and consider things from additional POVs. Which back then at the tail end of Gen-Y transition into the workforce was needed. Now you talk to the Gen-Z workforce about using empathy at work more and they'll just go: facts.
js8 3y ago
My biggest critique of design thinking is that it has this Taylorist elitism (designer observes how a user does something) sorta built into it, and as a consequence, it caters to new users rather than power users. In other words, there is no consideration that the most effective tools actually require some learning and expertise to master them. IMHO it's better if the designer becomes the user, by actually learning the particular discipline for which the thing is being designed, rather than just observing an expert. Kind of like method acting.
atourgates 3y ago
The strongest opinion I came away with (having never heard of design thinking previously) is that this author is sunk so far in his own soup of smugness that he is largely unqualified to judge whether or not Design Thinking is a worthwhile idea/technique/movement. Examples of points the author makes: * Popularity is bad, because Jim Jones was popular and poisoned a bunch of people with Koolaid. * d.school is a dumb name because it's not capitalized or punctuated the way the author would prefer * Design Thinking is dumb because it uses terms like "empathy" when we already know we should be listening to our clients, so it's dumb to use words like "empathy" * Design Thinking is dumb because there are some designers who don't like it * Design Thinking is dumb because the author of the blog post found a cheesey image of post-it notes on Google Image search when he googled "Design Thinking" * Design Thinking is dumb because when the author asked his friends if they use the term "Design Thinking" - most of them don't. * Design Thinking is dumb because it's too aspirational. * Design Thinking is dumb because someone used the technique to design an impractical water pump. * Design Thinking is dumb because sometimes things that are designed well sell well, and that's marketing, not design. After very confidently condemning Design Thinking for pages and pages worth of text on the above grounds, the author admits that he has no standing to do so, because: > "Here’s my one caveat: it could be true that the DTs are a good way to teach design or business. I wouldn’t know. I am not a designer (or business school professor)." Oh you don't say. The author then goes on for another (approximately) 400 paragraphs to continue to criticize Design Thinking and its use in education. The odd bit is that I actually broadly agree with the author. There's plenty of bullshit in design and architecture and business education, and silly nebulous concepts that get treated like world-changing ideas. There are plenty of people making money selling overpriced classes based on this bullshit. There are too many buzzwords. People heavily invested in them lose sight of the bigger picture, and think that if we only followed their creative framework, we'd solve world hunger, end poverty and usher in a brave new utopia. I recently watched an effusive hour-long documentary on Bauhaus, and couldn't confidently at the end of it define: "what is Bauahus," and it was full of people making similar claims about a the world changing power of an architectural movement that originated in early 20th century Germany. To some degree, all creative frameworks are bullshit. And to some degree, they can all be useful. The author seems to have spent a lot of time and effort ranting against one particular framework. I hope they're OK.
dkarl 3y ago
Design is a deep and difficult skill, but "design thinking" is not a deep set of ideas. If you listen to amazing designers and mediocre designers speak about how they approach design problems, they sound very much the same. It's like listening to professional athletes: a Major League all-star might use exactly the same words to describe how they hit a baseball as your Little League coach used when they tried to teach you how to do it. Some designers are more poised and articulate, some are better at telling stories for an audience, but the best designers don't distinguish themselves by having different or better ideas about how to do design, any more than the best hitters have different and better ideas about how to hit a baseball. The fundamentals are well-established, encoded in a set of timeworn clichés, and it's important to be familiar with them, but the difficulty lies in picking the right cliché at the right time to focus your mind in the right direction.
c7b 3y ago
