Design Thinking and Design Doing

It’s not what you say that matters... it’s what you do.?Laurance Laughton 2004

The concept of Design Thinking emerged in the 70s, but it wasn’t until IDEO turned it into an offering in the early 2000s that design moved into the foreground of business. And to good effect. Today, design leaders hold senior positions at almost every major company, and future executives learn Design Thinking in 12-week modules at leading universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. But before we declare victory, I want to pose the question, Is Design Thinking really Design?

While Design Thinking brings elements of the creative process to problem-solving, it leaves behind the doing and making aspects of design. Because solutions emerge in the abstract, I assert that Design Thinking does not a designer make. In the same vein, Design Doing—without the thinking—is not design, either. At its core, Design brings these two disparate activities together into a unified construct. Design is more than putting together the plans for a car, chair, or interface. Design means bringing these ideas to life.

Today, a variety of agencies offer neatly packaged Design Thinking workshops that apply creative processes to addressing clients’ thorniest issues. In my view, a big reason that agencies focus on process is that it’s predictable and repeatable. Delivering an innovative workshop is easier than delivering breakthrough outcomes. Coming out of these workshops, teams emerge energized and empowered to think in new ways. But while the process is rigorous, results vary when it’s applied to real-life situations.

This heightened emphasis on Designing Thinking also brings unintended consequences. An unnatural division emerges between those who think and those who make. Strategy and research move upstream from the creative and making processes. In effect, the head and the heart become disconnected as different experts move in and out of the process, each playing a specific role. In the end, the process can overwhelm creativity because it doesn’t allow for the breakthrough moments of learning from mistakes or achieving happy accidents. Even the most carefully designed process can still deliver results that are sub-standard or, worse, live only as PowerPoint presentations that never see the light of day.

If you’ve ever watched the show,?Mad Men, you know what I mean. In the 1950s copywriters occupied plush offices upstairs, while the creative directors and art department crammed into small rooms on the floors below, working at the end of the process to implement the ideas that came down to them. In?the?late 1950s, advertising legend Bill Bernbach reimagined the process by pairing art directors and copywriters in teams. DDB ended up creating some of the most iconic work of that era.

The truth is, Design is a messy process. It requires a back-and-forth between Strategy and Creative, each pushing on the other to elevate the solution. Great results rarely emerge from the clean, nicely packaged process of Discovery, Ideation, Experimentation, and Evolution we encounter in Design Thinking workshops. In Design Doing, steps move forward then backward, blend together, or require a different ordering. Developing the instincts for how to solve problems that haven’t been solved before takes years of experience. In my case, my Industrial Design education included electrical engineering, mechanical and manufacturing engineering, material science, and polymer technology. But my real learning didn’t begin until I worked side-by-side with engineers at manufacturing plants to untangle the challenges of bringing a design to market and into people’s hands. Later, to design digitally connected products, I had to learn everything about interaction and experience design. The lessons I learned in my six years of university study and 30 years of real-world experience simply can’t be squished into a 12-week course.

Now, management consultancies such as McKinsey, Deloitte, and Accenture have added Design Thinking into their array of offerings because corporations with Design leaders need people on the management consultancy side they can match with. This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, having management consultancies champion Design Thinking has been of great benefit to its cause. But it also muddies the waters of what Design is, who does it, and what’s required to do it well.

As Design becomes more codified, as executives and business leaders attended workshop theater where everyone can pick up the designer’s mantle, the question you should ask is, what makes for ‘good’ design? How can you take solutions from post-it notes and the whiteboard and manifest them in the real world? It comes down to designers or agencies that are not only great thinkers but also great doers.?If their portfolio is thin and focuses entirely on process, you might want to think twice. But if they can point to?incredible results that made it into the real world, odds are you've found a worthy partner who has both a good process and the know-how to deliver great results. Bringing creative and original work into the world requires designers who can both think and do.