The Design Thinking Movement and the designing of Lifeworlds
By Jeffrey Chan
The Design Tsunami
If you have been reading (and seeing) more of the word ‘design’ in recent years, you are not alone. Corporations, companies and even governments around the world are adopting ‘design’ more than ever, finding new homes for this word in old places. Once found only in the technical language of industrial, engineering, graphic, environmental and fashion design, today design has been normalized. Now, careful real estate agents would go to great lengths to tell you who had designed your bathroom seat. Now, school children are able to distinguish between ‘better’ and ‘worse’ cellphone designs. Now, even your experience before a bank-teller or at a Cineplex was likely designed. Confronting the mass normalization of design, one wonders what has not been designed.
The funny thing is that nobody quite knows exactly when the recent buzz surrounding ‘design’ came about. If one is to survey catalogues and media closely associated to what is labeled ‘design’ over a thirty years period following the intense commoditization of design—in fashion, product, graphic, and architecture—the ebb and flow of design has followed economic boom and bust cycle rather closely. For example, there was a proliferation of design before the OPEC oil crisis in the early 70s, and then during the yuppies excess of the 80s before the ‘87 crash. Following this line of thought, the resurgence of design in recent years might have something to do with our own recent Gilded Age.
However, one would imagine that the recent market crash that has brought an end to our own Gilded Age, leading to what is now commonly dubbed as the ‘Great Recession’, had decimated design. Surely enough, sectors traditionally associated with design were gravely affected. But design as a cultural force continues to prevail. Why is this so?
On this question several factors come to mind. First, globalization has radically transformed design and the design practice (1). While a few important markets have been critically affected by the unprecedented economic downturn, many emerging markets continue to do well. Second, design has been diversifying from its traditional artifactual forms into semantics, interactions, systems and networks (2). Increasingly, design operates in the semantic space of artifacts and interactions that are to some extent, free from the constraints of the physical economy. And third, design is increasingly practiced and operationalized by individuals and groups that are traditionally not directly connected to design. In other words, the universe of design is expanding (3).
Indeed, what is most intriguing about the recent design tsunami is how ‘design’ has been expansively conjugated and signified in different ways—for example, such as ‘service design’, ‘experiential design’, ‘organizational design’, ‘design for innovation’, and ‘design thinking’ by individuals who are rarely card-carrying professional designers but public administrators, business gurus, anthropologists, sociologists, managers, educators and medical practitioners.
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The Design Thinking Movement
Tim Brown of IDEO is right to say that there is design thinking (i.e., the way a designer thinks) and then there is design thinking (4). The former is the way card-carrying design professionals think. It is also an academic phrase referring to the study of a designer’s reasoning process (5). But the latter is what I would further call the design thinking movement. Powering the expansive presence of design in language, artifacts, services and systems today, the design thinking movement is orchestrating the designing of our lifeworlds.
The design thinking movement differs from design thinking proper in three broad ways. First as mentioned, the design thinking movement comprises of many different individuals and groups whom we are unlikely to label as card-carrying designers. Second, the design thinking movement is very likely to concede to a design process that is much more participatory, team-oriented and empirically driven rather than an individuated, cognitive and intuitive process that (traditional) design thinking is more likely to admit. And third, general media often credits the design thinking movement as the vital link between successful companies and their product offerings, for example, in Apple or OXO. In contradistinction, design thinking remains as a small but interdisciplinary academic field studying how designers think (i.e., how the designer reasons).
Differences aside, the intriguing question has always been whether the design thinking movement could exist independently without the academic field of design thinking altogether. As far as cross-acknowledgment goes, except for a few references to design thinking—and recurring favorites have always been Horst Rittel’s “wicked problems” and Herbert Simon’s concept of design—key publications rarely acknowledge the presence of this field. It is as though there were two wedding parties going on in parallel with little interaction between them. This may be because the design thinking movement has been preponderantly carried out in the management field. This is however ironic because the idea of ‘wicked problems’, a familiar concept recurring in the design thinking movement (6), was first invoked by C.W. Churchman in the school of business administration at Berkeley in 1967 (7).
