Design-Thinking is not Design

It's not. Design-thinking is NOT design. It may have started as observation of how designers approach problem solving, but now it has taken on a role of its own, and one that is well suited to it's audience.

One way of explaining the relationship may be to say that design-thinking is to design what a train schedule is to a railway network.

Design is a field of enquiry and practice, like art or science. Like a complex rail network, design is spread out - a diverse set of disciplines, many of which overlap. You can think of the field of design like a living thing, at it's boiling edge, new forms and methods of practice are constantly produced, mirroring the needs of technology, society or ecology, while at it's epicenter are a set of practices and mindsets that are inter-disciplinary.

Design thinking on the other hand is seen as an innovation method, a systematic way for organizations to manage their ideas to impact. Just like a train schedule, design thinking is useful for groups of people to plan their journeys beforehand and agree on the paths that they will traverse.

This encoding of design procedure may seem surprising to designers, who do this all the time, though they vary the approach based on the problem. Still, design-thinking is actually significant. The Hasso Plattner Institute, one of the torch bearing academies for design-thinking today describes it like this...

"Design Thinking is a problem-solving and a human-centred innovation approach. It’s a five step process: Observation, Ideation, Prototyping, Testing and Implementation. It puts people we design for at the centre of the process and invites them to co-create solutions." (Incidentally, the five step process has given them plenty of trouble causing them to design sibling models that try to account for the implied reductionism.)

Does this model actually describe how designers solve problems?

Then, why is Design-Thinking good for your organisation?

For the first time, we are seeing a human-centered method take root in modern organizations that have traditionally shunned anything non-rationalist, that could not be quantified by hard measurement or discussed using the language of efficiency and productivity.

This is no easy task. Even the innovation workshops that I observed and participated in during the early 2000s were pretty Taylorist, even if they were billed as exercises in creativity and imagination. The formula that many of those generic innovation consulting firms used were a combination of (that tired old thing) brainstorming, followed by more contextual ideas using variations of the morphological matrix and finally presenting these 'ideas' using elaborate dressed-up decks. I recall that one of the stranger proofs of impact were the number of ideas generated!

Some of these firms have even published elaborate theories of innovation, however, in my somewhat critical view, these are just colourful versions of group-think dressed up to look like business cases.

The problem seemed to be that those innovation sessions were largely populated by senior and mid management folk, choreographed and conducted off-site (presumably to change the environment to one more conducive to ideas.) The lack of diversity and customer perspectives meant that such sessions were rife with biases, like the expected Hawthorne effect where people temporarily change their behaviour under observation. I personally observed that the most dominant, aggressive 'leaders' were the ones whose ideas were 'championed', turning the whole thing into what is called Innovation theatre.

Source: Tom Fishburne

When generic forms of design-thinking started cropping up in the early 2000s, I became suspicious, even critical. By then I was already weary of corporate innovation theatre, and I assumed that a field that I had practised in for several years, and one in which I still find myself a beginner was now conveniently being described as a set of 5 linear steps. I recognized the steps of course, but I found them frustratingly reductionist. It took a fair bit of background research for me to conclude that there may be some merit to certain forms of design-thinking, although I still find the generic variety popularised by Stanford and some other schools as reductionist, confused and perhaps even dangerous.

source: Leo

In fact I think the friction between designers and design-thinking practitioners is simply cognitive dissonance. The kind that arises when a well defined field butts heads with a nascent practice that has not yet had time to define itself properly. While designers accuse design-think'ers of diluting design practice with prescriptive, linear ways of thinking, they are in turn accused of not having the humility to recognize that design-thinking bridges them with other functions within the organisation.

Both viewpoints are valid up to a point. Design-thinking started as a way to distil the core principles behind how designers solve complex problems and this meta aspect is what I suspect drove much of the critical theories around creative thinking in the early days (of what we call design-thinking today).

In the post war electronic and mechanical engineering boom of the 1950s, the idea of systems seemed to have attracted a lot of attention. Cybernetics for instance was concerned with how animals and machines communicate and control each other and Bionics studied biological systems to influence engineering design. It was a fertile time, ripe with ideas, and interestingly a lot of these early theories were emerging in the space of engineering design.

From Creativity to Design-thinking

In fact, the question “how do we get new ideas?” led John Edward Arnold, an American professor who stood at the cross-roads of engineering and business administration to evolve entire courses around the subject of ideas. He was even using sci-fi prototyping back then, but more on that in just a moment.

