“Design Thinking Isn’t Dead – It’s More Crucial Than Ever”

Rather than reading design thinking its last rites, Clive Grinyer says businesses should be doubling down on the customer-first approach it promotes.

Every now and then, business magazines, especially Fast Company, announce that design, and especially design thinking, is dead.

In Andrew Thompson and Mark Wilson’s most recent article, they investigate the drop in mentions of design thinking from US employers who are looking for UX, product or graphic designers.

They go on to state that the steps incorporated in the design thinking process are irrelevant – essentially  not any different from a simple hypothesis-and-test scientific model. Worse than that, they claim design thinking has polluted and diluted the value of design.

From a European perspective, the US obsession with – and then rejection of – design thinking is puzzling. The term is not particularly loved, but it has led to a more strategic view of what design is, and that has become more naturally embedded, with great success, in both the commercial and public sectors.

As a young designer, I was all too aware that most of the decisions around the product I was designing had already been made. Usually by people who were looking inward – to the efficiency of their organisation, or the ease of production.

They didn’t know, and in many cases still don’t know, anything about their customers.

They saw, and still see, innovation as jumping onto each new technology wave, without ever asking what problem it was solving.

Design thinking helped me understand how to find about the people I was designing for, see where and how things weren’t working, and develop, prototype and iterate better solutions. It helped me move on from putting lipstick on a pig, move upstream, and show how design can really add value to business. I mean, what’s wrong with that?

Unfortunately, we still live in a world where agile working, measured by the velocity of delivery, and siloed design, is somehow seen as better than understanding the problems you are solving.

The macho, tech-led approach to progress costs us millions in reworking solutions that don’t connect to customers, or their real problems and needs. In the worst cases this causes real damage, as with the initial Medicare roll-out in the US, and the Post Office Horizon scandal here in the UK.

Design thinking ,and methods such as the Design Council Double Diamond, that differ from science in that they search for human insight before they hypothesise, are fundamentally risk-reduction processes.

What the article describes as unwieldly processes are there to check the ridiculous and poorly-articulated assumptions of leaders, managers and designers, and to replace them with insights that identify not just the problems that need to be solved, but also where real customer value and opportunities lie.

When we don’t think about design, we mess up.

Take the “world class” track and trace system, announced by the UK government in response to the Covid pandemic. They believed they had all the right ingredients in place – but they didn’t think to understand who they were designing for.

People thought they were being scammed and those working in the call centres seemed to have limited training and partial, if any, information. The elements of the system were in place, but there was no overall system design. Or rather there was design – there is never no design – just unconscious and accidental. It cost them £36 billion to fail spectacularly.

On the other hand, global companies such as Bosch have integrated design thinking into their corporate strategy. Its approach is to design for AI as a customer benefit, design for inclusivity and accessibility, design new service models for a more sustainable world, and use service design thinking to understand customer journeys, as well as the product. They apply design excellence to them both.

Unfortunately, many businesses still compartmentalise design as an end-of-the-process activity to make previous decisions palatable.

Companies cut design first in hard times, and jettison the very talent that will produce future success. And the corporate world has been slow to see the strategic value of design.

Businesses liked the fad of design thinking as it seemed cool, but great design thinking leads to great design outputs, not replace them.

We are seeing design more alive than ever as it morphs into new areas beyond the screen, or the product, and finds the levers for change in business, policy making, social impact and humanising technology.

In my book I call it Redesigning Thinking, helping everyone embrace the desire to find the problem before we create meaningless solutions without insight or with data-free hunches.

Now more than ever, business needs to redesign its thinking, embrace a younger, purpose-led generation of smart and creative people to make better decisions, and work with brilliant young designers to deliver real, future-proofed and sustainable value.

Design, and the methods of design, applied beyond the object or interface, is very much alive. It is business that is at risk of not rising to the challenges, both now and in the future.

Source: Design Week