Nonetheless, it is still never easy to find out exactly when the design thinking movement started, though it is easier to conjecture on where and why it began. If we trace the dates of major publications and observe the career trajectory of key exponents in the design thinking movement, the contemporary design thinking movement started in earnest not long after the dot-com bust.
For many, the dot-com era conjured up images of 30 year olds playing ping-pong at 10am, and a flexible work ethic replacing the rigid time-card. In this work culture, creativity was key, and so was one’s independence and drive to excel. Because many of the dot-coms were also start-up companies, work culture was fluid and improvisational; then, the self-design of one’s work-tasks and the motivation to pursue productive new leads was more important than adhering to executive orders.
While many of these new work cultures vanished along with the dot-com bust, what remained as a legacy, and continues to charm and seduce, is the idea of a creative work culture capable of transforming (good) ideas into lots of cash and jobs.
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Explaining the Genesis of the Design Thinking Movement
Even so, the legacy of a creative work culture does not adequately explain the rise of the design thinking movement today. To furnish an adequate explanation, we need to further consider the convergence of three ideas: (a) the conjoint doctrines of the post-industrial society and of the (new) creative economy; (b) the historic relationship between industries and (industrial) designers and advertisers in the United States; and (c) the resurgence of the innovation paradigm.
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The doctrine of the post-industrial society and the doctrine of the creative economy are two distinct though closely related doctrines. While the former doctrine is a cultural doctrine suggesting the transformation of society from one producing goods to one providing and inventing (new) services, the latter doctrine is an economic roadmap suggesting that it is possible to foster an economy centered around transforming innovative ideas into cash and jobs. While each of these doctrines diverges in their thesis, both converge on the radical idea that it is possible to drive economic development and prosperity through ideas rather than goods.
This radical idea would not have come to pass if not for the fact that sometime during the last thirty years, it has become the norm to move production, especially production of goods in the lower-value strata, from major centers of capital concentration in the world to peripheral zones where labor was both abundant and cheap. This phenomenon of outsourcing, doubtlessly exacerbated by an intense deregulatory wave initiated in the 1980s, increasingly hollowed out such centers. Consequentially, such centers were burdened to emphasize management, innovation, service and design over manufacturing and the production of goods. In turn, this transformation set the stage for the creative economy—an economy centered on creating (profitable) ideas and services rather than actual goods for trade; an economy weaned on the creative cerebral rather than the production muscle power. In the midst of all these, the seeds of the future design thinking movement were extant but remained dormant within the ranks of advertising and industrial design industries.
Even so, the essence of the design thinking movement has existed for a long time between American industries and the American advertisers and (industrial) designers. One classic example refers to the fierce competition between Alfred Sloan of GM and Henry Ford of Ford Motor Company in the early but saturated automobile market (8). To expand his market share, Sloan created seductive styling and colors with the help of designers and marketed them with the help of creative advertisers. While Ford provided quality engineering and low prices for his stodgy but well-built Model T, Ford’s cars were no match for GM’s cars not only on the basis of styling and colors, but also because GM cars also happened to be appealing for the lady-driver (i.e., no hand-cranking required). The rest as we know is history (or at least up till before the recent debacle).
And long before the creative economy, industrial designers discovered research methods that could effectively allowed them to innovate (9, 10). In essence, these methods served a twofold function. One, these methods were capable of providing new user data for the designer such that his design increasingly approximated optimality for the user. And two, the constant flow of such data provided ample opportunities for successive iterations of the designer’s design prototype towards that optimal solution. The ideas of getting to know your users and prototyping are therefore hardly new. In the quest for an optimal solution, the industrial designer has to oversee and balance all of the following criteria, namely performance, merchandising, function, ergonomics, innovation and aesthetics appeal just to name a few. This provided the industrial designer with a perspective to complexity that is rather dissimilar to other fields of design. For these reasons, the design thinking movement today shares a lineage more in line with the culture of industrial design in America rather than say, with fashion or architectural design where in comparison, the designer’s artistic vision is of greater paramount.
