A Non-Theological Approach to Design Thinking
We need a handful of principles to use when considering Design Thinking. They don’t exist yet. I’ll begin.
#1 — For hardcore male performance managers, Rogaine, Viagra, and Design Thinking may seem to belong in the same category. They don’t.
#2 — Design Thinking helps to discover problems worth solving, and then discover solutions worth using. Design Thinking does not apply to all problems. The best proof of this is that Design Thinking does nothing at all to stem the relentless tidal wave of… unvetted articles about Design Thinking. If it did, you might have been protected from ever seeing the one you’re reading now.
#3 — Design precedes Design Thinking by a few thousand years. In that time, some pretty good designs appeared. The important part about Design Thinking is not the “design” part. It’s the thinking” part.
#4— Design Thinking does not democratize design. The only things that democratize design are the same things that prevent democratizing it: power, money, and knowledge. Design Thinking, on a good day, democratizes design values.
#5 — Design Thinking is not required for innovation. You have perhaps heard of Science? Art? Luck? Post-Its? Silly Putty? The Fosbury Flop? For the most part, making something different doesn’t make it an innovation until someone figures out what to do with it, and if no one cares what that is, there’s a good chance it will still not be called an “innovation”
#6 — Anything that a human designs for another human is human-centered. Sometimes, that’s even a good thing. And sometimes, that thing is not designed well. And even then, sometimes it is still desirable. Who knew we were gonna need the Consumer Safety Commission?
#7 — Remember when you were growing up, and you first learned that it is a good thing to be told “You’re so thoughtful… Thank you!” You were 9 years old and already encountering sympathy… possibly even empathy. Why wasn’t Design Thinking called Thoughtful Design?
A digression: Back in the 1970s, somebody started calling some kinds of performances Performance Art. Since performance-as-art was already pretty well established let’s say by 1925 B.C., what the heck did Performance Art mean? It didn’t mean “artful performance”, and it didn’t announce a breakthrough in human civilization with which suddenly artists were interested in performing. What really happened was that a certain community of artists, most of whom did not practice as performers in an already recognized way, decided that they wanted performances to be evaluated by a different set of criteria that this particular community considered to be artistic. The phrase Performance Art was coined by this community to talk to itself. But why didn’t it call their idea Art Performance instead of Performance Art? You know, like saying Art Painting instead of House Painting?
The real answer is… branding. And the point is, it doesn’t matter. The name doesn’t tell you what it is. The name just points at it.
#8 — We reference frameworks. We adopt methods. We make models. We conduct processes. We practice techniques. And we execute procedures. Design Thinking is not a procedure. Parenthetically, IDEO’s Tim Brown says that it isn’t even a method. Most literature on the subject now prefers to call it a model for processes. There is not only one process that it models. But the one thing that it consistently offers is a problem-solving strategy. Who cares if it is a framework, method, model, process, technique, or procedure. It uses any or all of those things as necessary.
* Malcolm designed and managed the competitive jurying process for Artists’ Fellowship Grants to individual artists, for the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, including for Performance Artists under the New Genres category.
© 2020 malcolm ryder / archestra research
