Dear all,
This is an interesting conversation. We’ve already had some of the historical and practical context of design thinking outlined in this thread; I post now to supplement this with a phenomenological account of ‘design thinking’ in the United States (plus a semi-formal argument).
In the US, the term ‘design thinking’ is overwhelmingly associated with a process popularized by David Kelly through his firm IDEO and the Stanford d.school. I think most of us are familiar with this process, so I will not go into more detail here (it is easy to google, after all). This is a simplistic but I think, for our purpose, accurate interpretation; the majority of designers, business people, and educators in the US who are familiar with the term understand and define it within the domain of this rough perspective. If you google ‘design thinking’, the majority of the results you will get via web search, image search, blog search, and news search all come from the same perspective.
I agree with Ken when he said in his most recent post that he “[doesn’t] believe that the marketplace ought to determine what we do in a research group”. Yet later in his post, Ken said that "Worrying about the marketplace isn’t our concern.” This is a fair point, taken in its context, but I’d like to take it out of context for just a moment. My disagreement with this miscontextualized quote is based on a working draft of an argument we can formalize as:
P1. The common conception of ‘design thinking’ in the US (and maybe other areas) is substantially and importantly different from scholarly definitions of design thinking.
P2. Design research and scholarship has little ability to intentionally direct design practice and/or the public perception of design, at least not on topics and definitions that have gained the buzz status that popular ‘design thinking’ has achieved.
P3. Design scholars do at least have the ability to change the perceptions and definitions of concepts within the design scholarship and research community.
P4. It is important that design research/scholarship be intelligible and accessible to design practitioners and others, and that these parties be involved in design scholarship in various ways.
C. Design researchers and scholars should concede the term ‘design thinking’ to the popular definition, and instead seek to explain their concepts through another lexicon. I suggest simply ‘design’. The unqualified term ‘design’ is, I believe, surprisingly available as a domain name.
In short, I suggest we flip Stef’s original position and instead understand ‘design thinking’ and every other qualified version of design as simply a variety of design. We can leave the qualifications where they belong: as specialties.
Thanks,
Arjun
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