To appreciate the role of design-thinking today, it helps to go back to the 1950s, around the time Arnold was formulating his philosophy of design. This was the time of control systems, perhaps the very height of the Taylorist era. Everything that could be measured was being measured, any system that could be studied, studied. Arnold noticed that engineers needed to develop skills that were different from the analytical, top-down modes of thinking that made organizations run effectively.

Could Creativity co-exist with Efficiency?

Even back then Arnold seems to have worried about how design could survive under the Taylorist conditions of the modern organisation. He seemed concerned with the excessive need for verifying and presenting data for decision making. In one of his lectures on Creative Engineering, he underlines the difficulty of designers presenting their subjective solutions to a resistant audience.

"... somehow a few [prehistoric humans], even without language, asked themselves questions. Perhaps not the kind we are used to with question marks at the end; but emotionally they became aware of problem areas, they were sensitive to themselves and the limited world around them, and these in effect were questions for them to solve.

They made keen observations in search of the answers to these questions. They related these answers together and combined them with past observations so that finally they could make a prediction, a prediction that was valid, that answered the question first asked. These answers were probably resisted then as our new answers are resisted today.

Many died in their attempts to verify and sell their answers. They were ridiculed and tormented, but the truth prevailed and progress was achieved."

Source: Tom Fishburne

He was also aware of the reductionist tendencies of the organizational mindset in breaking everything down into structured steps. On breaking down problem-solving into the four steps of Question, Observe, Associate, and Predict - he says:

"I don’t actually like to think of them as steps of a process that are followed in a certain definite sequence. To me these four words represent attitudes of the mind or the personality of the learner, the seeker, or the creative problem solver. They represent the cognitive process as well as the process of science."

One of the things that Arnold seemed concerned with was the notion of the engineer as a designer for human needs. This has early hints of human-centered design, and is a crucial point in his idea of Creative Engineering. He wanted engineers to see problems with fresh eyes, with a humanistic perspective.

He devised ways to get engineers to re-see problems, famously using sci-fi settings for cases, such as The Arcturus IV case study. Designing for aliens from another planet allowed engineers to set aside their personal beliefs and assumptions and think through the project through an objective lens. He said of the problem-solver... "He has to stretch his imagination to such a limit that it doesn't quickly shrink back to its former inconspicuous self."

You have to remember, being able to suspend disbelief for the duration of problem space exploration is a critical ability, and very hard to nurture in a reductionist, rationalist world. He knew back then, the hardest thing for design-thinking facilitators to crack even today.

Moving towards a human-centered design paradigm

Arnold believed in what he called 'Comprehensive Design' created by a 'comprehensive designer'. (This is a goal worth aspiring to, at least for me personally.) The cornerstone of being comprehensive is that the designer understands humanity and what it means to design for real people. This is also echoed by Robert H. McKim, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Stanford University. He writes about how the idea that 'Form follows Function' was refreshing when it first came about in the wake of decades of craft copying, but quickly turned stale itself as modern architects and designers pushed too hard in the other direction - towards modernity and rationality.

In his paper - Designing for the Whole Man, McKim says

"Clearly we badly need the designer who understands and is capable of responding to the needs of the whole man. This designer should be capable of reasoned as well as felt design responses. He must understand man’s physical needs, needs not only for power over his environment but needs for physical comfort and sensory well-being. He must understand man’s intellectual needs, needs for minimizing needless problem solving in design as well as visual needs for knowledge and order."

If Arnold's concerns were with Creative Engineering, McKim's concerns were about putting the human at the centre and continuing this thread Rolf Faste, an American designer and teacher of Industrial design further built on the notion of human centered design, as a way of 'needfinding', recognising human needs and evolving approaches with such concerns at the heart of the problem statement. He advocated what could be called 'a whole person' approach to problem solving, echoing Arnold and McKims ideas on 'Comprehensive Design.'

Practitioner to Theorists to Practitioners

What seems obvious from design-thinking's early days and the many insightful theories that seeded it, are that those early theorists were also practitioners. The Naturalistic-decision Making model that expert practitioners apply to decision making is quite different from the Heuristics & Biases approach described by Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist and economist. The HB approach tends to be largely academic as opposed to the NDM model in which insights are drawn from practice in the field. While the paper authored by Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein are focused on expert decision making, there is a lesson here for design-thinking as well, especially since it is concerned with innovation and supportive decision-making as facilitated by DT experts.