On this, it is possible to further argue that the design thinking movement today is quintessentially an American innovation. Historically, design thinking took a different form in Europe with the probable exception of Peter Behrens who worked for AEG in Germany. In Europe, design thinking took on a much more polemical role in critiquing material production as well as trying to reconcile the role of the artists with the new techniques of modern industrialization (11). And while national institution that promoted design did exist as early as 1944 in the UK, as I shall discussed later, such an institution was in essence closer to a trade board rather than a school of thought for design. The historic differences underlying the design thinking movement between the two continents persist to the present day, where for example in Italy, (industrial) design is very often performed by architects and the entrepreneurs themselves, and where there is no tradition of performing market-research or user-needs studies before making a design offering in the market (12).
Over this long corporate partnership between industries and designers, corporate executives gradually became aware that there was in fact a close compatibility between the innovative methods practiced by the designers and the innovation that is obligated by the ever shortening of product life-cycle in modern production. This requirement (and desire) for innovation in the American society was noted long before outsourcing or psychological obsolescence became the norm (13, 14).
Truly, the recent drive for innovation was rooted in the need to expand the supply and variety of goods made possible by new technologies and labor relationships on one hand, and on the other hand, obligated by the strategic shift to compete on the distinguishing mark of design. In other words, in a world saturated with a greater variety of goods all imbued with a drastic reduction in shelf life, corporate executives realized that it is much more strategic to differentiate and to compete through incessant design. But because consumers today are also much more discerning than before, the design of products and services must therefore be equally discerning and accurately targeted to the pluralistic needs and wants of consumers. For this reason, the design thinking movement has also evolved to encompass a pluralistic class of ‘designer-thinkers’ from a variety of disciplines offering a multitude of insights for design—anthropology, sociology, psychology, management, engineering and design—all capable of observing and collecting insights through their own unique vantage point. Christened as the new advisers in the courts of corporate suites and media halls, ‘design thinkers’ quickly turned into the vanguard of strategy and innovation for many design-centered corporations.
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The Institutional Demand for Design Thinking
The success of the design thinking movement would have gone unnoticed except for the continuous coverage by notable media such as the New York Times, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Wallpaper and Monocle over the last decade. In many cases, new branches, sub-sections and dedicated spokespersons emerged to closely monitor trends in the design culture and to interpret these trends for the layperson interested in design. By accentuating the multiple roles of design in successful product offerings, such media reports inadvertently also reaffirmed the vital importance of the design thinking movement to the public. There is after all, a direct correlation between the public’s interest on design and the stock prices of companies creating successful products. And just going by the financial reports of luxury consortium such as LVMH whose marketing thrust remains predominantly in design, consumers in the last decade, likely boosted by high earnings in the stock market, were generally more willing to spend on a greater variety of designed goods compared to any other periods in modern history. For many, the design thinking movement has become a positive, self-reinforcing cycle of converting design innovation into increased corporate earnings.
This design thinking movement is however not a phenomenon only confined to the private sector. In recent years, three institutional entities are playing greater roles in the propagation of the design thinking movement globally. These institutional entities are governments, NGOs and the universities.
However, the marriage between institutions and design is hardly new. Insofar as the government is concerned, the earliest example must be the Council of Industrial Design, or what is known as the Design Council (UK) today. Started in 1944 by the government to harness the potential of design for wartime Britain, it was perhaps the earliest case where institutional powers directly and explicitly connected design to some notion of the public interest. And in 1953, the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, was set up as part of the American program for the postwar reconstruction of Germany (15). Initially conceived as a school of social research and political science, it subsequently turned into a school of design. Even so, the subsequent curriculum offered in HfG Ulm, though in design, was heavily laced with the component of social research and science. HfG Ulm was noted for its work with industrial bodies such as Braun and Lufthansa, training a few generations of designers capable and comfortable in navigating the interdisciplinary fields of social research, management and design.