Tbh, I had Design Thinking down as a buzzword and never really engaged with it or even knew what it really was. Then someone recently suggested using DT to revamp the UI in a place where most of us weren't quite happy about the current solution. We got some pretty good ideas after three sessions stretched out over a few days, and several of those ideas have already made it into production, with great feedback so far. So I actually had to revise my opinion - my n=1 experience was that for a narrow, well-defined problem like "Create a UI for this process", and if you count something as small getting someone senior to give up strongly held convictions as a success, then I'd say it actually worked pretty well.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
My experience? As soon as it has a Name, it has a Holy Book, and a [self-appointed] priesthood. At that point, it (no matter what "it" is) has vaulted the Selachimorpha.
Dowwie 3y ago
six sigma was replaced by agile, which in 2023 often includes design thinking
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  I was put on a Six Sigma project when I was new to a company. Had run it after the guy leading it got lucky and died. Holy smokes... I can't begin to describe the codswallop that was dished out.
kepler 3y ago
Based on over 15 years of experience as a product designer, having worked with Fortune 50 companies and having contributed to numerous successful products, I have reservations about the efficacy of design thinking. Just as there are both proficient and underperforming programmers, the same distinction exists among designers. Is it challenging to discern the difference? Absolutely. However, a process is just that — a process. What truly counts at the end of the day is the final product and the quality of communication throughout its development.
yawnxyz 3y ago
I think this person is against the cottage industry that's popped up around the idea itself? The core concept of "design thinking" isn't that wild — figure out what ails people, and design / build stuff that people need/want that makes their lives better. Then there's a bunch of tactics to go into how to do that. I don't really understand the hype around it- seems like consultants and institutions have taken it on as the next big thing to squeeze a buck from it, but the core concepts and tactics are really useful for those who like building products for real users and use cases.
sebastos 3y ago
My mechanical engineering curriculum included courses that touched on the most substantive points of what we're apparently calling "Design Thinking". I won't speak for whatever bastardizations of IDEO's process are now being shilled and cargo-culted, but I can say that it was an incredibly valuable piece of my own education. I'd agree with the author that trying to recast the liberal arts as one big design problem is probably A Bad Idea, but outside of that very basic observation, the article is just pointlessly non-constructive sneering. Some people evidently think that the process is too obvious to merit teaching, but to fixate on this is to miss the point. It doesn't matter that the principles are easy and intuitive to understand. It's about providing a framework that nudges people away from unhelpful human tendencies that arise in the context of a design problem. People tend to assume the type of solution they need up front without doing due diligence of establishing exactly what problem they're trying to solve. When left to their own devices, people tend to zoom in on particular ideas and do "depth-first" searches, immediately looking for reasons why an idea might not work. This is a natural instinct, and it's the wrong way to behave in a brainstorm. IDEO's original process was merely meant to push people towards a more fruitful approach. To politicize this as the solution to all of world's problems is dumb, but to throw the baby out with the bathwater is equally ignorant.
OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
Excellent takedown. In my area there was a big "Systems Thinking" movement a few years ago. Not sure what happened to it. It runs deep and wide though. "Unendurable Horrors of Leadership Camp" is another good one. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/06/the-unendurable-horrors-of-leadership-camp https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/06/the-unendurable-horro...
sagarkamat 3y ago
Its funny to see this phenomenon repeat itself again and again in corporate America. Company X manages to become successful due to bunch of amorphous reasons. Some academic decides to reverse-engineer this messy process into a neatly packaged theory that has some kernal of obviousness at the heart of it. Then the academia-consultant-management complex takes it over and starts evangelizing it for $$ to companies and contexts that are only tangentially similar to the original company. Obviously the cut-paste theory fails to take hold in its new home. Rinse repeat till a new fad comes in. Lean, Agile, Design thinking...

