Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle

Do you know what design thinking is?

Your answer to that question will depend largely on where you sit. Design thinking is often centrally associated with the fabled design and consulting firm IDEO, most famous for crafting Apple’s first mouse and the look of the Palm V personal digital assistant. But in recent years, it is Stanford University’s design school (or “d.school” — their asinine punctuation, not mine) that has become most associated with design thinking. IDEO will charge you $399 for a self-paced, video-based design-thinking course, “Insights for Innovation.” Stanford will charge you $12,600 for a four-day “Design Thinking Bootcamp” called, likewise, “From Insights to Innovation.” Clearly, there’s money to be made from design thinking.

If you’re confused, you’re not alone. Confusion is a common reaction to a “movement” that’s little more than floating balloons of jargon. If design thinking (for short, let’s call it the DTs) merely involved bilking some deluded would-be entrepreneurs, well — no harm no foul. The problem is that faddists and cult-followers are pushing the DTs as a reform for all of higher education. In the last couple of years, The Chronicle has published articles with titles like “Can Design Thinking Redesign Higher Ed?” and “Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?” The only reasonable answer to these questions is “Oh hell no.”

Both articles feature DT enthusiasts taking pilgrimages to Stanford’s d.school. In “Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?” Peter N. Miller, a professor of history and dean at Bard Graduate Center, explains the d.school’s various origins. First, there is the product-design program in Stanford’s engineering school. Second, there is the Esalen Institute, a retreat center in Big Sur and home to the Human Potential Movement and other New Age nonsense. Stanford community members started hanging out there in the 1960s, where they picked up terms like “creativity” and “empathy.” Finally, there is the Stanford design alum David Kelly, who got deeply into the empathy thing and started IDEO in 1978.

After founding the company, Kelly was an occasional instructor at Stanford. In 2005, he approached the software billionaire and IDEO fan-client Hasso Plattner, with, as Miller writes, “the idea of creating a home for design thinking.” Plattner donated $35 million, inaugurating the d.school, or what you might call “IDEO.edu.”

Kelly got the ear of Stanford’s then-president, the computer scientist John L. Hennessy, who now thinks that undergraduate education should be reformed around a “core” of design thinking. For d.schoolers, design thinking is the key to education’s future: It “fosters creative confidence and pushes students beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines.” It equips students “with a methodology for producing reliably innovative results in any field.” It’s the general system for change-agent genius we’ve all been waiting for.

Despite his enthusiasm, Miller struggles to define design thinking. “It’s an approach to problem-solving based on a few easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious: ‘Show Don’t Tell,’ ‘Focus on Human Values,’ ‘Craft Clarity,’ ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ ‘Mindful of Process,’ ‘Bias Toward Action,’ and ‘Radical Collaboration.’” He explains further that these seven points can be reduced to what are known as the five “modes": “Empathize,” “Define,” “Ideate,” “Prototype,” and “Test.” He seems particularly impressed with “Empathize": “Human-centered design redescribes the classical aim of education as the care and tending of the soul.”

Beautiful. Compelling. But what does it mean? According to the d.school’s An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE, “The Empathize Mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge.” We can dress things up with language about the “soul,” but this is Business 101: Listen to your client and find out what he or she wants.

Miller calls the Empathize Mode “ethnography,” which is uncharitable  to cultural anthropologists who spend their entire lives learning how to observe other people. Few anthropologists would sign on to the idea that amateurs at a d.school boot camp strolling around Stanford and gawking at strangers constitutes “ethnography.” The Empathize Mode of design thinking is roughly as ethnographic as a marketing focus group or a crew of consultants trying to suss out their clients’ desires.

Design thinking, in other words, is just a fancy way of talking about consulting. What Miller, Kelly, and Hennessy are asking us to imagine is that design consulting is a model for retooling all of education. They believe that we should use design thinking to reform education by treating students as clients. And they assert that design thinking should be a central part of what students learn, a lens through which graduates come to approach social reality. In other words, we should view all of society as if we are in the design-consulting business.

Fawningly, Miller observes that the d.school’s courses are “popular” and often “oversubscribed.” “These enrollment figures suggest that whatever it is the d.school is doing, it’s working.” One social innovator Miller might look into is a guy named Jim Jones, who also had many enthusiastic followers.

