Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 287 | Strategy & Business Model Section

Extractive summaries of and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 287 | March 10-16, 2023

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

By Rebecca Ackermann | MIT Technology Review | February 9, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

The first step of the design thinking process is for the designer to empathize with the end user through close observation of the problem.  The next steps were to reframe the problem (“How might we …?”), brainstorm potential solutions, prototype options, test those options with end users, and—finally—implement. Design thinking agencies usually didn’t take on this last step themselves; consultants often delivered a set of “recommendations” to the organizations that hired them.  

This was a savvy strategy for selling design thinking to the business world: instead of hiring their own team of design professionals, companies could bring on an agency temporarily to learn the methodology themselves. The approach also felt empowering to many who spent time with it. We are all creatives, design thinking promised, and we can solve any problem if we empathize hard enough.

But in recent years, for a number of reasons, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics have argued that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. And they have maintained that by centering designers—mainly practitioners of corporate design within agencies—it has reinforced existing inequities rather than challenging them. Years in, “innovation theater”— checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts—had become endemic in corporate settings, while a number of social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects. Meanwhile, the #MeToo and BLM movements, along with the political turmoil of the Trump administration, have demonstrated that many big problems are rooted in centuries of dark history, too deeply entrenched to be obliterated with a touch of design thinking’s magic wand. 

Today, innovation agencies and educational institutions still continue to sell design thinking to individuals, corporations, and organizations. In 2015, IDEO even created its own “online school,” IDEO U, with a bank of design thinking courses. But some groups—including the d.school and IDEO itself—are working to reform both its principles and its methodologies. These new efforts seek a set of design tools capable of equitably serving diverse communities and solving diverse problems well into the future. It’s a much more daunting—and crucial—task than design thinking’s original remit.   Instead of “empathy,” “make” and “care” are the concepts that program leaders hope will shape the design education across all offerings. 

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Design thinking was a savvy strategy for selling ideas to the business world: instead of hiring their own team of design professionals, companies could bring on an agency temporarily to learn the methodology themselves.
2. But in recent years, for a number of reasons, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics have argued that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. 
3. Today some groups—including the D.school and IDEO itself—are working to reform both its principles and its methodologies. These new efforts seek a set of design tools capable of equitably serving diverse communities and solving diverse problems well into the future.  Instead of “empathy,” “make” and “care” are the concepts that program leaders hope will shape the design education across all offerings. 

Full Article

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Topics: Design Thinking, Decision-making, Strategy, Problem Solving