Blogless

Kevin McCullagh has a really nice writeup of his thoughts on the recent The Big Rethink conference at Core77. Among many fine reflections on the profession, one thread of his discussion should be of particular interest to the BlogLESS crowd.

The Problem

Conference chair Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran “began by throwing down a hefty gauntlet to design. He explained that the world faces crises on many different levels, not only economic and environmental: politicians and corporate leaders are also experiencing a profound crisis of trust and legitimacy. This, in turn, has triggered a loss of confidence in the old ways of doing things and has led business and governments to cast around for new ideas. As design thinking is offering itself up as a process to solve many of these problems, what has it got to offer? Gulp!”

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, via.

What is Design Thinking?

McCullagh’s worry, and a fair one at that, is that it’s not really altogether too clear just what ‘design thinking’ is supposed to mean. The only strong confluence of opinion among design thinking’s proponents, MuCullagh notes, is that they share the “ambition for design to play a more strategic role in the world than ‘making pretty,’” and, he quips, “Who could argue with that?”

So, on pain of being just hopelessly vague and agreeable, it’s worth wondering if there’s a more substantive way of talking about the kind of thinking that designers do, insofar as that kind of thinking is of some unique interest. MuCullagh’s own observation is that ‘design thinking’ is not so much a change in the practice of design as it is a change in the packaging of that practice. Nicely, he suggests, “what’s notable about the design thinking debate is not so much how design practice has changed, but rather how the audience for design has changed and raised its expectations.”

But, of course, a substantial change of expectation for designers in general means quite a lot for the design profession. Especially when the matters at hand are trust and legitimacy. That’s good reason for designers to take ethics very seriously. Bigger challenges are in the mail, and those bigger challenges mean scarier problems. Thinking about ethics is a way to equip yourself for the kind of projects that will be expected of you, should you do well in the profession of design.

Conference scribing, via.

Design Thinking and Philosophy

The problem is that designers may not be as up to the challenge as they should be. MuCullagh writes:

The ideal of design thinking as laid out by Roger Martin, is to ‘balance [left brain] analytical mastery and [right brain] intuitive originality in dynamic interplay’….it has to be said that analytical thinking is not typically a designers’ strong point.

The problem, McCullagh concludes, is that “designers are actually not great exemplars of the balanced thinking that design thinking takes its name from,” and so designers have much to learn from people who are good at analytical reasoning. McCullagh calls them “left-brain types”. When the issue is ethics, I call them philosophers.