If the DTs were so terrific, you’d expect designers to approve. But often enough the opposite is true. According to the graphic designer Natasha Jen, design thinking is largely a meaningless buzzword, an instance of what André Spicer, a professor of organizational behavior at the City University of London, calls “business bullshit” — “as if anyone who enrolled in these programs can become a designer and think like a designer and work like a designer.” Its advocates tout its greatness but, Jen says, have nothing to show for it.

In an informal survey I conducted with people who either teach at or were trained at top art, architecture, and design schools in the United States, most respondents said that they and their colleagues do not use the term design thinking. Most of those pushing the DTs in higher education are at second- and third-tier universities and, ironically, aren’t so much innovating as merely emulating Stanford’s example. In a few cases, respondents said they did know a colleague or two who said “design thinking” frequently, but always in order to increase their turf within the university or to extract resources from college administrators willing to throw money at anything that smacks of “innovation.”

Moreover, those working in art, architecture, and design schools tend to be quite critical of existing DT programs. According to them, some schools are creating design-thinking tracks for unpromising students unable to hack it in traditional architecture or design programs — DT as “design lite.” The individuals I talked to also had strong reservations about the products coming out of design-thinking classes. A traditional project in DT classes involves undergraduate students leading “multidisciplinary” or “transdisciplinary” teams drawing on faculty expertise around campus to solve some problem of interest to the students. The students don’t develop any specific expertise, however, and the projects often take the form, as one person put it, of “kids trying to save the world.” Of a typical DT project, one architecture professor said, “I couldn’t critique it as design because there was nothing to it as design. So what’s left? Is good will enough?”

Others suggested that design thinking gives students an unrealistic idea of design and the work that goes into creating positive change. Upending that old dictum “knowledge is power,” design thinkers give their students power without knowledge, “creative confidence” without actual capabilities. This situation often leads to a significant mismatch between designers’ visions — “empathy” notwithstanding — and users’ actual needs. Perhaps the most famous example is the PlayPump, a piece of merry-go-round equipment that would pump water when children used it. Designers envisioned the PlayPump providing water to thousands of African communities. Only the kids did not play with the merry-go-rounds as expected, and women found the toys harder to use than old hand pumps.

On OpenIDEO, a webpage intended by Tom Hulme of IDEO’s London office to “invite everybody into everything,” community users were enthusiastic about the PlayPump even a year after it had been debunked — which suggests that inviting everyone to participate gets you people who don’t do research.

Thom Moran, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, told me that design thinking brought “a whole set of values about what design’s supposed to look like,” including the unfortunate idea that everything is supposed to be “fun” and “play.” “The disappointing part for me is that I really do believe that architecture, art, and design should be thought of as being a part of the liberal arts,” he said. “They provide a unique skill set for looking at and engaging the world, and being critical of it.” Like others I talked to, Moran sees little critical thought in design thinking, which, he said, “really belongs in business schools, where they teach marketing.”

There was, of course, a lot of actual innovation before World War II, but use of the word “innovation” only began rising after 1945, with the steepest increases in the 1960s and the 1990s. Since then, innovation-speak has grown into an ever-proliferating variety of newspeak, Silicon Valley division. Its lexicon includes terms like “disruption,” “angel investors,” “thought leaders,” “change agents,” “incubators,” “pivot,” “lean,” and “agile,” not to mention such dead or dying jargon as “killer app” and “Big Data.”

Innovation-speak is meant to compensate for a dearth of actual innovation. By some measures, truly deep technological change with a corresponding increase in economic productivity slowed down around 1970, but the era of high innovation-speak began later. Since 1980 or so, we have reformed many core cultural institutions in innovation’s name. Universities are perhaps the most deeply affected. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, for instance, enabled researchers to patent inventions that had been supported through federal funding, something that was previously illegal. Since that time, research has increasingly gone into the patentable and profitable. Professors are encouraged to view themselves as entrepreneurs while universities amass portfolios of intellectual property.

Universities have cast themselves as engines of innovation, and innovation-speak has traveled from campus to campus, something John P. Leary, an associate professor of English at Wayne State University, has examined beautifully. This kind of me-too-ism gets you the Stevens Institute of Technology trademarking “The Innovation University”; Texas Tech’s College of Arts and Sciences declaring “We Build Innovators”; and the University of Pennsylvania’s pathetic Pennovation Works (“Where Ideas Go to Work”). Those enamored of such language argue that higher education is in some kind of crisis and must be totally remade. They don’t mean the real crises — ballooning student debt and exploding rates of poverty-wage adjunct labor. Rather, they’re worried that “education hasn’t changed in a hundred years” — like it’s an outdated taxi system in need of Uber.

