‘Design thinking’ has been a throwaway phrase I have been aware of for some time, but never took too seriously. Like ‘Blue-sky Thinking’ and ‘Big Society’, it’s the kind of terminology I expect to hear from a businessman wearing chinos on a dress-down-Friday. But recently, Design Thinking has been cropping up in quite serious places and suggested to have meaning where I always presumed it had none. No longer a trendy concept, it is now an apparently fully government-endorsed strategy.
The Design Council’s latest report, for example, ‘Design for Innovation’ (December, 2011), reads, ‘The idea of adopting design principles at the heart of business culture and management is linked to global business success stories such as Apple, Dyson and Burberry. ‘Design Thinking’ builds on theories around creative culture and thinking styles and deploys design methods within strategic business management.’
An article in The Guardian Weekend Magazine published in the same month introduced Design Thinking as a sort of self-help tool. In this article, Oliver Burkeman reviews a publication, entitled ‘Life Kerning: Creative Ways To Fine Tune Your Perspective On Career & Life’, by Chicagoan designer Justin Ahrens. Burkeman states, ‘No offence to the designers I’ve known, but they tend to be neat-freaks with an obsessive attention to detail (and stylish spectacles). These are excellent attributes for the job, but are they really a recipe for happiness?’, he asks. And although he starts the article on this rather sceptical note, he ends by arguing:‘There’s something appealing about treating life as a design project: it’s less cringe-inducing than ‘life as a work of art’, yet more free-spirited than life as a to-do list’.
According to an article in the New York Times in September, 2009, the term Design Thinking was first coined by David Kelley, who co-founded IDEO in 1991 originally to develop products for clients in Silicon Valley. This torch continues to be carried by Tim Brown, now President and Chief Executive Officer of IDEO. ‘When Mr Brown started out as a product designer in the late 1980s, design was mostly about creating physical things…Designers now also tackle intangible strategic and behavioural issues, such as helping businesses and government to organise themselves more efficiently and make their services more user-friendly’, the article states.
The fact that no-one really seems able to say what it is hasn’t stopped Brown from going onto TED talks to convince the world that design thinking is the solution to almost any problem- from the global economic crisis to water shortages. That’s not to say that the TED talk didn’t clarify anything for me personally. By the end of the presentation I began to realise that the term could really be shortened to just plain Thinking. Even if it is thinking in interesting ways, can we really call this design? According to the NY Times, Design Thinking has the potential to ‘redefine the profession’, but if this is the case, I’m not sure if this is a good thing.
I am sure that for Hal Foster Design Thinking would be further proof of the re-configuration of design as a pure marketing concept. In this book, Design and Crime, Foster describes the hollowing out of design since the 1980s. In an era where everything ‘from our genes to our jeans’ are designed, he asks what can the word mean anymore? It’s a question I’m sure that Design Thinking doesn’t have the answer to.