105 points by Lutzb 3y ago

I studied this, it looked very nice in the abstract but when we had to apply it to actual design it was terrible way to do things. Way more important was learning to do project profitability estimates based how each feature would contribute to increasing revenues, increasing expenses, decreasing revenues, decreasing costs. Simple as

gls2ro 3y ago
what did you study specifically? Like what resource did you use? Design Thinking is not about the actual design. Is a method or process to understand user needs, generate solutions and then review those solutions with the actual users. Why I ask this and add the explanation is thar design thinking is not a project management metodology so it is not concerned with estimation, profitability, revenue, expenses, costs as a main focus. It can add those as constraints on the convergent phase but it is not about managing those. Or at least this is what I know about it from my experience.

kitd 3y ago

Author spends a lot of time complaining about Design Thinking, and worrying about it "infecting" education, but he doesn't actually say what is wrong with it. He quotes a few woolly phrases that look like the introductory sentences in an Overview section, then extrapolates from those as a detailed description of the whole topic. No wonder it looks vapid to him. I'm not a design expert but AIUI, Design Thinking brings empathy with the user to the forefront of the design process and makes it a first-class factor. My own experience of the outcome of this process (writing software to such designs) is very largely positive.

MPSimmons 3y ago
He also doesn't actually describe what it is. I don't think he knows any more than the people he's complaining about.
- whydoineedthis 3y ago
  He eventually quotes someone as: “It’s an approach to problem-solving based on a few easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious:‘Show Don’t Tell,’ ‘Focus on Human Values,’ ‘Craft Clarity,’ ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ ‘Mindful of Process,’ ‘Bias Toward Action,’ and ‘Radical Collaboration.’” All of those are pretty sound principals proven to be effective by most innovators though. Screaming at people is easier than actually learning to be effective, and I suspect is the root of his outrage.
- GuestHNUser 3y ago
  Really? I thought it was pretty clear that the author thinks Design Thinking is composed of vague ideas and vapid phrases. Moreover, the author cites a significant number of noteworthy designers that make compelling arguments that Design Thinking is nonsense that produces a skewed picture of the design process. I think your comment dismisses the article without giving a compelling reason why.
qsort 3y ago
Stanford's website is apparently unable to explain it either: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exec-ed/programs/design-thinking-bootcamp https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exec-ed/programs/design-thinkin... Judging from the "participant profile", it sounds like the kind of thing you do when you have money to spend before the end of the year.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  No better at MIT/Sloan. The illustration under "Here’s what you need to know to get started" is utterly generic and trite. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/design-thinking-explained https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/design-thinkin...
- Centigonal 3y ago
  I'm gonna take a stab at this because I don't think it's that complicated. Design thinking is a methodology for designing things, often products. It has 5 steps: 1. Empathize. Find your intended user and try to understand them, their expectations, wants, needs, and fears. 2. Define. Based on understanding your user, what are you trying to actually do? What are the problem(s) you want to solve for the user? 3. Ideate. Get a bunch of people in a room and have a no-judgement brainstorming fest around solving the problem(s) you defined. Come up with a ton of ideas! Then look at them all critically and remove the less priomising ones. 4. Prototype. Make MVPs for a promising idea or ideas. 5. Test. Take your MVP to your target user. See how they react. Go back to prototype and adjust the idea based on feedback, or pick a different idea out of the ideation process if this one is a bust. Repeat until your prototype is good enough that you're confident to scale up. Within each of these steps, there are a few tools/techniques you can learn to structure them more if you like. There are also no shortage of experts and consultants who will take your money to expound on the finer points of each part of the process. You can go as deep into the rabbit hole as is useful.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Isn't all that just the standard process of design/development? Have I been engaging in "Design Thinking" all these years without even knowing it?
Jorge1o1 3y ago
The problem with Design Thinking is that Design Thinking has become a cargo-cult of meaningless buzzwords and hot air. The same can be said about Agile -- it's just a collection of buzzwords loosely connected into a "framework" or "approach" or "school of thought" but it's certainly difficult to put an exact pin on what exactly DT and Agile entail. But if we can't agree on the specifics -- at least we can agree on the broad points right? - Agile is about iterating quickly, making smaller changes more frequently, etc. - DT is about empathizing with the end user, considering the problem before solving it, and then attempting to fix it and asking for feedback The problem is, once you cut through all the bullshit, you're left with what is really just common-sense wisdom. So they're faced with a choice: - Either you teach the core concept sans-BS, which can't be monetized. - Or you build an entire ecosystem of hot air, buzzwords, tooling, artifacts, blog posts and rituals around your obvious wisdom, which is how we ended up with Stories and Sprints and User Points and Epics and JIRA and Scrum and all the other crap. You can now sell $12,000 bootcamps, $100k software, etc.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > Agile is about iterating quickly, making smaller changes more frequently, etc. Agile is about revising the plan frequently to adjust it for reality. All of those things are tools, not the goal; and if you do all of them but still don't revise the plan, you won't get any of the benefit.
  - Jorge1o1 3y ago
    Good point actually, thanks.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Granted, it's even a bit hard to make fast iterations without revising the plan, so it's natural to ignore the difference. But some management structures achieve just that.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  Agile is clearly defined below Design thinking is letting user requirements and their actual use cases dictate product definition and execution rather than feature cram and technology momentum. It's literally the base of Steve Jobs most famous speech before launching the iPod -- it's not about Mips and Bips, it's about the experience users wants. Something the author of this gets insanely wrong. Like the author, you complain about something rather simple and obvious to understand -- then just sort of... rant.
choonway 3y ago
> Design Thinkers giver their students power without knowledge, “creative confidence” without actual capabilities. this is the problem. a lot of curicculum time has been taken away from basic/fundamental skills in order to do DT.
- heisenbit 3y ago
  And to make matters worse a much better way to learn true design is applying these basic/fundamental skills to problems for real. Opportunity costs matter in education and are swept under the rug by every promotor of new content.