This manufactured general perception of “crisis” creates opportunities for disruption from above and below. From above, university presidents and provosts introduce new initiatives, funding streams, and incentives to encourage, or even force, faculty to model themselves on the current image of “innovation.” From below, the perception of crisis provides openings for faculty members to create new programs, centers, institutes, and other initiatives that promise to transform students into little “innovators” and “entrepreneurs.” Because STEM is the dominant model of innovation in universities, other disciplines have had to contort themselves to fit. Artists raised their hands and started talking about STEAM: “Look, we can commodify things too!”

Design thinking’s roots in consulting are instructive. As Margaret Brindle and Peter Stearns explain in Facing Up to Management Faddism: A New Look at an Old Force, fads often enter organizations from outside in moments of perceived crisis. Fads are useful: They assuage leaders’ worries by offering some novelty that promises to solve their problems. They legitimate the organization by giving it a chance to show that it can keep up with all the new, cool stuff out there. And they enable leaders to show that they are doing something.

The Oxford business historian Christopher McKenna has argued that the rise of management consultancy depended on the carefully produced impression that consultants had access to esoteric “systems” of thought. As a tool for hucksterism, such spurious systematicity is precisely what makes the DTs attractive. Design thinkers use scientific-sounding jargon, like the “five modes,” to push the idea that they have some special technique.

Here are the design-thinking “modes” juxtaposed with some rules I was taught in a freshman writing class in 1998:

Empathize Mode: Consider Your Audience

Define Mode: Pick a Clearly-Defined Topic, Neither Too Broad, Nor Too Narrow

Ideate Mode: Think

Prototype Mode: Write Your Thoughts Down

Test Mode: Give What You’ve Written to Someone You Trust to Read It and Tell You if It Sucks

When you contemplate writing and many other activities, you realize there is nothing new about design thinking. It is common sense tarted up in mumbo jumbo. It is common sense tarted up … by design.

The deeper problem is that design thinkers offer a seriously skewed picture of design’s role in innovation. Design-thinking types tend to worship Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, who deeply influenced the look and feel of that company’s most famous products. As writers like Patrick McCray and Mariana Mazzucato have described, however, the technologies undergirding the iPhone weren’t created at Apple but elsewhere — in fact, often through federally funded research. Design thinking isn’t focused on generating these kinds of fundamental technological transformations; it’s centered on repackaging existing technologies behind slick interfaces. It’s the annual model change of some consumer electronics. It’s iCrap.

The picture gets even worse when you compare design thinking’s “social innovation” with movements that led to deep and abiding social change. How did Rosa Parks, Dorothy Height, or Martin Luther King Jr. ever manage to be so successful without the Ideate Mode hexagon? Thank heaven they didn’t have to wait for the founding of IDEO to get going. Design thinkers dream lubricated dreams of “social innovation” free of politics and struggle.

In the end, design thinking is not about design. It’s not about the liberal arts. It’s not about innovation in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not about “social innovation” if that means significant social change. It’s about commercialization. It’s about making education a superficial form of business training.

A couple of years ago, I saw a presentation from a group known as the University Innovation Fellows at a conference in Washington, D.C. It was one of the weirder and more disturbing things I have ever witnessed in an academic setting.

The UIF was originally funded by the National Science Foundation and led by VentureWell, a nonprofit organization that fosters “collaboration among the best minds from research labs, classrooms, and beyond to advance innovation and entrepreneurship education and to provide unique opportunities for STEM students and researchers to fully realize their potential to improve the world.” VentureWell was founded by Jerome Lemelson, who some people call “one of the most prolific American inventors of all time” but who is actually famous for virtually inventing patent trolling. Is there any more beautiful metaphor for how design thinkers see “innovation”? Socially beneficial, indeed! Eventually, the UIF found a home in — where else? — the Stanford d.school.

It’s not at all clear what UIF change agents do on their campuses, beyond recruiting other people to “the movement.” A blog post titled “Only Students Could Have This Kind of Impact” describes how in 2012 the TEDx student representatives at Wake Forest University had done such a good job assembling an audience for their event that it was hard to see how others would match it the next year. But, good news, the 2013 students were “killing it!” "*THIS* is Why We Believe Students Can Change the World,” the blog announced.

