5 ms·

The Perils of 'Design Thinking'

52 points by Petiver 1y ago

dtagames 1y ago
https://archive.ph/vRkDq https://archive.ph/vRkDq
spit2wind 1y ago
> Design won’t save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck So things like the cotton gin or Ford's use of interchangeable parts don't count as design or somehow didn't change the world? How is volunteering at soup kitchens more effective at changing the world than interchangeable parts? And still yet...are you wanting to change the world for the better?
- socalgal2 1y ago
  In the context of the article design is separate from engineering and/or invention. those later two invented the Cotten gin and ford’s use of interchangeable parts.
  - pavlov 1y ago
    But it's not actually separate. A lot of engineering innovation starts by identifying a design problem.
    - socalgal2 1y ago
      In the context of the article it is separate. maybe engage with the article itself instead of arguing with something the article is not about?
    - dr_dshiv 1y ago
      There is a general academic rejection of “solutionism” that prefers criticism to design. I find it unnerving, personally.
    - grimpy 1y ago
      this is a useless semantic position. could you frame innovation problems as "design" problems? sure. was the cotton gin framed as a "design" problem in the sense that it had some sort of epistemological lineage to the "design" discipline when it was invented? I suspect not. the worst thing design ever did for itself was frame itself as "the" human-centered problem solving discpline. everyone is a human-centered problem-solver in the most general sense, in the same way that everything is a "design" problem in the most general sense.
- yubblegum 1y ago
  You had n chances to note that "save" =/= change.
socalgal2 1y ago
If you want to see designers trying to fuck the world go to the Osaka 2025 Expo where designers are each proposing the next Brazilia City. They want total control over everything all centrally planned. no room for anyone’s individualism except the designer’s
- pjc50 1y ago
  Not a new thing, sadly. See Le Corbusier's "plan for Paris".
  - josephg 1y ago
    Current Paris looks the way it does because of central planners who had a vision for the city. In my opinion, it’s beautiful. I don’t know what it’s like to live there, but as a visitor walking though all those brownstone buildings? I love it. Central planning is a risky move - you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one basket. When it works well, we all benefit. When it works badly, we all suffer for it.
    - yubblegum 1y ago
      "brownstone" buildings in Paris?
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      The mansard roofs, etc are a consequence of tax policy. End of the day, design can be from architects imposing their views or tax collectors and road engineers doing theirs. The worst design comes from the genius planners, the best usually from people working with well defined constraints of money, taxes and build expense. The state of American architecture and life is almost completely based on tax policy and allocation of resources to roadways. Our cities of vacant office towers are almost completely a tax story.
      - sgt101 1y ago
        >Our cities of vacant office towers are almost completely a tax story. Also a financial leverage story. Rendering the true market value of these towers would create balance sheet issues at quite a few institutions. No one is keen to rock that boat.
detourdog 1y ago
Such a dumb position. Every discipline has projects that don't succeed. What about when engineers use both metric and imperial measurements while engineering a space probe.
draw_down 1y ago
[dead]
jimnotgym 1y ago
Is such discussion of such a broad area helpful in anyway other than filling magazine pages? It's a bit like saying 'language is so damaging, every argument I ever had was a result of language'.
astrobe_ 1y ago
This looks to me like a profession which is overstepping its bounds. The trap seems to be in the "form follows function" motto. It shouldn't mean that designers have a word to say about how things function. TFA: > The solution, though, isn’t to stop trying to change the world. What could a more beautiful, user-friendly, accessible, and egalitarian society look like? That absolutely is not a job for a designer. Anything about how society works is politics. If a a designer suggests things in this area, they are not designers, they are politicians. TFA notes that en passant as well: Lyons and Ideo didn't have a design problem, but a political problems.
locallost 1y ago
It's as if people that wanted to accomplish something called their method design, but the people that came after them wanted the design itself to be the achievement. We see this in the developer world, where the goal is not to have working software, but a work of art of engineering that is to be admired by fellow colleagues. A slight nitpick to the section of Bauhaus - the goal was not industrialization, and in fact in the early days that "group" was completely against industrialization. Gropius was the first director of Bauhaus, but the school existed previously in other forms led by Henry van de Velde, who only left Germany because of WWI and the fact he was Belgian. And in fact, there was a clash in the group already in 1914 at one of their first exhibitions, where one fraction strongly advocated for industrialization and "typed" production. But van de Velde won, and Gropius sided with him. If you visit van de Velde's house, it's clear what he was thinking. The house was designed with his family and his work in mind. In a way that his many children and family could live there and he would have his space and peace and quiet to work. So the idea was to have living conditions adapted to the needs of the people, but it's clear that without industrial scale it would only be available to the rich. But still, "form follows function" is not necessarily industrial. Van de Velde's house is classical in appearance, but still the starting point was function not form.
