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Thinking about Design Thinking

By Steve Portigal - October 5, 2008

in Object Culture

In Design Is More Than Packaging, the New York Times introduces "design thinking," citing Jump's work for Saturn, as well as Stanford's d.school, and Half Moon Bay's C2 Group. The article takes a stab at actually explaining just what the heck people mean by that term....

They are proponents of "design thinking," which focuses on people's actual needs rather than trying to persuade them to buy into what businesses are selling. It revolves around field research followed by freewheeling idea generation that often leads to unexpected results. Properly used, design thinking can weave together elements of demographics, research, environmental factors, psychology, anthropology and sociology to generate novel solutions to some of the most puzzling problems in business.

...while offering a gently sober reality check for the bandwagoneers who might be reading.

"It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves everything. That's putting it too high on a pedestal," Mr. Kembel says. "Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful."

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hughmama

16 years ago

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very design consultancy based definition me thinks. Good for managers who don't critically engage with things but who just need to be satisfied that enough fancy words are used. User centered passive fad design in a post-humanist society. This comes over in Tim Brown's blog too. For someone so influential the blog smacks of shallow engagements with ideas.
Im tired so being constructive is off the cards here but to paraphrase David Weinberger as he muses about people's guesses at the future implications of the internet: if we can define design in the current technological environment then we are not doing it right.
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Dan Saffer

16 years ago

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While it's great to see the NYT finally getting that "design is more than packaging," I hate that the conclusion jumped to is the snake oil that is "design thinking" which is like "design lite." Designing *is* thinking: ideas given form. Separating thinking from design is like separating oxygen from air.

The projects sited in the article aren't "design thinking" projects, they are design projects, as is the process described. To call Design "design thinking" (this year's "innovation?"), is to obfuscate what design really is and can do.
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Reilly

16 years ago

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IDEO's president Tim Brown just started a new blog on design thinking, called...Design Thinking: http://designthinking.ideo.com. An awesome read.
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