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Well, you can't feel but admiration for someone who has the courage to take design thinking head on by describing it as "naive, at best" (and yes, the author refers to the likes of Bruce Nussbaum, David Kelley, Hillary Cottam, Charles Leadbeater, the World Economic Forum, and IDEO). Here are a few lines:
"Design metaphors obscure the ideological--and political--decisions involved in tackling societal issues. [...] This generation's design movement is built less on a coherent set of ideas than a simple, can-do attitude. [...] When it comes to the nastier socioeconomic and environmental corollaries of growth, everything is going to be just fine. No need to reevaluate or contest the road to economic development. When we run into "problems," we'll simply innovate our way out of them."
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Comments
"A common wisdom today dictates that effective change isn't about reforming public attitudes, but discovering practical, realistic fixes."
This assumption is incorrect. Good design does both -- provides practical solutions and inspires positive value shifts.
"Good design" does nothing of the kind, depending on how you define good design. I would say that design has the power to influence attitudes. Whether that's positive or not is largely an open question. The original disposable diaper was an amazing design, but has it ultimately let to positive or negative value change?
Design thinking by itself is not enough, particularly when problems are ambiguously framed as they often are for our biggest social issues. It's about time someone with a skeptical eye from outside the field surveyed the debate.
Oh the arrogance of politics invading Design . Stop the high horse and get back to work or you will destroy design like it happened in my country.
It was obvious to me that the person who wrote this didn't know what she was talking about, so I wasn't suprised to see that she studies politics.
To me, this assumption is where she goes wrong: "They accept the given problem, the specs and the budget, and get the job done."
Isn't NOT accepting the given problem what "design thinking" is all about?
As interesting this article might appear� It's principal argument seems to be that design is not pragmatic enough.
If that's enough to say that design thinking is naive, at best, then it is also enough to say that Politic today is pragmatic, at best.
It is clearly relevant that the pragmatic ways of thinking are generally associated with anti-progressivism, anti-idealism and most of all anti-creative thinking.
There is one thing that design should be aware of thought: It is clearly dangerous to promote a way of thinking as the solution for The Problems of The World. Because design might also be The Cause of many problems if it is not used adequately!
Louis D
NB: Sorry for my bad English, I'm French, at best !!!
To my colleagues: instead of hearing what problems design can solve or help solve (all of them, apparently), is any designer brave enough to say what design -cannot- do, and thus take a more mature responsibility for our actual abilities? Anyway, a worthy article, even if you do not agree with it.