exiguus 1y ago
I did not really understand why they use the term 'Design Thinking.' The article did not make it clear to me why they use the product development framework for social problem-solving. Personally, I like data-driven design. As in: ask a designer why, and you know why this is good or bad design. The 'why' should be linked to real data and decisions based on them.
- gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
  >Stanford University's d.school begins to teach design thinking as a generalisable approach to technical and social innovation. From wikipedia. It's like "Foundation Models", they successfully branded the concept but nobody cites them anymore
  - exiguus 1y ago
    Thx for the hint. I found a introduction to Design Thinking Process Guide by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford [1]. I worked before with the IBM Design Thinking Field Guide [2]. That offers some hands-on examples to work with users and stakeholders. Now, when i think about this, you may use Design Thinking to solve social-problems. With all the benefits and issues (like feature creep) you have in software engineering. [1] https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554... [2] https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring18/cs130/hw/IBM-Design-Thinking-Field-Guide-v3.4.pdf https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring18/cs130/hw/IBM-Design...
  - sgt101 1y ago
    It had a big moment in about 2015 where it (Design Thinking) was touted as a way of focusing software/product development on "real needs". This created an industry of designers and workshops and a lot of C-1 executive enthusiasm. I think it failed for two reasons, first off is the fact that technical and financial fundamentals are like gravity - there's no arguing with them. Secondly, COVID came and all the workshops went away. I haven't seen any big push to resurrect it, and I suspect it's been quietly parked by all those who had bet their careers on it and then identified an off ramp during the pandemic.
Oarch 1y ago
I've spent far too long in the "Design" world (I'm talkikg Design with a capital D). It's largely an ivory tower ego playground for the financially elite, but with a creative side. It's a lot of relentless self-marketing with a generous helping of whatever buzzwords are in at the moment. The designers are easy to spot. They wear boldly coloured look-at-me glasses and clothing. It's like a menagerie of rare birds. Find them at international Expos, Bienalles and design festivals (if in doubt, seek out a pavilion). Their ideas are largely stale and reused. These people are born rich and die rich and affect very little positive change in the time between. But - remove the glamour and apply design thinking to hard, thankless but important problems and it can be a pretty meaningful and worthwhile profession IMO.
- jama211 1y ago
  I’m not sure anything they wear could be more pretentious than your judgement of what they wear, to be honest.
  - dandellion 1y ago
    There are certainly more pretentious things to wear, but very few.
    - jama211 1y ago
      Sorry what?
  - theandrewbailey 1y ago
    Stereotypes exist because they have an element of truth. His description of designers aligns with mine.
- somewhereoutth 1y ago
  > These people are born rich and die rich and affect very little positive change in the time between. Sadly, with increasing wealth inequality, the rich are better able to keep out the talented but poor, with things like unpaid internships, access to professional networks gated by exorbitant college fees, insane rents in key cities, etc. There was a period in the mid 20 century when just talent and drive could get you very far. Should be no surprise that that led to a blossoming in the creative fields, and the converse more lately has led to their impoverishment.
b0a04gl 1y ago
[dead]
quanto 1y ago
I had a colleague, an architect deeply soaked in the Design Thinking cool aid, telling me that architecting a single-family house is humankind's most intellectually challenging endeavor because he has to worry about the end users and construction materials that go in ("holistic[TM]"). I asked him if building a space shuttle is easier than building a house, and he genuinely believed that engineers have a far easier (and dumber) time than designers like himself. This take of designers being superior being to engineers is something I consistently observed among designers over the decade. Here is a light-hearted video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvU5dmu4sl8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvU5dmu4sl8
- _annum 1y ago
  Your colleague is wrong and this is a tired debate, but neither are easy. Engineering deals mostly with objective outcomes. Space shuttle designers have a clear goal and measurable performance metrics. The problems are extremely hard but the design constraints permit a more focused development process. Architecture is technical but mostly subjective, and deals with a host of multi-disciplinary and social concerns. It's quite open-ended and difficult to settle on an optimal approach. Extreme budget limitations, building code, zoning restrictions, public consultation, and the idiosyncrasies of personal taste complicate this process further. Full-size prototyping is also less common and it's almost impossible to truly test the outcome of a design before actually constructing something. Building a house and building a perfect house are drastically different accomplishments. A lot of people will even hate the perfect house – there's no winning! I have a great deal of respect for engineers and (competent) architects. The latter are rare.

