Design thinking: Everywhere and Nowhere
Reflections on The Big Re-think
It’s a sign of the times when The Economist, the house journal of the global business elite, holds a conference in London on ‘design thinking’ (official Big Rethink site here). Having attended the conference, produced in association with The Design Council and held over 11-12 March, I was left wondering one thing: why is design thinking such a hot topic with business leaders, given that it leaves so many designers cold?
The conference’s brilliant chair, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, a global correspondent for The Economist and author of Zoom, began by throwing down a hefty gauntlet to design.
He explained that the world faces crises on many different levels, not only economic and environmental: politicians and corporate leaders are also experiencing a profound crisis of trust and legitimacy. This, in turn, has triggered a loss of confidence in the old ways of doing things and has led business and governments to cast around for new ideas. As design thinking is offering itself up as a process to solve many of these problems, what has it got to offer? Gulp!
So, how well did the conference fare, given such a preamble? The short answer is that the speakers largely sidestepped the crises—and sidestepped, too, the subject of design thinking.
Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran.
The big sidestep
The format didn’t help. There were too many rapid-fire sessions. Some were only 10 minutes long, leaving little time to develop much more than a sound bite or two. The Work Foundation’s Will Hutton took a few bad-tempered minutes to tackle the economic crisis and make the case for more investment in R&D. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Robin Bew concisely delineated all the crises, but, sadly, had been briefed not to show any graphs. Would that really scare the designers?
There’s something odd going on when business and political leaders flatter design with potentially holding the key to such big and pressing problems, and the design community looks the other way.
David Kester.
A number of speakers, mostly from outside the world of design, addressed sustainability. They rehearsed familiar themes (cutting waste, apparently, can also save you money!). Tellingly, they made few connections with design thinking, apart from Jeff Denby. He made a memorable presentation on his sustainable underwear brand, and its on-trend ethical marketing practices. Some of the case studies on innovation addressed traditional design themes, but most didn’t touch design thinking.
An exception was the speech by UK Design Council CEO David Kester. He showed how the Council and Richard Seymour had coordinated a range of interested parties and design agencies to develop staff- and patient-centred design concepts to improve hygiene in hospitals.
The main attempts to connect design thinking with the grand themes of the conference were the workshops in the afternoon of the first day. Here, we tackled some board-level leadership issues like purpose and the business models of struggling UK companies and institutions like Royal Bank of Scotland and the National Health Service. However, most delegates found these a frustratingly superficial exercise, doing the cause of design thinking little service.
There’s something odd going on when business and political leaders flatter design with potentially holding the key to such big and pressing problems, and the design community looks the other way.
To understand this paradox, we need to look back at why business and political leaders have become so enamoured with design, and why so many designers struggle with the concept of Design Thinking.
Leaders fall for designers
When I took my first design job in a consultancy back in the eighties, business leaders considered design an optional and mysterious activity practised by a small cult of polo necks in Milan, London and New York. Today, by contrast, design is global, rarely off the TV, and a popular subject at college. It has also expanded its scope from products and graphics into interactions, experiences, services and, more recently, ‘social change.’
Innovation came to be reduced to creativity—and the idea that scientists and technologists are themselves creative was completely lost.
In hindsight, the 10 years between 1997-2007 were the real boom years. Three events in 1997 set the scene for design’s rise. Steve Jobs returned to Apple, which soon became the totemic case study of how to out-innovate the competition through smart design. The days of putting the case for the importance of design were replaced by CEOs wanting to be the Apple of their category.
In 1997 Tony Blair’s New Labour was elected with a mandate to modernise Britain, and quickly elevated something called Creative Industries to the forefront of a policy focused on the shift to a service-based knowledge economy. This was a strategy that would be replicated around the world in the form of countless policies for the creative sector. In the process, innovation came to be reduced to creativity—and the idea that scientists and technologists are themselves creative was completely lost.
The third event was the death of Princess Diana (bear with me on this one). The public outpouring of grief for this global emblem of vulnerability marked the arrival of a new culture of emotions. Western societies now had more therapists than policemen, watched Oprah and encouraged its citizens to ‘express themselves.’ This cultural shift from the head to the heart provided a fertile context for designers to be re-conceived by leaders as the authentic points of connection with impulsive consumers and voters—who were losing trust in their leaders.
Participants of The Big Rethink’s workshops.
Rise of design thinking
The notion of design thinking, which began to be discussed in design circles in the mid-noughties, marked a high water mark of design euphoria. First, Roger Martin inspired it. His concept, ‘Integrative Thinking,’ suggested that the best leaders integrate left-brain, analytical thinking with right-brain intuition.
Then, design thinking was brought to life in stories about IDEO’s T-shaped designers by Tim Brown, the consultancy’s CEO and president. Brown triumphed at the Global Economic Forum in Davos in 2006. After that, the then assistant managing editor of Business Week, a design buff named Bruce Nussbaum, rallied for the cause.
The concern was that too much time has been spent trying to outsmart the MBAs, and that design managers had lost their focus on delivering great design. The most common response to this feeling of over-stretch was to regroup and get back to basics…
In fact, design thinking always meant different things to different players. For some it was about teaching managers how to think like designers; for others, it was about designers tackling problems that used to be the preserve of managers and civil servants; and for others still, it was anything said on the subject of design that sounded smart. To most, it is was merely a new spin on design. All its proponents were, however, united by their ambition for design to play a more strategic role in the world than ‘making pretty.’ Who could argue with that?
Designers fall out with Design Thinking
Anna Rafferty of Penguin
The term was poorly defined, its proponents often implied that designers were merely unthinking doers, and it allowed smart talkers with little design talent to claim to represent the industry. Others worried about ‘overstretch’—the gap between design thinkers’ claims, and their knowledge, capabilities and ability to deliver on those promises.
Still, when design thinking began to get a name for itself, most seasoned designers merely considered it harmless hype. But as the hype gathered pace, attitudes began to change.
Today, as business and governments start to take design thinking seriously, many designers and design experts are distancing themselves from the term.
While I have often been dubbed a design thinker, and I’ve certainly dedicated my career to winning a more strategic role for design. But I was uncomfortable with the concept of design thinking from the outset. I was not the only member of the design community to have misgivings.
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