Design thinking has been accepted by many. Unfortunately, as the terminology continues to gain traction, many adopters vaguely apply design-like processes to solve wicked problems, under the guise of “design thinking”. Perhaps it’s time to do something different. Maybe it’s time to re-identify.
What is Design Thinking?
Beginning in the 1950’s creative techniques and problem-solving methods emerged in product and industrial design practices. One of the earliest adopters was John Arnold, who started his career at MIT’s Creative Engineering Laboratory and eventually accepted a dual appointment as a professor of Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration at Stanford. Within 30 years, researchers and design practitioners like Donald Schon (The Reflective Practioner), L. Bruce Archer (may be the first to use design thinking), and Peter Rowe (used “Design Thinking” as a title of his book in 1987) collectively explored design methodologies, theory, and practice.
There are many design thinking models, but for the sake of this post, we will focus on the recent-traditional methodology as an iterative process:
- Empathize– focus on understanding human-centered challenges
- Define– articulate the challenge intended to solve
- Ideate– brainstorm potential solutions
- Prototype– develop model solutions to test
- Test– iteratively analyze solutions to continuously improve the design
One of the goals of design thinking is to remove patterns of thinking (schemas) and creatively think solutions “outside the box”. Also, design thinking begs for multidisciplinary collaboration, where each contributor leverages their own skill set and experience to contribute to the problem-solving process. Finally, design thinkers are expected to follow a data-driven approach, utilizing a system-thinking mindset, and ambiguously work through abstract processes to arrive at a solution. Design thinking utilizes linear “phases” to guide users through a step-by-step and iterative process.
But then, it gets murky. Design Thinking has evolved from a practical model to a theoretical strategy and continues to cause discourse. The challenge of design thinking is that it’s trying to please everyone, giving it an identity crisis. Let’s review further…
Business Strategy
By the 21st century, IDEO’s Tim Brown (the originator’s of Apple’s mouse device) championed design thinking strategies into mainstream media and applied design thinking to business (Roger Martin), education, and many other industries and practices (including personal lifestyle management). The application to evolve business with design thinking was easily adapted due to the competitive nature to create and support innovative products and services within a market. In a globalized, technology-driven economy, the product is often the service. As the evolution of participatory design, user-centered design, and service design lends itself to a creative business methodology, service, and product become one of the same. In addition, some corporate leadership adopted design thinking tactics with the intention to inspire organizational change through creativity. There’s an array of examples of how design thinking has been applied in business strategies including Airbnb, who utilized design thinking strategies to transition its startup operation to a profitable household entity, and IBM who used design thinking to shift corporate culture by creating their own buzzwords.
Irani suggests that globalization evolved IDEO’s strategy from tangible designs to design consultancy in the early 2000’s. She reminds us that this is occurring during a time when US societal fears began to rise as jobs were outsourced to Asia, the housing market was about to burst, Common Core replaces No Child Left Behind, and Web 2.0 was a new way for sharing information. The solution as Daniel Pink states is to replace left-brain, task-oriented thinking, with right-brain, creative logic. Pink defines this shift from the “Informational Age” to the “Conceptual Age” with design as a valuable skill for survival (Pink, 2006, p. 49-50).
Education Strategy
As we continue to review the start of the 21st century, a time when businesses began to shun linear and automated processes, a very public perception emerged that educational school systems operated like a monochromatic factory. If business was evolving, education would need to as well. Policies like No Child Left Behind Act and the launch of the Common Core State Standards/Next Generation Science Standards challenged education to focus on productivity and data. These federal policies not only encouraged corporate philanthropy (many from Silicon Valley) to provide grant funding to support schools to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) but also influenced a new business strategy in education.
Education was ripe for aligning design thinking elements into practice due to the desire for educators to apply “21st-century skills into the classroom” (collaboration, critical thinking, creative problem-solving, etc.) to prepare students for college and careers. The K-12 education landscape began to erupt in 2007 when many d.schools (and similar) bought-in to the movement with hopes to deploy design strategies to solve interdisciplinary challenges.
As K12 continues to adopt outcome-based, student-centered, and active learning strategies to align an authentic curriculum to 21st century needs, higher education institutions like Stanford (IDEO’s academic arm), Harvard, and MIT (consider correlation to previously mentioned theorists and practitioners) offer degrees and programs in innovation and design thinking.
The Design Thinking Oasis
The internet is scattered with educational design thinking vignettes that have a lot to say about nothing. In an Edutopia article, it shares a quote from an educator who states, “Design thinking reminds me all the time why I became an educator; it all starts with empathy“, and continues with a header entitled “An Oasis for Educators“. Below is another example scattered with buzzwords offering little promise to provide strategies for improved learning outcomes.
In a recent article, How Design Thinking Became a Buzzword at School, Lahey’s word choice articulates a well-known phenomenon spreading like a virus across the educational landscape. She writes,
“At a recent teaching conference in Richmond, Virginia, a session on “design thinking” in education drew a capacity crowd. Two middle-school teachers demonstrated how they had used the concept to plan and execute an urban-design project in which students were asked to develop a hypothetical city or town given factors such as population, geography, the environment, and financial resources.
The teachers in the audience were enchanted by the details of the project; and if the photographs in the presentation were any indication, the students who participated in the lesson enjoyed it, too. The presenting teachers were bubbling over with enthusiasm for what they saw as the potential inherent in teaching design thinking.