afpx 3y ago

Those are some strong opinions of design thinking. I always thought it was just requirements and design but done by specialists from service design backgrounds. I’ve seen the results of workshops, and although very expensive, are very useful because they put the project focus’s on the users rather than the technology. And, if someone has hired design thinking specialists, then you at least know that the leadership has a commitment to usability and not putting the cart before the horse. For instance, I’ve seen results of design thinking result in drastically reduced savings because they avoided buying technology that they didn’t need.

mannykannot 3y ago
You may want to edit this, unless you see an upside to "drastically reduced savings."

notmypenguin 3y ago

In addition to the usual Medium related complaints, I spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling a giant polemic against something I didn’t even have a notion of a definition of, only knowing thst it was supposedly bullshit, whatever it was. This article needs work.

wgx 3y ago

Over the years, organizations look inward. Their products, features and practices become more self-serving and less user-serving. Design Thinking aims to flip people's mindset to re-focus on user needs over and above internal corporate needs. That's pretty much all there is to it.

karaterobot 3y ago

The way I see it, Design Thinking is an idea is older than Agile, and has followed a similarly problematic evolution. At the core of both, there are a number of insightful and meaningful observations about how to approach difficult problems, and both offer some useful tools. But once both ideas got into the wild, people just mutated them until they were barely recognizable, made them incomplete and, okay, absurd. Consultants took them over and turned them into products: got a dysfunctional engineering team? Just add Agile. Need creativity? Sprinkle some Design Thinking on it. That's just what people do. But I work in an organization that is still building its product side, and this stuff is not obvious to them. I talk to a lot of smart people who don't know that you should build small things and iterate on them. I meet a lot of people who don't think to question the assumptions of the problem statement. I assumed all this stuff was natural, because I came here from tech startups, where it's been in the air for twenty or thirty years. But, it turns out it's not all obvious, it has to be taught. I guess that, whatever faults they have, Agile and Design Thinking have nudged a lot of people in the right direction, when nothing else is apparently doing that.

version_five 3y ago
All these frameworks are ways of turning what should be common sense into bureaucratic procedures that can be used without needing to think independently and thus more widely used. "Lean" is another example of this. They serve the dual purpose of sounding better to leadership types who don't like the idea of just studying the problem and coming up with a solution, and requiring less experience and autonomy to execute.
- whstl 3y ago
  I mean, you're not wrong, but the problem isn't with the frameworks themselves. The problem is that there is a cottage industry of companies, consultants and individual contributors trying to sell those ideas to everyone else, but common sense doesn't really pay the bills. So they must package "Agile" or "Design Thinking" or whatever into something that actually costs a lot of money and makes them feel important and authoritative. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" doesn’t pay and actually saves money, so things like Agile naturally get lost in the translation.

JohnClark1337 3y ago

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VyseofArcadia 3y ago

I used to work for a company that makes CAD software for architects. Quite a lot of our customers and potential customers that I'd bump into at conferences and the like were insufferable. They think of themselves as "designers" not "architects", and they wore black turtlenecks and talk about Changing the World through the power of Design. It's like a cult. No one can talk specifics, no one can point to a design that will change the world, just Design in general, and they even have their little uniforms. I had to sit through so many goddamn talks about Design Thinking and how it's Revolutionizing Everything. Three years in that job and I still don't have a clue was Design Thinking is. It reminds me more than anything of those useless "collaboration frameworks" that HR keeps coming up with.

mocha_nate 3y ago
I empathize with that as I went to grad school in a school of architecture. Ended up specializing in software in their department of urban planning. Calling yourself a designer instead of an architect is just a way to be more inclusive to landscape architects, interior designers, material engineers, and everyone else who works in a the design software space. Design thinking is just a concept for thinking about problems. Whether you're a plumber or a fashion designer, solving your problem with software first is the antithesis of design thinking. It's just a philosophy of first principles built for anyone who creates physical or digital products.
ravenstine 3y ago
I wonder how much money I'd be making by now if I always wore nothing but black turtlenecks. There seems to be something to it in terms of convincing others that one is more competent than they are.
marcosdumay 3y ago
> Three years in that job and I still don't have a clue was Design Thinking is. The things you create must have a form derived from how the people that interact with it think and what problem they are trying to solve. I'd say it's Bauhaus adapted to complex products, but then, Bauhaus themselves were just adapting the idea too. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody has some source for the idea from Ancient Greece.