52 points by Petiver 1y ago

https://archive.ph/vRkDq https://archive.ph/vRkDq

> Design won’t save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck So things like the cotton gin or Ford's use of interchangeable parts don't count as design or somehow didn't change the world? How is volunteering at soup kitchens more effective at changing the world than interchangeable parts? And still yet...are you wanting to change the world for the better?

socalgal2 1y ago
In the context of the article design is separate from engineering and/or invention. those later two invented the Cotten gin and ford’s use of interchangeable parts.
- pavlov 1y ago
  But it's not actually separate. A lot of engineering innovation starts by identifying a design problem.
  - socalgal2 1y ago
    In the context of the article it is separate. maybe engage with the article itself instead of arguing with something the article is not about?
  - dr_dshiv 1y ago
    There is a general academic rejection of “solutionism” that prefers criticism to design. I find it unnerving, personally.
  - grimpy 1y ago
    this is a useless semantic position. could you frame innovation problems as "design" problems? sure. was the cotton gin framed as a "design" problem in the sense that it had some sort of epistemological lineage to the "design" discipline when it was invented? I suspect not. the worst thing design ever did for itself was frame itself as "the" human-centered problem solving discpline. everyone is a human-centered problem-solver in the most general sense, in the same way that everything is a "design" problem in the most general sense.
yubblegum 1y ago
You had n chances to note that "save" =/= change.

socalgal2 1y ago

If you want to see designers trying to fuck the world go to the Osaka 2025 Expo where designers are each proposing the next Brazilia City. They want total control over everything all centrally planned. no room for anyone’s individualism except the designer’s

pjc50 1y ago
Not a new thing, sadly. See Le Corbusier's "plan for Paris".
- josephg 1y ago
  Current Paris looks the way it does because of central planners who had a vision for the city. In my opinion, it’s beautiful. I don’t know what it’s like to live there, but as a visitor walking though all those brownstone buildings? I love it. Central planning is a risky move - you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one basket. When it works well, we all benefit. When it works badly, we all suffer for it.
  - yubblegum 1y ago
    "brownstone" buildings in Paris?
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    The mansard roofs, etc are a consequence of tax policy. End of the day, design can be from architects imposing their views or tax collectors and road engineers doing theirs. The worst design comes from the genius planners, the best usually from people working with well defined constraints of money, taxes and build expense. The state of American architecture and life is almost completely based on tax policy and allocation of resources to roadways. Our cities of vacant office towers are almost completely a tax story.
    - sgt101 1y ago
      >Our cities of vacant office towers are almost completely a tax story. Also a financial leverage story. Rendering the true market value of these towers would create balance sheet issues at quite a few institutions. No one is keen to rock that boat.

detourdog 1y ago

Such a dumb position. Every discipline has projects that don't succeed. What about when engineers use both metric and imperial measurements while engineering a space probe.

draw_down 1y ago

[dead]

jimnotgym 1y ago

Is such discussion of such a broad area helpful in anyway other than filling magazine pages? It's a bit like saying 'language is so damaging, every argument I ever had was a result of language'.

astrobe_ 1y ago

This looks to me like a profession which is overstepping its bounds. The trap seems to be in the "form follows function" motto. It shouldn't mean that designers have a word to say about how things function. TFA: > The solution, though, isn’t to stop trying to change the world. What could a more beautiful, user-friendly, accessible, and egalitarian society look like? That absolutely is not a job for a designer. Anything about how society works is politics. If a a designer suggests things in this area, they are not designers, they are politicians. TFA notes that en passant as well: Lyons and Ideo didn't have a design problem, but a political problems.

locallost 1y ago

It's as if people that wanted to accomplish something called their method design, but the people that came after them wanted the design itself to be the achievement. We see this in the developer world, where the goal is not to have working software, but a work of art of engineering that is to be admired by fellow colleagues. A slight nitpick to the section of Bauhaus - the goal was not industrialization, and in fact in the early days that "group" was completely against industrialization. Gropius was the first director of Bauhaus, but the school existed previously in other forms led by Henry van de Velde, who only left Germany because of WWI and the fact he was Belgian. And in fact, there was a clash in the group already in 1914 at one of their first exhibitions, where one fraction strongly advocated for industrialization and "typed" production. But van de Velde won, and Gropius sided with him. If you visit van de Velde's house, it's clear what he was thinking. The house was designed with his family and his work in mind. In a way that his many children and family could live there and he would have his space and peace and quiet to work. So the idea was to have living conditions adapted to the needs of the people, but it's clear that without industrial scale it would only be available to the rich. But still, "form follows function" is not necessarily industrial. Van de Velde's house is classical in appearance, but still the starting point was function not form.

