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

Verbal Vampirism

The man behind Bored Sketchbooks is a talented and observant graphic designer with an awesome and unusual sense of humor. I appreciate the overlap of good design and a sense of humor and Gabe Shultz often nails this combination. His IDEATRON blog features a section called No: Things That Are Not Good. Check out this post on Verbal Vampirism:

If you say an idea and someone kills it, then resurrects it to serve their own dark purposes a couple of days later, they’re a verbal vampire. Once an idea turns vampiric, there is almost no way to re-kill it. Ironically, vampire ideas are the ONLY ideas that see the light of day.

Because immortality is truly a curse, verbal vampirism = no.

Gabe has been away from his blog working on some other projects, but hopefully he’ll be back soon!

See also: Not Designed By Me

Tags: definitions, designer bias, Links

Industrial Designer’s Dream House

As I’ve been thinking about the right approach for designers to take on styling, this great example of designing for designers came to me. An unnamed industrial designer commissioned Koji Tsutsui Architect & Associates to create a Tokyo home ” in coexistence with the client’s feelings for his life’s work, the industrial design.” It is rumored that the house is either for Oki Sato or Naoto Fukasawa.

The project interests me because it is asks one creative person to create something in the vision of another creative person. The result is a pure, uncompromising vision that is polarizing. I personally think the work is beautiful, but I can sympathize with those who think it would be a cold and lifeless place to live. As an industrial designer, I rarely get the chance to create products for other designers or people who value formal aesthetics as much I do. This is a great example of how client and consultant can create beautiful work when they are share the same vision.

via Core77

Tags: architecture, Links