Centigonal 3y ago

To me, this is a weird argument to make. I'm a product manager, and I use design thinking as part of my approach all the time. Does that mean I'm reducing all product innovation to a linear five-step approach? Hell no! I think the best way to use design thinking outside of a pure design agency context is eclectically, not as a religion. The point of methodology is not to take the humans out of the process - it's to give humans tools that they can then consciously use to define and adjust the process according to their own needs. If you go pay $12k for a design thinking bootcamp and expect that that's somehow going to make you design radically different or better things, that's off-base. What you're getting for your time and money are a few new tools/approaches you can whip out when appropriate. This is similar to a lot of the complaints I see about Agile/Scrum from teams who've had it forced on them in a very rigid way by PMs, scrum masters, or corporate policy. If the process is causing more pain than it's preventing, we should change it or remove it. If we can't do that, the process is a prison, not a helper. IMO that's what "people over process" means. Aside: Two quick rebuttals to points the author made: - There's no room for "crit" in design thinking. That's just wrong - what do you think the "converge" step is about? - The Post-it notes. My workplace is 100% remote. When we do in-person gatherings, we sometimes use post-it notes for ideation. Otherwise, we use Notion, Google Docs, and Figma. Again, I think the problem is the author is working with design thinking zealots who are taking the methodology to an inflexible extreme.

_the_inflator 3y ago

Innovations are hard, UI and especially UX even harder and establishing a successful product in the market - you get the superlative. That said, I have never heard that DT has established a product that is widely popular (Wikipedia features only minor and highly unspecific use cases). There are some cases within a larger project, were DT might bears fruit. Innovation is an iterative process which costs money independently of the approach you take. Is the company willing to do this? In most cases the answer is no. So how could DT help then? Using interdisciplinary approaches and methods? Then you might have a communication problem in general which won't DT solve. Why should a team magically work differently, takes care of other views and perspectives? My experience with DT (IT domain) has always been negative. You apply 10 minute solutions to hard problems - this does not work, it often made things worse ("Use DT! I don't get why it takes you so long while DT is a matter of minutes to hours."). In my experience it is the "feeling better but not getting better" approach to problems.

Gualdrapo 3y ago

My graphic design bachelor thesis for uni was a exhaustive usability&a11y study on all my uni had for web at that moment. From that work we built and made a redesign for all of its web portals and websites and co, which somehow still stands today, almost 10 years after. Back then I was told _that_ was design thinking. Kind of a scientific method approach to do things. But over the years I felt it became another buzzword. Everybody started to talk about it, everybody was allegedly doing it, but everybody got ahold of their own definition for it, so now it seems it lost its meaning.

whydoineedthis 3y ago

Yikes. I had to dig deep to read that rant. Ultimately, the best definition in the article defines Design Thinking as such: > “It’s an approach to problem-solving based on a few easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious: - ‘Show Don’t Tell,’ - ‘Focus on Human Values,’ - ‘Craft Clarity,’ - ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ - ‘Mindful of Process,’ - ‘Bias Toward Action,’ and - ‘Radical Collaboration.’” I'm not really sure why he is ranting though - these are the principals espoused by some of the most successful VC's, founders, and world renowned Architects. Does anyone understand why he is so angry?

HlessClaudesman 3y ago
The whole design thinking mania in the early 2010s was just annoying for actual designers, having to fend off more entry level ideas that have already been considered and rejected. Just because you did a workshop in astronaut thinking doesn't entitle you to start planning spacewalks.
rendang 3y ago
There seems to be a certain type of personality/intellect that tends to develop a powerful aversion to oversimplifying abstractions.

dockrizppl 3y ago

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strongpigeon 3y ago

After reading this, I’m still not quite sure what “Design Thinking” is? It seems like a fancy term for focusing your design on the user, but then I don’t understand the hype nor the hate. Maybe it’s just hype hate? What am I missing?