exiguus 1y ago

I did not really understand why they use the term 'Design Thinking.' The article did not make it clear to me why they use the product development framework for social problem-solving. Personally, I like data-driven design. As in: ask a designer why, and you know why this is good or bad design. The 'why' should be linked to real data and decisions based on them.

gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
>Stanford University's d.school begins to teach design thinking as a generalisable approach to technical and social innovation. From wikipedia. It's like "Foundation Models", they successfully branded the concept but nobody cites them anymore
- exiguus 1y ago
  Thx for the hint. I found a introduction to Design Thinking Process Guide by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford [1]. I worked before with the IBM Design Thinking Field Guide [2]. That offers some hands-on examples to work with users and stakeholders. Now, when i think about this, you may use Design Thinking to solve social-problems. With all the benefits and issues (like feature creep) you have in software engineering. [1] https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554... [2] https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring18/cs130/hw/IBM-Design-Thinking-Field-Guide-v3.4.pdf https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring18/cs130/hw/IBM-Design...
- sgt101 1y ago
  It had a big moment in about 2015 where it (Design Thinking) was touted as a way of focusing software/product development on "real needs". This created an industry of designers and workshops and a lot of C-1 executive enthusiasm. I think it failed for two reasons, first off is the fact that technical and financial fundamentals are like gravity - there's no arguing with them. Secondly, COVID came and all the workshops went away. I haven't seen any big push to resurrect it, and I suspect it's been quietly parked by all those who had bet their careers on it and then identified an off ramp during the pandemic.

Oarch 1y ago

I've spent far too long in the "Design" world (I'm talkikg Design with a capital D). It's largely an ivory tower ego playground for the financially elite, but with a creative side. It's a lot of relentless self-marketing with a generous helping of whatever buzzwords are in at the moment. The designers are easy to spot. They wear boldly coloured look-at-me glasses and clothing. It's like a menagerie of rare birds. Find them at international Expos, Bienalles and design festivals (if in doubt, seek out a pavilion). Their ideas are largely stale and reused. These people are born rich and die rich and affect very little positive change in the time between. But - remove the glamour and apply design thinking to hard, thankless but important problems and it can be a pretty meaningful and worthwhile profession IMO.

jama211 1y ago
I’m not sure anything they wear could be more pretentious than your judgement of what they wear, to be honest.
- dandellion 1y ago
  There are certainly more pretentious things to wear, but very few.
  - jama211 1y ago
    Sorry what?
- theandrewbailey 1y ago
  Stereotypes exist because they have an element of truth. His description of designers aligns with mine.
somewhereoutth 1y ago
> These people are born rich and die rich and affect very little positive change in the time between. Sadly, with increasing wealth inequality, the rich are better able to keep out the talented but poor, with things like unpaid internships, access to professional networks gated by exorbitant college fees, insane rents in key cities, etc. There was a period in the mid 20 century when just talent and drive could get you very far. Should be no surprise that that led to a blossoming in the creative fields, and the converse more lately has led to their impoverishment.

b0a04gl 1y ago

[dead]

quanto 1y ago

I had a colleague, an architect deeply soaked in the Design Thinking cool aid, telling me that architecting a single-family house is humankind's most intellectually challenging endeavor because he has to worry about the end users and construction materials that go in ("holistic[TM]"). I asked him if building a space shuttle is easier than building a house, and he genuinely believed that engineers have a far easier (and dumber) time than designers like himself. This take of designers being superior being to engineers is something I consistently observed among designers over the decade. Here is a light-hearted video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvU5dmu4sl8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvU5dmu4sl8

_annum 1y ago
Your colleague is wrong and this is a tired debate, but neither are easy. Engineering deals mostly with objective outcomes. Space shuttle designers have a clear goal and measurable performance metrics. The problems are extremely hard but the design constraints permit a more focused development process. Architecture is technical but mostly subjective, and deals with a host of multi-disciplinary and social concerns. It's quite open-ended and difficult to settle on an optimal approach. Extreme budget limitations, building code, zoning restrictions, public consultation, and the idiosyncrasies of personal taste complicate this process further. Full-size prototyping is also less common and it's almost impossible to truly test the outcome of a design before actually constructing something. Building a house and building a perfect house are drastically different accomplishments. A lot of people will even hate the perfect house – there's no winning! I have a great deal of respect for engineers and (competent) architects. The latter are rare.