"Design Thinking" keeps walking. Almost all design schools are more or less happy with the great attention that the talk about design thinking brings to them. Some, however, will concede that it may actually be hight time to avoid being caught in this conversation.
What I am reallty tired about is the portray of design thinking as a "simple" way to use recipes (empathize, prototype, iterate, implement). Nothing is further away from a design attitude. And nothing less suitable for the complicated type of problems where “design thinkers” are invited to join and try a solution.
Indeed, design is being used to tackle increasingly complicated problems. It is mentioned as a silver bullet in any discussion about "wicked problems": global warming, poverty, pollution, etc. Don't get me wrong, designers think and are knowledgeable of methods that are very helpful at this.
Those are problems and systems that actively involve the "earlier known as users" with decision-making within a web of relationships between systems at many levels. These are probems that rely on some type of social change, a change in social organization. The so-called “social innovation” (another buzzword rapidly surpassing simple "innovation") requires designing for this level of complexity. Design thinking may amount here to the creation of situations and processes that enable users to design their own solutions, including organizational and social ones. In this, one can see the emergence of a certain reflexivity: you let people learn to design and they are both part of the problem and the solution. It is in these situations where the prêt-à-porter design thinking that is advertised and promoted everywhere falls short. The best designers recognize that their role has changed. Some of them address new challenges rom the service design perspective applied to public situations.
That’s why I'm interested Humantific methods for social change. They insist a lot in the role of language and conversation to articulate real change in heterogeneous groups of people. For example, a group of citizens in a city, people that are not constrained by the same type of norms and requirements as employees and costumers of companies... which makes the problem even more open.
Designing the conversation
I wondered whether it would be useful for all this to resort to all the accumulated knowledge from traditional cybernetics and its insistence of complexity, multiple levels, feedback, etc. I was thinking about this when I came across the talk of Paul Pangaro at PICNIC. Paul Pangaro was adopting the cybernetics perspective. There is a lot in this video.
Rethinking Design Thinking - Paul Pangaro - PICNIC '10 from PICNIC Festival on Vimeo.
I’d like to remark just three of Pangaro’s comments:
- The conversation as the basis of the design process
- Design the conversation, not the product
- Prototype the solution, not ideas
"Designing the conversation” is basically to set the goals and norms of the process of design. So, you are asking participants to become designers of a process where hey will be a part of it. This is what Pangaro calls “Metadesign” (there are other uses of this same expression within the design community, by the way). I hope it is useful and doesn’t not become another buzzword itself.
Seen in this perspective, IDEO, Tim Brown et al. were able to design a good conversation about their concept of "Design Thinking" and created a solution that worked for their goals.