Spooky23 3y ago
The way I've interpreted it, when done well, it's usually focused on designing experience first (ie the "what") and then focusing on the "how" afterward. Think about a well designed mobile app with thought out user journeys vs. a circa 1999 VB6 app, which was focused on whatever IT nonsense was were doing first. When done poorly, it means you get trapped in a room with some folks with religious zeal and a set of post-it notes in various colors, sharpies, and colored paper sticky dots for a few days. Afterward, you get... not much. It's just like agile.... if the "practitioner" is hyper-focused on the rituals and ceremony, it's easy to miss doing actual work. My personal beef with the concept is that the ceremonial aspects mean you need a special UX/design/etc specialist, who comes in and leaves. Usually the "design" processes focus on 80% solutions, and nobody comes back to finish the other 20%. You used to notice this when people built out responsive websites -- key functions that weren't in the "Top X", would just disappear on mobile.
- strongpigeon 3y ago
  So I guess it’s almost like the “Scrum” of the design world. It can help you focus on the right thing, but just following the process won’t magically give you good results.
- alaskamiller 3y ago
  A realistic portrayal. Always amusing when I step into a conference room and the little cubbies or trays full of post it notes and sharpies and markers left behind telegraphs how the next few hours in talking with the stakeholders will go since it's clear now I'm here for the "how". Then when I started leading the design thinking sessions all I can think of is how silly all this is. When we went remote during covid, introducing in virtual whiteboards like Miro and Figma, made the rituals and ceremonies more tolerable and more importantly actionable. After all this time weaving through Stanford where this all went down, the corporate war rooms all over, settling down now, ultimately I think it just comes down to this: design thinking is really just empathetically solving problems rather than apathetically solving problems (as in working off requirement documents or best practices or protocols or just because you're told what to do). All the little ceremonies and rituals is inclusivity of everyone to empathize and feel good about each other, and consider things from additional POVs. Which back then at the tail end of Gen-Y transition into the workforce was needed. Now you talk to the Gen-Z workforce about using empathy at work more and they'll just go: facts.

js8 3y ago

My biggest critique of design thinking is that it has this Taylorist elitism (designer observes how a user does something) sorta built into it, and as a consequence, it caters to new users rather than power users. In other words, there is no consideration that the most effective tools actually require some learning and expertise to master them. IMHO it's better if the designer becomes the user, by actually learning the particular discipline for which the thing is being designed, rather than just observing an expert. Kind of like method acting.

atourgates 3y ago

The strongest opinion I came away with (having never heard of design thinking previously) is that this author is sunk so far in his own soup of smugness that he is largely unqualified to judge whether or not Design Thinking is a worthwhile idea/technique/movement. Examples of points the author makes: * Popularity is bad, because Jim Jones was popular and poisoned a bunch of people with Koolaid. * d.school is a dumb name because it's not capitalized or punctuated the way the author would prefer * Design Thinking is dumb because it uses terms like "empathy" when we already know we should be listening to our clients, so it's dumb to use words like "empathy" * Design Thinking is dumb because there are some designers who don't like it * Design Thinking is dumb because the author of the blog post found a cheesey image of post-it notes on Google Image search when he googled "Design Thinking" * Design Thinking is dumb because when the author asked his friends if they use the term "Design Thinking" - most of them don't. * Design Thinking is dumb because it's too aspirational. * Design Thinking is dumb because someone used the technique to design an impractical water pump. * Design Thinking is dumb because sometimes things that are designed well sell well, and that's marketing, not design. After very confidently condemning Design Thinking for pages and pages worth of text on the above grounds, the author admits that he has no standing to do so, because: > "Here’s my one caveat: it could be true that the DTs are a good way to teach design or business. I wouldn’t know. I am not a designer (or business school professor)." Oh you don't say. The author then goes on for another (approximately) 400 paragraphs to continue to criticize Design Thinking and its use in education. The odd bit is that I actually broadly agree with the author. There's plenty of bullshit in design and architecture and business education, and silly nebulous concepts that get treated like world-changing ideas. There are plenty of people making money selling overpriced classes based on this bullshit. There are too many buzzwords. People heavily invested in them lose sight of the bigger picture, and think that if we only followed their creative framework, we'd solve world hunger, end poverty and usher in a brave new utopia. I recently watched an effusive hour-long documentary on Bauhaus, and couldn't confidently at the end of it define: "what is Bauahus," and it was full of people making similar claims about a the world changing power of an architectural movement that originated in early 20th century Germany. To some degree, all creative frameworks are bullshit. And to some degree, they can all be useful. The author seems to have spent a lot of time and effort ranting against one particular framework. I hope they're OK.

