As you said it early, design thinking is a type of creative problem solving. All squares are rectangles, but all rectangles are not squares. A key consideration about the future of either must be this: why was DT suddenly so important in the world where problem solvers had opportunity worth their effort?

The consideration of the future is of course multi-dimensional. Who has the greatest need for creative solving and why?

Have we been doing something (solving) that we called creative because we hadn’t so far already known How To, but the learning curve is now distillable to “best practice” and no longer called “creative”??

Are we ready to accept that trial-&-error is not the “same thing as” creativity, but that exploration does NOT take a back seat to creativity?

Will the political justification for taking the risk of creativity be the same or greater without Competition (or extinction) being the most dominant driver?

And not most of all, but necessarily, since DT is actually a methodology (systemic), not a process (executive), should we anticipate that continuing IT evolution will naturally make it more asynchronous and distributed? If yes, the emphasis in the “solving” actually moves to orchestration — something already done most predominantly by architecture since… forever.

(malcolm ryder / archestra research)