A Critical Review of Design Thinking

Summary

Design thinking is a repeatable way to understand a problem before solving it, and it works for products, services, and processes in any industry. It is not a silver bullet. It is thin on team dynamics and change management, it favours ideas over constraints, it is exposed to groupthink and habit, and the numbers used to sell it come mostly from its advocates. Used with those limits in view, and with ethics built in, it belongs at the core of strategy.

Why look at it critically

Thinking like a designer is not new, but it has become fashionable and the term is everywhere. Companies struggle to find new ideas, products, and services in a crowded market, and resources are limited. They need processes that identify what the client needs and lead to fitting solutions. Design thinking promises exactly that, and the promise is why it deserves scrutiny.

This article does four things:

1. It reviews design thinking from an academic and a professional point of view.
2. It traces where the method comes from and what it does well with complex problems.
3. It gives concrete examples of its limits.
4. It argues that ethics belong in data-driven, human-centric design.

Design thinking, as Daylight (2013) puts it, is an expedition without a map and without a known destination, but with the confidence that you end up somewhere great.

Where it comes from

It is neither new nor a silver bullet. The ideas are decades old.

1. 1969. Herbert Simon publishes The Sciences of the Artificial, which treats everything designed as artificial (Simon, 2008).
2. 1973. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber set out “wicked problems” in Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning and stress the role of human perception and experience in design (Rittel and Webber, 1973).
3. Late 1970s. Human-computer interaction research starts to study how designers think and how their decisions differ from other professions (Cross, 2010).
4. 1992. Richard Buchanan combines Rittel and Simon with Ezio Manzini’s practice, reopens the discussion of wicked problems and links innovation to design thinking.
5. 1991. IDEO forms from a three-way merger. Multidisciplinary teams with strategy, anthropology, health care, and education expertise make it a global agency. CEO Tim Brown’s Change by Design (2009) becomes the reference for enthusiasts.
6. 2003. Universities in Europe and the USA begin teaching service design. Co-creation and participatory design follow, and with them multidisciplinary teams and more transparent, usable solutions.

Three models

Design Council’s Double Diamond

Four phases. Discover gathers insight into the problem. Define makes sense of the possibilities and ends in a clear brief that frames the design challenge. Develop drafts, prototypes, tests and iterates concepts. Deliver finalises and launches. The two diamonds show how the team loses and regains focus. The problem, its definition and the final solution should leave no room for interpretation (Design Council, 2017).

In 2018, my team worked with a refined version, with a clearer separation of the phases and their purpose and an acknowledgement that the process is not linear. We combined it with the Google Design Sprint Kit. Google created the sprint framework in 2010 and, together with Google Ventures, studied and tested 300 business strategies, design thinking, and user research methods. It kept the most effective ones and arranged them into a framework for both divergent and convergent thinking (Knapp, Zeratsky and Kowitz, 2016).

d.school

Stanford’s model is close to the Double Diamond and puts empathy at the centre. Empathize builds understanding of people in the context of the challenge. Define brings focus to the design space. Ideate provides the raw material for prototypes, which generate artefacts that answer questions on the way to a solution. Test gathers user feedback, another chance to understand users better.

IDEO

Three phases (The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, 2015). Inspiration builds empathy through an immersive experience of the target audience’s needs. Ideation makes sense of what you learned, identifies opportunities, and builds prototypes. Implementation brings solutions to life in a real-world scenario.

Where it falls short

Design thinking alone will not save the business world. The concept is thin on team dynamics and change management, especially in academic research. What stops teams from reaching innovative solutions? Egos, mindsets, language, skills, team composition, culture, time, and money all matter, and small obstacles that look unimportant can slow a team down.

Under pressure people react spontaneously. It is easier to name the obvious factors than to analyse the subtle and more influential ones, which means attacking symptoms rather than understanding the whole problem. Teams need to resist the urge to react impulsively. Design thinking is also heavy on ideation, and ideas generated without the burden of constraints do not necessarily solve wicked problems (Malbon, 2016).

Groupthink. People tend to agree with the group, out of peer pressure, low confidence, or fear of rejection. The desire for harmony produces irrational or dysfunctional decisions (Turner and Pratkanis, 1998). Design thinking needs decisions grounded in user insight and testing, and groupthink dulls the critical edge. Managers need to create a safe and playful space where people can throw ideas out without feeling targeted (Dam and Siang, 2017).