dkarl 3y ago

Design is a deep and difficult skill, but "design thinking" is not a deep set of ideas. If you listen to amazing designers and mediocre designers speak about how they approach design problems, they sound very much the same. It's like listening to professional athletes: a Major League all-star might use exactly the same words to describe how they hit a baseball as your Little League coach used when they tried to teach you how to do it. Some designers are more poised and articulate, some are better at telling stories for an audience, but the best designers don't distinguish themselves by having different or better ideas about how to do design, any more than the best hitters have different and better ideas about how to hit a baseball. The fundamentals are well-established, encoded in a set of timeworn clichés, and it's important to be familiar with them, but the difficulty lies in picking the right cliché at the right time to focus your mind in the right direction.

c7b 3y ago

Tbh, I had Design Thinking down as a buzzword and never really engaged with it or even knew what it really was. Then someone recently suggested using DT to revamp the UI in a place where most of us weren't quite happy about the current solution. We got some pretty good ideas after three sessions stretched out over a few days, and several of those ideas have already made it into production, with great feedback so far. So I actually had to revise my opinion - my n=1 experience was that for a narrow, well-defined problem like "Create a UI for this process", and if you count something as small getting someone senior to give up strongly held convictions as a success, then I'd say it actually worked pretty well.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

My experience? As soon as it has a Name, it has a Holy Book, and a [self-appointed] priesthood. At that point, it (no matter what "it" is) has vaulted the Selachimorpha.

Dowwie 3y ago

six sigma was replaced by agile, which in 2023 often includes design thinking

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
I was put on a Six Sigma project when I was new to a company. Had run it after the guy leading it got lucky and died. Holy smokes... I can't begin to describe the codswallop that was dished out.

kepler 3y ago

Based on over 15 years of experience as a product designer, having worked with Fortune 50 companies and having contributed to numerous successful products, I have reservations about the efficacy of design thinking. Just as there are both proficient and underperforming programmers, the same distinction exists among designers. Is it challenging to discern the difference? Absolutely. However, a process is just that — a process. What truly counts at the end of the day is the final product and the quality of communication throughout its development.

yawnxyz 3y ago

I think this person is against the cottage industry that's popped up around the idea itself? The core concept of "design thinking" isn't that wild — figure out what ails people, and design / build stuff that people need/want that makes their lives better. Then there's a bunch of tactics to go into how to do that. I don't really understand the hype around it- seems like consultants and institutions have taken it on as the next big thing to squeeze a buck from it, but the core concepts and tactics are really useful for those who like building products for real users and use cases.

sebastos 3y ago

My mechanical engineering curriculum included courses that touched on the most substantive points of what we're apparently calling "Design Thinking". I won't speak for whatever bastardizations of IDEO's process are now being shilled and cargo-culted, but I can say that it was an incredibly valuable piece of my own education. I'd agree with the author that trying to recast the liberal arts as one big design problem is probably A Bad Idea, but outside of that very basic observation, the article is just pointlessly non-constructive sneering. Some people evidently think that the process is too obvious to merit teaching, but to fixate on this is to miss the point. It doesn't matter that the principles are easy and intuitive to understand. It's about providing a framework that nudges people away from unhelpful human tendencies that arise in the context of a design problem. People tend to assume the type of solution they need up front without doing due diligence of establishing exactly what problem they're trying to solve. When left to their own devices, people tend to zoom in on particular ideas and do "depth-first" searches, immediately looking for reasons why an idea might not work. This is a natural instinct, and it's the wrong way to behave in a brainstorm. IDEO's original process was merely meant to push people towards a more fruitful approach. To politicize this as the solution to all of world's problems is dumb, but to throw the baby out with the bathwater is equally ignorant.

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago

Excellent takedown. In my area there was a big "Systems Thinking" movement a few years ago. Not sure what happened to it. It runs deep and wide though. "Unendurable Horrors of Leadership Camp" is another good one. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/06/the-unendurable-horrors-of-leadership-camp https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/06/the-unendurable-horro...

sagarkamat 3y ago

Its funny to see this phenomenon repeat itself again and again in corporate America. Company X manages to become successful due to bunch of amorphous reasons. Some academic decides to reverse-engineer this messy process into a neatly packaged theory that has some kernal of obviousness at the heart of it. Then the academia-consultant-management complex takes it over and starts evangelizing it for $$ to companies and contexts that are only tangentially similar to the original company. Obviously the cut-paste theory fails to take hold in its new home. Rinse repeat till a new fad comes in. Lean, Agile, Design thinking...