Source: Randy Glasbergen

The jump to an NDM model from academic and scholarly ways of thinking about design-led problem-solving began to occur when practitioners, i.e design firms began to showcase behind-the-scenes processes of their work. IDEO for instance became famous after an episode on a late night news show describing its design process for developing a shopping cart. As design-thinking slowly started to go mainstream, more literature began to appear, this time in the business press and in popular non-fiction such as Daniel Pink's a Whole New Mind, which emphasised a more creative approach to problem solving in organisations with design and empathy as key abilities.

The problems with generic Design-thinking today

In 2019, at least 70 years after the initial seeds were planted, Design-thinking has grown far beyond the playing field envisioned by those early thinkers. As is their wont, organisations interpret models to suit their predispositions (interpret, not redesign) and so design-thinking models today range from deeply insightful to plain platitudinal. 

There are websites out there that offer objective, useful viewpoints just as there are so many that offer banal marketing spins. Lets call the latter - generic design-thinking. (The difference between GDT and design is even more striking. Like the one between a Cardiac surgeon and someone who took an hour long first-aid workshop on CPR.)

Generic Design-thinking has its problems. For one, as IDEO's founders put it, design-thinking workshops just don't scale well. "We really blew it when we called this thing Design Thinking. […] It works great when you’re doing it in these small workshops at Stanford, but it starts to break apart and fail at scale.” - Tim Brown and David Kelly when consulting with IBM on their problem of adopting design-thinking.

Second, the so called process is reductionist and misleading. Even those who market design-thinking courses, such as the Hasso Plattner institute acknowledge this. In a paper from 2010 called "Is there a need for a design thinking process, the authors admit that "there is in design thinking discourse apparently more ease in developing explanatory and theoretical models than prescriptive and concrete ones." causing them to evolve what they call a didactic model (as opposed to the popular 5 step 'conceptual' model.)

Third, design-thinking is grappling with issues positioning itself and more importantly integrating itself in its host organisations. The case study of IBM's struggles with integrating design-thinking into its business processes are a telling story of how hard it can be to meaningfully integrate a method that has arguably vague definitions without strong moorings in the organisation's culture. In particular, the coupling between the individual self (the designer doing the thinking) and the system (the problem space) has traditionally been subjective and empirical in practice. It now seeks to integrate itself into an area where rationality, logic and critical analysis are the primary modes of thinking, which are naturally resistant to more humanistic, synthetic thinking modes.

Moving from Design-thinking to Design

If the analogy of the train schedule VS a railway network resonates with you, then you understand the role that both of these play in problem solving. While design-thinking can help you create a rich and fertile ground for human-centered thinking and action in your organisation, you will still need the experience of designers to see it through. Design-thinking can act as a pre-condition for your innovation activity, and design helps you creative adaptive processes that guide a project through to its eventual outcome.

Another way of putting this is that an actual design department will help you benefit from the long tail of the idea culture created by design-thinking in your organisation. More importantly having design-thinking moored to design will help you avoid certain types of magical thinking.

Source

In summary, the trans-disciplinary nature of design is the original source, the wellspring from which creativity researchers will continue to draw from as design-thinking grows into maturity.

In part Two of this series, I explore the roots of design-thinking in management consulting and new age spirituality, and how some of that explains design thinking's weird language and approach. You can read it here.

In part Three, I explore the popular claim that design-thinking is an innovation method. You can read it here

End Notes

Why did design-thinking originally catch my attention? I think its because I may have perceived a complexity drop when I first heard about it from a consultant many years ago. Something as complex as design being dressed up as Innovation-to-go, something didn't seem right. Today the field seems more mature (even if there is a lot of bullshit to sift through) and I see potential for evolving better forms of design-thinking in the future.

Who you ought to hire for your design-thinking workshops?

If you're looking to build design-thinking competence within your organisation, do background research on your consultant. Avoid those that don't have a practitioner's background. Meaning, if your trainers were themselves trained via one of those expensive, month long training camps, they likely do not understand the subject enough to meaningfully transform your organisation - they will only indulge in DT theatre. You want someone who has practiced design long enough to help you actually DESIGN the integration.

Addressing that old chestnut.

Are you saying design-thinking is a weak and diluted form of design?

What? No. This post is not about design purity VS design-thinking. Design is too vast, too diverse for it to even become an organized profession like architecture or law. Its peculiar nature of constant cross-pollination with other disciplines, alongside perennial growth triggered by technological and societal needs will in my opinion keep it that way. I'm saying that design-thinking too needs to constantly evolve, feeding off it's parent - design.

Related :)

Source: XKCD