The hammer. “To the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail,” as Charlie Munger liked to say. To reduce cognitive load the brain follows familiar patterns, so problems that look similar get the same methods. Cross-disciplinary teams are the countermeasure.

A full understanding of the target users’ problems and needs remains the vital element, and the method does not guarantee it.

Ethics

Design ethics is complex and relevant, and most design thinking models leave it out. It spans professional responsibility, confidentiality, behaviour, and conflicts of interest, and the answers are rarely clearly right or wrong. Ask five people and you get five answers. It reduces to two ideas: ethics establish the behaviours accepted in the profession, and they raise the standard of work. Put together: design ethics raises the standard for work by establishing behaviours and actions that are acceptable in the professional community and for clients (Cousins, 2017). Design professionals have basic obligations to society, clients, the profession, and peers (Designproacademy.org, 2017).

For data-driven, personalised products, ethical standards have to be core values underlying the whole process. Ignoring that risks losing the trust of the people who use them. User-centric work also means close contact with real people, and their trust is not a given. We have to ask how we gain and share insights about people in an ethical way. IDEO’s The Little Book of Design Research Ethics is a good start. Responsibility, honesty, and respect are its core principles for interactions that are safe, fair, enjoyable, and mutually beneficial (Kelley and Suri, 2015).

What the numbers claim

Five figures are often quoted in favour of design thinking:

1. Design-driven companies outperformed the S&P Index by 219% over 10 years (Harmer, 2015).
2. 46% of design leaders cite an emotional bond with customers as a defining trait of advanced design practice (Abramovich, 2017).
3. 71% of respondents in a large-sample survey report that design thinking improved their working culture at team level (Schmiedgen, 2015).
4. 69% perceive the innovation process as more efficient with design thinking (Schmiedgen, 2015).
5. 50% of design-led companies report more loyal customers as a benefit of advanced design practice (Murray Brozek, 2016).

Read them with care. Two come from Adobe, which sells design software, and two from one survey of people who already practise design thinking. They show how strongly the field believes in the method more than they prove that it works.

Conclusion

Design thinking is a repeatable way to understand problems, and any business or profession can use it. Its value lies less in the workshop than in the discipline it asks for: time to understand the problem, iterate on the solution, and measure the result. That is the time companies most often skip. Built into a culture, that discipline belongs at the core of strategy development and organisational change, for products, services, and processes alike (Forbes.com, 2017).

Any company can implement it. Becoming design-centric takes longer for an established company than for a young startup. Most teams already have the client at heart, but processes are far from ideal, ideas still serve internal groups more than customers, and decisions get made in isolation, without the full context, and can fail on rollout. Design thinking applies design strategies across teams and functions. It cuts the uncertainty and risk of new ideas by letting the customer challenge them. It does not fix the egos, groupthink, and habits that decide what happens to those ideas next. That part remains the work of leadership.

References

1. Abramovich, G. (2017). Design-Led Businesses Do These Three Things Right. Cmo.com.
2. Cousins, C. (2017). What Are Design Ethics? (And Why Are They Important?). Design Shack.
3. Cross, N. (2010). Designerly ways of knowing. Springer London Ltd.
4. Daylight (2013). What is Design Thinking. Video.
5. Design Council (2017). The Design Process: What is the Double Diamond?
6. Designproacademy.org (2017). The Academy of Design Professionals, Code of Professional Conduct.
7. Forbes.com (2017). Why Design Thinking Should Be At The Core Of Your Business Strategy Development.
8. Harmer, T. (2015). 4 key stats on the importance of design for business. Adobe Creative Blog.
9. Kelley, D. and Suri, J. (2015). The little book of design research ethics. IDEO.
10. Knapp, J., Zeratsky, J. and Kowitz, B. (2016). Sprint. Bantam Press.
11. Malbon, T. (2016). The Problem with Design Thinking. Made by Many, Medium.
12. Murray Brozek, C. (2016). Design-led firms win the business advantage. Adobe.
13. Rittel, H. and Webber, M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Berkeley, Univ. of California, I.U.R.D.
14. Schmiedgen, J. (2015). Parts without a whole? Potsdam: Univ.-Verl, pp.100, 103.
15. Simon, H. (2008). The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
16. The field guide to human-centered design (2015). San Francisco: IDEO, p.13.
17. Turner, M. and Pratkanis, A. (1998). Twenty-Five Years of Groupthink Theory and Research. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73(2–3), pp.105–115.