“Design Thinking — It’s Complex, Isn’t It?” By Dr Aysar Ghassan

‘Design Thinking’ is as popular now as it’s ever been. Right now, 1000s of people working in businesses, charities, governments, and education will be using it to facilitate change management; hundreds of students will be swotting up about the Double Diamond; someone, somewhere, may well be reading an article about it on their phone…

There are so many people celebrating Design Thinking but very few are looking into what all the hype is really about. I think this is a bit worrying given the fact that Design Thinking is everywhere — and that whether we’re directly exposed to it or not, we all feel its post-it-notey presence. This is because we’re all consumers of products and services that are created by companies who have used it; many of us are citizens of countries whose governments use it to help them form policy.

“Where can I find an easily digestible critique of Design Thinking?”, I hear you ask. Well, you’re in luck! In my PhD, I did just that. And you can read my 80000 word study here:

Designerly ways of speaking: investigating how the design tribe of researchers speak on design thinking — Northumbria Research Link

Ok, you’re not going to do that, so I’m going to tell you a bit about what I found in my thesis. I studied how academic researchers investigate and write about Design Thinking. I found that researchers speak very positively about Design Thinking, but they tend to use flawed methods, so their findings can’t be relied upon. In fact, because of this, it’s impossible to verify that Design Thinking really even exists!

I discovered instead that researchers use certain words and phrases to write the idea of Design Thinking into existence. So, really, I uncovered a ‘Lexicon of Design Thinking’ that researchers use in place of bringing to light actual rigorous evidence.

One such term is ‘complex’ (and its close friend ‘complexity’). You’ll have been told that Design Thinking is ‘complex’, and that it can be used to solve ‘complex problems’. Indeed, researchers will argue that Design Thinking is in fact too complex to even define.

Sometimes, you’ll see authors use terms like, ‘wicked’, ‘messy’, ‘undefined’, or ‘ill-structured’ — these are interchangeable with the word ‘complex’. These help to create a richer and more varied narrative. Why use one word, when you can use several? And it’s really easy for us to throw these words out there.

These words have a habit of fornicating with other clever-sounding words to form practically incomprehensible sentences. You will probably have heard someone trying to dissuade you from operationalising Design Thinking in order to safeguard its inherent complexity.

When words are used without an avenue to critique whether they are appropriate, the danger is that we get in the habit of accepting — and even becoming addicted to propagating — work and educational cultures in which lexical shenanigans run riot.

So, ‘complex’ and its buddies are the Design Thinking words of today.

What do you think might be the Design Thinking terms and phrases that you might be creating, using — and hopefully, critiquing — tomorrow?

By Dr. Aysar Ghassan

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