My mechanical engineering curriculum included courses that touched on the most substantive points of what we're apparently calling "Design Thinking". I won't sp

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.