Hence, the recent drive towards national institutions whose sole organizational mission is to promote and coordinate design activity—such as the Design Council (UK), the DINZ (Design Institute, New Zealand) and DesignSingapore (Singapore)—is steeped in the long history between governments and design. While each of these institutional units has different contextual duties and mission, all of them converge on the task of promoting design activity, which inevitably also amplifies the design thinking movement today in no small ways. Whether it is actively promoting a culture for design, or an awareness to design or championing design learning, such institutional units for design are also intellectual base-camp for the global circuit of key thinkers, educators and consultants in the design thinking movement. Importantly, these institutional units also advise their respective governments in charting out a roadmap for a creative economy through design.
Another institutional group that has gradually seen the workings of the design thinking movement is the NGOs. It is suggested that the delivery of aid and support by NGOs from a top-down position has not been effective (16). This is because without understanding the actual needs and grounds for aid delivery, effectiveness for many NGOs has been compromised. In recent years, key consultants from the design thinking movement have been commissioned to rethink and reinvent the organizational structure and output of these NGOs (17). Departing from the analytical, top-down approach favored by a past generation of NGOs, the newly designed NGOs tend to favor a bottom-up approach featuring self-empowerment and self-help made possible by the signature methods of ethnographic observation and creative reimagination practiced within the ranks of the design thinking movement.
Finally, the last institutional group that has embraced and played a role in the propagation of the design thinking movement is the university. Consistent to Herbert Simon’s critique made years ago, many universities have found the idea of design uneasy (18). First, design lacked the intellectual rigor required by the natural and social sciences. Second, design is neither a true academic subject defined by core textbooks nor one where intellectual demarcations could be used to differentiate it from other subjects. Worse, design is neither fully comfortable in the humanities nor within the social science. In short, there is no place for design in the university.
It is therefore not surprising to see design appearing as independent units within established universities, for example the Stanford d-school or the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University. And to be precise, these are not design schools, as reputable design schools such as Pratt, Parsons, Otis or RISD are. Instead, these are schools of design thinking. Students of these new schools of design thinking do not graduate with a professional degree in design. Rather, they graduate with traditional disciplinary degrees with (accredited) emphasis in design. Similarly, these are also not schools of design management, where increasingly, it has become the norm to teach design and management hand-in-hand in design specific programs (i.e., ‘the MFA is the new MBA’, or so the mantra goes).
How can we further characterize such schools of design thinking? These can be said to be schools championing the confluence of many disciplines working together on challenging problems to realize concrete and human-centered solutions. Realizing that real-world problems are complex and ‘wicked’ (19, 20) and therefore less amenable to be solved through the sequestered silos of the traditional university knowledge structure, schools of design thinking exhorts their students to practice system rather than disciplinary thinking by marrying rigorous empiricism, innovative imagination and aesthetic appeal in the search for design solutions.
For this reason, such schools draw much more from the interdisciplinary principles underpinning the design thinking movement rather than from the craft-oriented leanings of traditional schools of design. Given that these schools of design thinking appeared only recently, it is still too early to draw any further conclusion. However one thing is almost certain: that the design thinking movement will continue to evolve because of these schools.
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Where is the Design Thinking Movement Heading?
But where is the design thinking movement heading? If it is in fact a movement as I argue, how will it further evolve? And will it expire eventually—like all movements do?
There is anecdotal evidence indicating that the design thinking movement—at least as it is being practiced today in the corporate context—is evolving. There are sound reasons to support this view. Firstly, corporate cutbacks have greatly pruned the scale and reach of the design thinking movement. Although still necessary, there is an enormous—if unprecedented—pressure to consolidate operations in the corporate sector today. Inadvertently, this has led to a vast contraction in the market for design thinking services. Secondly, the growing momentum of the sustainability movement is directing the design thinking movement towards more sustainable goals, behaviors and systems (21).
Here, it may be useful to propose a further question: to what extent has the design thinking movement—like all productive social movements—contributed to the public interest? All those new product editorials and pictures of lavish architecture, and the explosive growth of media coverage on design related issues have indeed contributed to the growth of public consciousness and awareness on design. But I argue that the design thinking movement has so far missed its central mission: to promote the active deliberation of design in everyday life.
