Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What's Next? | Co.Design
Bruce Nussbaum hits the eject button on Design Thinking, saying that this movement — which arose from agencies trying to reach past the narrow confines of product or brand-related design and into the real guts of business — has petered out, it’s goals unmet.
Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process. In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess along with the process and real innovation took place. In most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the process was low, very low.
Yet, the contributions of Design Thinking to the field of design and to society at large are immense. By formalizing the tacit values and behaviors of design, Design Thinking was able to move designers and the power of design from a focus on artifact and aesthetics within a narrow consumerist marketplace to the much wider social space of systems and society. We face huge forces of disruption, the rise and fall of generations, the spread of social media technologies, the urbanization of the planet, the rise and fall of nations, global warming, and overpopulation. Together these forces are eroding our economic, social, and political systems in a once-in-a-century kind of way. Design Thinking made design system-conscious at a key moment in time.
So, the approach has failed to revolutionize business, but midwifed a wider scope in the minds of designers, leading them to think at a larger scale and about how the smaller is embedded in the larger.
Creativity is still hard, and hard specifically to systematize. Turning it around, I’d add that creativity is naturally averse to systems other than the messy cycle of trying things, and picking out what works for further experimentation. Process can’t smooth out the wrinkles in the fabric of the universe, or on the inside of our minds.
Read Helen Waters’ excellent piece, which should be titled Design Thinking Won’t Save You, for more on this.
Nussbaum is off on a tangent with another head-twisting term; Creative Quotient, based on the I.Q. model. Yawn. I won’t buy the book.
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