Michael Roller

Peter Merholz’s view: Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You

Harvard Business published a nice, if somewhat controversial, article by Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz. His viewpoint challenges the current popularity of “design thinking” and reminds us that each discipline brings value with it’s approach. To throw out other forms of thinking in favor of design’s is limiting. Here’s an excerpt:

Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing “creatives,” “ideating” tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth.

But talking about only “design thinking” and “business thinking” is limiting. Me? My degree is in anthropology. And a not-so-secret truth about “design thinking” is that a big chunk of it is actually “social science thinking.” Design thinkers talk about being “human-centered” and “empathic,” and the tools they use to achieve that are methods borrowed from anthropology and sociology. Believe me, until very recently, they didn’t teach customer research at design schools. In fact, when I began working in this field, the practice of design was remarkably solipsistic — I’d have to harangue designers to care about the person using what we created.

I think that many designers are still solipsistic, although maybe less so than in the past (thanks for the vocabulary lesson). When was the last time you heard “design is a powerful tool; design can completely change the way we look at things”? I recently read Super Crunchers and those same statements, for me, are true for number crunching. Merholz’s point is a good one, which says that design has just as much value as journalism, anthropology, business, and other disciplines (calligraphy?). In my mind, the best people I’ve worked alongside are “integrative thinkers,” sympathetic to the value brought by people from a range of perspectives.

Check out the full article.

Tags: definitions, design thinking, Links

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