RIP "design thinking"? Not quite.
An empathetic, collaborative, iterative mindset can still help
A colleague had sent a link to this recent FastCo piece, with the rather clickbaity (and verbose) title declaring “the end of an era of design thinking.” 🙄 Per the article, it’s perhaps true that IDEO’s business model of packaging and selling simplified, predictable, routines of “product innovation” has likely seen its final days, but the fundamental qualities — which existed long before “design thinking” became a buzzword — remain vital, necessary, and evolving with our times. 🙌🏽
For historical references, look to Charles Eames, Paul Rand, Herbert Simon, or even Donald Schon, amongst many others…including phenomenal women who informed “design thinking” & practices like Katherine McCoy, Muriel Cooper, Brenda Laurel, and more1.
Now more than ever, cross-functional teams building SaaS B2B platforms and highly networked service/product ecosystems, spanning a range of channels or devices and customer touchpoints, need to strategically define such customer value collaboratively, while validating the problem and the solution with feedback loops. This will necessarily involve discovery, iterations, user studies, prototypes, and further refinement per experience principles and success criteria — as well as risks & tradeoffs. 🤔
Or if you’re improving internal “back office” operations like finance, legal, HR, and so forth, holding facilitated workshops to a) understand pains in the existing setup by talking to those impacted and b) explore ideas for reframing what’s possible are still hugely valuable. It’s better than griping and complaining while nothing happens! 😣 Or being stuck in tedious spreadsheet analysis reviews with no clear paths forward to explore what’s feasible. 😬 While you might not find the right solution after a round of brainstorming and distilling themes, at least the conversation has begun to define what success might look like…and how to get there. That takes collaboration, iteration, fast-fail/learning prototypes (or pilot launches), and cycles of feedback with inclusivity, empathy, and a diversity of persons involved. 🙌🏽
And whether it’s for addressing the needs of paying customers or improving processes for internal teams, this process can only provide value through bonafide execution, with plans, resources, timelines, and workstreams that have clear deadlines and signals for success.
The “thinking” pays off in the “working” with actual delivery.
As we move forward with societal adaptations and technical changes, this so-called “design thinking” process also must continue to evolve:
Advocacy for more than the “ones in the room” but also recognition for the invisible ecosystems of impacts upon unseen/unheard audiences, especially traditionally marginalized and/or unprivileged peoples, cultures, and societies.
Considerations for impacts upon nature, society, climate, and the planet at-large, going beyond "human-centered” or “user-driven” towards macroscopic matters of interdependence and justice, and fair-minded consequence.
Recognition of the values (and harms) of AI (in all various forms: automation, machine learning, predictive intelligence, etc.) as part of an evolving technical landscape of tools and abilities, including rapid, efficient generation of content or ideas via ChatGPT or MidJourney.
This essay offers further thoughts on what’s evolving “beyond design thinking” in other spheres of discourse and activity, particularly in the academic realms — including participatory design, critical design, speculative design, and design fictions. Each embodies ways of achieving better, stronger understanding of situations with various perspectives and mediating/deliberating them towards some effective solution. It’s not easily packagable, but the journey of modes and methods of design is ongoing…and necessary, as well as important. ⭐️
⌘ Useful resources —
For more, I’d recommend the upcoming book In Through the Side Door by Erin Malone on the history of women in interaction design, featuring a range of incredible, brilliant pioneers, leaders, and enablers of the ideas and concepts we use today. More info at the website >
Love the section on how “design thinking” needs to evolve.
I feel over recent years we’ve limited the definition of Design to “design thinking”. Design (right from Bauhaus and also the social design practice followed in NID, and Participatory Design) is broader.
Tim Brown packaged some key parts of the design process into a simplified version that anyone could use as “design thinking” which over time became synonymous with Design.
A similar wave has happened these last two years as Figma & their community have started to conflate UI Design with Design.