Why “Design Thinking” Might Have Been a Victim of Poorly-Executed Research

It seems everyone is writing about the ‘death’ of design thinking lately.?

Business publications have worked themselves into overdrive to write the epitaph for design thinking as a practice, spurred by companies like IDEO coming down to earth after their meteoric rise over the last decade.

Like most things, the reasons for the downfall of design thinking are myriad and nuanced— which personally, I think nobody covered better than MIT Technology Review’s in-depth piece “Design Thinking Was Supposed to Fix the World: Where Did It Go Wrong?”— it’s thorough and well-written.

(The piece, written by Rebecca Ackermann, is so fantastic that I’m dropping the link to it right in the comments.)

But, one narrative in this piece (and in other publications) that I found myself reacting to was the assertion that “empathy"— long-utilized as the starting point of the design thinking exercise— might not have been successful after all.?

As a researcher, I often have a front-row seat to the massively-positive change that can happen when an insightful research project brings the experience of the customer to the fore, and have seen the transformative nature of companies re-working their systems to better satisfy customer needs and desires. So, naturally, I wondered— how could ‘starting with empathy’ have been bad?

As I read through many pieces explaining why ‘empathy-first’ design thinking fell apart, I found myself agreeing that huge failure really did occur— in my assertion, not because of the guiding philosophy of leading with customer empathy— but because of the flawed APPROACH that design thinking used to go about said research.

I’ll spend this article attempting set the record a little straighter on the role of empathy in business transformation: there’s nothing wrong with the aim of starting with empathy— in fact, that’s a good thing— but the APPROACH to doing the foundational research work HAS to be sound, far more sound than design thinking’s attempt at it.?

There were lots of research miscues— brought best to-light in this line from the MIT article:

“It gave designers permission to take on any big, knotty problem by applying their own empathy [emphasis mine] to users’ pain points—the first step in that six-step innovation process filled with Post-its”

In the phrase I emphasized above, perhaps you can see the two glaring problems that would invariably make this consumer-empathy research result unreliable—?

1. It makes the designer’s own lens primary —

Self-centering bias is something that researchers have to actively work to avoid— and to my knowledge, designers that were suddenly thrust into the role of researchers didn’t receive any background or training to help them do this.?

This is backed by the MIT article, which is very clear that wealthy, big-city, often-white designers who could not help but apply their own lens — either prioritizing the points-of-view that most aligned with theirs, or the points-of-view coming from clients with the biggest titles.

As the article shows, this self-centering was applied even when those projects were focused on the public and social sector, in areas designers had little experience with (and in areas in which they had little in-common with the people they were ‘helping’).

Diverse perspectives were apparently regularly disregarded by designers at firms like IDEO, and if you’re going to work across sectors, and especially in the public sector— there’s got to be a deeper work at undoing one’s own biases and perceptions as part of ANY process… particularly one that purports to put “empathy” at the center.

?2. Designers aren’t researchers (!!!!!) —-?

There’s asking questions. And then there’s conducting research.?

As someone who does research for a living, you can probably see why I chafe at the idea that a designer-by-training could suddenly be extremely adept at research. Not that designers aren’t intelligent and somewhat intuitive folks— they are. But I’m also painfully aware that in business, it’s extremely rare to train people up to a new skill, but instead, the modus operandi is often to assume ‘they’re smart people, they’ll figure it out.’

Over the years, I’ve participated in many design thinking projects where I was hired to be the primary upfront researcher hired to gather insights, and I’ve also been a part of other projects in which I was merely asked to consult on a process in which the research was designed and conducted almost entirely by the designers themselves.?

There was a spectacular difference in the insights produced when using a skilled researcher, versus letting a designer take the reigns of the upfront research.?

The key to empathetic research work wasn’t (and still isn’t) just a matter of putting together a list of questions and asking them. But this was often the approach I saw designer-turned-researchers employ.

The level of research rigor in design thinking projects also seemed to decrease over time, as clients wanted to gobble up all the promise of design thinking without the time and money spent on larger-scale, upfront research. I personally noticed that research timelines and budgets got scaled back as the popularity of design thinking increased.?

The biggest product and service innovations in design thinking’s quiver were often created thanks to far deeper research that a one-page list of questions. Continuum, the company best-known for creating the Swiffer, embedded with their consumer participants for WEEKS in an ethnographic research study that had them practically living in-home with respondents.

Over the course of time, they watched parents interact with families (and messes) from morning to evening. The eventual insight was that a new generation of families cleaned in short spurts, quickly-between tasks rather than in one fell swoop: the Swiffer was born of that need around cleaning-multitasking and speed.

But that level of devotion to the research portion of the discovery? That seemingly went out of fashion as design thinking companies grew in size and scale and scope. And while some design thinking firms did employ proper researchers— more of them seemed to hope designers could just ‘wing it’ and come up with great insights themselves.

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Ultimately, designers being forced to switch ‘hats’ to execute truncated, poorly-conceived research could never have produced the level of meaningful insights needed to keep the consumer properly centered in the problem-solving world of design thinking.?

And as the MIT article catalogues, this vacuum of insights could often lead to firms centering their own point-of-view instead.?

Given these factors, it’s no wonder that the lofty promise of “design thinking” could never have measured up to the hype, and that the results often failed to live up to the broader mystique.?

Despite the faltering of the guru-like status that was assigned to “design thinking”— when about to undertake a process that should be centered on a consumer need, starting with “empathy” still is a fine aim— one that should be put into practice by starting with a truly seasoned insights professional designing your research.?