To explain this, I will have to make two distinctions. First, thinking is different from thought, which is the product of thinking. Second, thinking is different from ideas, which is a fixation of thought. Truly, thinking is the ongoing, active flow of furthering thoughts and questioning extant ideas. And so while the design thinking movement has richly contributed to the proliferation of design thoughts and ideas with ever newer products and better services, it has not visibly improved the active deliberation of design in everyday life.
But what do I mean by the ‘active deliberation of design in everyday life’? By this I mean the following: for everyone who is capable and willing to be informed in design matters to question design motives, artifacts, policies, systems and their corresponding consequences. In other words, the active deliberation of design in everyday life ought to include the following few basic, design-oriented questions: (i) Who designed this artifact, service, policy, or system? (ii) What is his or her or their intentions in this design? (iii) To what extent are these intentions justified? (iv) What are the consequences of this design and are there any (suspected) unanticipated consequences? (v) What are the methods used in attaining the design goal? (vi) Are these methods justified, ethical and sustainable? (vii) Can we live with the consequences of this design and would these consequences affect future generations adversely? (viii) Are there alternatives to what is being proposed? And finally, (ix) Given the answers to the above questions, what empowers my consent or dissent to this design?
We catch a glimpse of this practice in a few debates on nuclear energy, where clearly, every informed citizen should be aware of the material and policy designs—and indeed the future repercussions—behind nuclear energy before they support or reject it. Similarly, a snippet of this practice could be caught in the different discourses that emerged on the design of bailout packages and the various economic stimulus policies. In the same way, every product, service, system or network being designed today should be subjected to these design-oriented questions for the sole reason of safeguarding the public interest tomorrow.
This then, ought to be the central mission of the design thinking movement—the public thinking on matters of design.
Otl Aicher, the co-founder of HfG Ulm and an early dissident during the Nazi regime, knew this mission of design thinking well. In one of his most memorable essays, ‘the world as design’, he wrote,
‘the world in which we live is the world we made…
making is an activity for which someone is responsible, in which someone is involved with concept, design, execution and checking…
in design, man takes his own development in hand. for human beings, development is no longer nature, but self-development…in design man becomes what he is. animals have language and perception as well. but they do not design.’ (22)
‘the world in which we live is the world we made’: it is too important to leave the active deliberation of design in everyday life beyond the capable and able reach of the design thinking movement.
References and Notes:
1. Bruce Mau. (2004). Massive Change.
2. Klaus Krippendorff. (2005). The Semantic Turn.
3. The ‘universe of design’ was a phrase used by Horst Rittel. It is also the title of a new book by Jean-Pierre Protzen and Dave Harris (2010).
4. Tim Brown. (2009). Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.
5. Peter Rowe. (1991). Design Thinking.
6. Roger Martin. (2009). The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. See also, John Kao. (2007). Innovation Nation.
7. C.W. Churchman. (1967). Guest Editorial, Management Science.
8. Giles Slade. (2007). Made to Break.
9. Henry Dreyfuss. (2003). Designing for People.
10. C.W. Mills. (1963). Man in the Middle: The Designer.
11. Ulrich Conrads. (1997). Programs and manifestoes on 20th-century architecture.
12. Roberto Verganti. (2009). Design-driven Innovation.
13. Donald Schön. (1971). Beyond the Stable State.
14. John Gardner. (1981). Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society. Beyond these mid-20th century references, it should be noted that Alexis de Tocqueville was probably the first who observed this characteristic.
15. Kenneth Frampton. (1974). Apropos Ulm: Curriculum and Critical Theory.
16. Willam Easterly. (2007). The White Man’s Burden.
17. Tim Brown, (2009).
18. Herbert Simon. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial.
19. Donald Schön. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner.
20. Horst Rittel & Melvin Webber. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning.
21. Tim Brown, (2009). Brown’s account of the Oral-B toothbrush washing up the shore unchanged ought to be retold in every design classroom.
22. Otl Aicher. (1994). the world as design.