Many of the teachers in attendance were flummoxed, however. As we filed out of the room and headed toward our next sessions, I overheard one woman remark to another that while the urban-design project looked like something she’d like to try in her own classroom, “I think I missed something. I still don’t understand what design thinking is. Do you?” The other teacher shook her head and said, “I think it’s a curriculum, but I’m not really sure.”
The K12 examples, the video, and the scenario outlined above leave the audience baffled. The overuse of buzzwords, ambiguity of design thinking terminology and lack of actual design practice is leading to a massive scale of misuse…and confusion. To be clear, design thinking is NOT a curriculum. It is a methodology for a skilled- practice.
Design thinking isn’t limited to the K12 landscape. Unfortunately, it’s also been targeted to reform higher education. Fortunately, tides may be turning as articles like Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle (previously entitled “Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis- It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains” )begin to emerge and question the practicality of the “movement”. In a personal example, I recently attended a design thinking workshop where the facilitators spent a considerable amount of time walking through the values of persona development as a technique to emphasize the challenge. One of the exercises included working in a group to develop personas… without data. This means, our personas were created on stereotypes, personal stories, bias, and assumptions. How are we expected to design an empathetic solution (without personal bias) if we do not have quantitative and qualitative data to develop archetype users, and then repeatedly test them in our prototype solutions? I realize this was an exercise to provide us with a hands-on design thinking strategy within the constraints of the workshop. However, whether it’s called design thinking or not, design decisions should never be made on assumptions and personal bias. Know your audience will always be essential whether you call it “Empathy” or not.
I have to question the return on investment (ROI) from the time and resources spent on these professional development activities. In my critical review of design thinking in education, I believe some components align with learner-centered, systems thinking, and procedural problem-solving. Also, there’s evidence about how design thinking techniques have helped foster educator collaboration. However, most professional development activities (including IDEO U) and resources that intend to foster design thinking skills, are vague and leave participants with a false belief that they can design in practice.
Design Convergence
Instructional design’s beginning emerged from World War II as a discipline used to systematically help soldiers interpret complex tasks within a short period. Instructional design embeds learning strategies and technologies to create learning experiences that are efficient, effective, and appealing (Merrill et al., 1966). In the 1950’s B.F. Skinner (programmed instructional materials), Robert Mager (learning objectives), and Benjamin Bloom (Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning domains) began to lay the foundation of instructional design for education.
ADDIE Model
As previously mentioned at the start of this post, design as a discipline (specifically industrial design) escalated approximately around the same time. It wasn’t until the 1970’s (after Gagne’s nine events) that instructional design appeared in business, academia, and the military. With the adoption of instructional design, many instructional design models materialized including ADDIE (developed in 1975), AGILE, Rothwell & Kazana, Dick & Carey, and SAM. If you were to do a word cloud of the modes included in these models (including design thinking) you would get something similar to this:
Design Model Word Cloud
The most common words used in these models are Evaluate (3) and Implement (3). Most instructional design models are very similar, for example, “evaluate” is used in ADDIE, AGILE, and SAM; but Design Thinking uses “test“. Similarly, most of these models believe that the design process is iterative and ongoing. Are we splitting hairs with wordsmithing the terminology in these instructional models to create buzz? Which model is best employed for instructional problem-solving?
Daniel Scarnecchia’s Frank and Honest Re-Rendering of Stanford d.school’s Design Thinking Hexagons
Design as an Expertise
As Natasha Jen shares in her presentation, the design community should critique the outcomes of design thinking projects. She defines design thinking as, “Design Thinking packages a designer’s way of working for a non-designer audience by codifying their processes into a prescriptive, step-by-step approach to creative problem solving- claiming that is can be applied by anyone to any problem.”
And there lies the problem with design thinking, it devalues design as an expertise. Expert designers, those with more experience, are able to holistically understand the design scenario and quickly approach the challenge to determine design decisions.
Design Disciplines from ITERATIONS
These four design categories, strategic, visual, artifact, and environment are interconnected with no priority given over another, and each focuses on improving the human experience. In any design discipline, designers are tasked to solve wicked problems or complex problems that are ill-formulated and not completely solvable. They use similar methodologies, including critique, to work within complex systems and within context to make design decisions for the best possible solution to ill-structured problems. Finally, designers push innovation through their own personal philosophies and frameworks to explore elements, strategies, and principles (Buchanan, 1992).
The relationship of design methodologies and the human experience continues to be complicated and abstract. Design thinking has become a set of guiding principles for those who wish to think like a designer. I echo Natasha’s call to action, designers need to help reshape this conversation.
References: In addition to all the links.
Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design issues, 8(2), 5-21.
Dorst, K. (2011). The core of ‘design thinking and its application. Design studies, 32(6), 521-532.
Johansson‐Sköldberg, U., Woodilla, J., & Çetinkaya, M. (2013). Design thinking: past, present and possible futures. Creativity and innovation management, 22(2), 121-146.
Gobble, M. M. (2014). Design thinking. Research Technology Management, 57(3), 59-61.
Irani, L. (2018). “Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 4(1).
Merrill, M. D., Drake, L., Lacy, M. J., Pratt, J., & ID₂ Research Group. (1966). Reclaiming instructional design. Educational Technology, 5-7.
Pink, D. H. (2006). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. Penguin.
Razzouk, R., & Shute, V. (2012). What is design thinking and why is it important?. Review of Educational Research, 82(3), 330-348.
Champions of the Human Race 