Should we give design thinking over to the bots?

This year OpenAI revolutionized creativity. Research, essays, poetry, concept imagery, editorial illustrations and much more rapidly appeared with a few text prompts.

Design practice was thrown into the computational sausage machine too. Articles and videos illustrating how design thinking recipes could be plugged into ChatGPT to gain market insights and suggest solutions peppered the web. It was inevitable after years of design and design thinking being reduced to a formula.

It’s tempting to optimize design thinking to quickly solve whatever ails us. But the problem is that it is not a fixed process. It is filled with variables, often contextual choices made in the moment. As a proponent and advocate for design thinking this has long been my concern about companies adopting the practice without experienced designers guiding them. Reducing it to a formula reduces its effectiveness and often results in mediocre outcomes, giving design thinking a bad name.

However, design thinking is a methodology. To whomever you want to attribute with design thinking’s long gestation, it began with academics trying to understand how humans solve problems. The methodologies were slowly documented by John Arnold in his engineering courses, first at MIT, then at Stanford, then later in books by Bob McKim, Don Kobert and Jim Bagnall. Students such as David Kelley, who later founded IDEO, used these methods for years and then, as professionals, some began piecing them together as a practice to help clients understand the value of design and know they were not getting fleeced by us creative types.

Though the practice was (and still is) diverse, there were elements that were always part of it and clients fell in love with them. They liked the insights and “opportunity finding” phases to help them build growth strategy. Like most good things, once people outside of the academy got familiar with the process, they began trying it themselves. Then back at school they started teaching these methodologies as a package. This is where we are today with the mass education of design thinking, first at the Stanford d.school, and now… everywhere. It’s no surprise as the curriculum has matured it has become more formulaic to make it more teachable. In a business world that succeeds through optimization, that word, “formulaic,” is the seducer. Artificial intelligence works on pattern recognition so processes are prime targets for optimization. If the academic sphere was step one of optimizing design thinking, and corporate certification was step two, artificial intelligence is step three.

But as I wrote with my colleague, Jane Fulton Suri for the Rotman Journal in 2010, “it is so tempting to misapply design thinking and cling to design methods that focus on performance benchmarks…. But without design sensibilities, design thinking runs the risk of addressing only functional concerns and falling short in issues of desirability. To address these subjective concerns, organizations must shift their focus from what to how.” In the article we continue to explain how designers use their ability to sense opportunities for change and then express that change by manipulating elements. This ability to sense is a non-formulaic skill. It’s often thoughtless, stemming from the subconscious.

A lot of existential dread has recently been expressed about AI as a threat to humanity. In those statements there is a zero sum game that imagines a Skynet-like scenario in which the machines decide to eradicate the humans. However there is a more tragic and slow erasure that is upon us now. AI is a threat to our humanity. What we lose when we automate design and design thinking isn’t just its effectiveness, we are actually undermining ourselves. Disregarding our sensory skills, empathy and intuition is a reduction of who we are. Beyond this we are also undermining our own growth and wellbeing. Process is joy and discipline for a creator. It is literally what gets us up, keeps us making. And when we play in it, and experiment with it, then new things can be discovered.

Process keeps us humble and motivated. Sometimes the work is difficult, the learning curve high, and the meaning blurry. Our creative process has to be where we find satisfaction because not every thing we make is worthy of sharing (gasp!). If we made our happiness dependent upon the outcomes of our work—even when good—there is no guarantee it will be understood, adopted or enjoyed. Big market hits like a Swiffer or iPod are contextual. When they land in culture at the right time they can go viral. But, most of the time the impact more incremental.

I know I have an unconventional opinion about design. I have heard statements like “art is selfish and design has purpose.” I’ve also read that design must have a function and art does not need one. There is truth in these statements but they are too binary if they are describing a practice. There is a dance between the forms and I still believe the best design begins from the origins of art, then finds its way into problem solving. The best designers I’ve worked with are the ones that listen closely to their subconscious (sensing) and make space for irrational expressions before taming those wild ideas into a work stream, especially in the world of innovation. There is method in this practice, but not a formula.

I’m not suggesting AI can’t be helpful in the creative process. It just shouldn’t be the process. And neither should a corporate flow chart. I hope if you or your organization are entertaining the idea of optimizing design thinking or design, that you pause to reconsider. Not only is it not creative, it will produce ineffective, formulaic results, and it ultimately will rob us of joy.