Because they can fill audiences for TED talks? The post goes on, “Students are customers of the educational experiences colleges and universities are providing them. They know what other students need to hear and who they need to hear it from. … Students can leverage their peer-to-peer marketing abilities to create a movement on campus.”

At its gatherings, the UIF inducts students into all kinds of innovation-speak and paraphernalia. They stand around in circles, filling whiteboards with Post-it notes. There are sessions on topics like “lean startups.” Students learn crucial skills during these DT sessions. As one participant recounted, “I just learned how to host my own TEDx event in literally 15 minutes from one of the other fellows.”

The UIF has many of the features of classic cult indoctrination, including intense emotional highs, a special lingo barely recognizable to outsiders, and a nigh-salvific sense of election. Whether the UIF also keeps its fellows from getting a decent night’s sleep and feeds them only peanut-butter sandwiches is unknown. Their publicity video boasts Post-it notes, whiteboards, hoodies, look-alike black T-shirts, and the incantatory jargon of the DTs. When I showed a friend the video, he nearly fell out of his chair: “My God, it’s the Hitlerjugend of contemporary bullshit!”

When I saw the University Innovation Fellows speak in D.C., a group got up in front of the room and told all of us that they were change agents bringing innovation and entrepreneurship to their respective universities. One of the students, a sprightly slip of a man, said something like, “Usually professors are kind of like this,” and then he made a little mocking weeny voice — wee, wee, wee, wee. The message was that college faculty are a backward-thinking barrier, blocking the path of this troop of thought leaders.

After the presentation, an economist who was sitting next to me told the UIFers that she had been a professor for nearly two decades, had worked on the topic of innovation that entire time, and had done a great deal to nurture and advance the careers of her students. She found their presentation presumptuous and offensive. When the Q&A period was over, one of UIF’s founders and co-directors, Humera Fasihuddin, came running over with the students to insist that they didn’t mean faculty members were sluggards and stragglers. But why, then, did they say it?

This cultivated disrespect is what the UIF teaches its fellows. That young man had only been parroting what he’d been taught. A UIF blog post titled “Appealing to Your University’s Faculty and Staff” lays it all out. “The unfortunate truth … is that universities are laggards (i.e. extremely slow adopters). The ironic part is universities shouldn’t be, and we as UIFs, understand this.”

Now this could just be millennial entitlement all hopped up on crystal meth. But I think there’s something more troubling going on. For Everett Rogers, an early theorist of innovation, “laggard” was a technical term referring to the last individuals to adopt new technologies. But for the UIF, Rogers’s descriptive term becomes normative and punitive, an excuse for thoughtless dismantlement. I am reminded of those billionaire libertarians who hope to found floating cities on the sea, “innovating” away, free of pesky government regulations and constraints.

Now, if you have never been frustrated by hoary old institutions, you have not lived. Moreover, when I was young, I often believed my elders were old and in the way. But once you grow up, you come to realize that other people have a lot to teach you, even when — especially when — they disagree with you.

This isn’t how the UIF sees things. “Appealing to Your University’s Faculty and Staff” advises fellows to watch professors’ body language and tone of voice. If signs hint that a faculty member isn’t into what you’re saying — or if he or she speaks as if you are not an “equal” or talks “down at you” — the UIF tells you to move on and find a more receptive audience. The important thing is to build the movement. “So I close with the same recurring statement,” the blog post ends. “Connecting to other campuses that have been successful … removes the fear of the unknown for faculty.”

Is there any possibility that the students themselves could just be wrong? Sure, if while you are talking someone’s body tightens up or her head looks like it’s going to explode or her voice changes or she talks down to you and doesn’t treat you as an equal, it could be because she is a laggard-y enemy of progress, or it could be because you are being a moron — or that you are immature, inexperienced, and uninformed. Design thinkers and the UIF teach a thoroughly adolescent conception of culture.

Edmund Burke once wrote, “You had all of these advantages … but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.” The brain-rotting illness of innovation-speak leads us to see everything around us as objects in our way, and to overvalue our own uniqueness.

But significant change in art, technology, science, and culture starts by building on what has come before, not by throwing it away. In jazz, Bird, Coltrane, and Herbie Hancock all spent years understanding the tradition — thousands of hours of listening and practice — before making their own breakthroughs. In computer programming, there is an idea called “Chesterton’s fence,” “the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.” Or as Burke again put it, “We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may be upheld.” It is precisely this kind of subtlety and local tradition that innovation-speak aims to erase.

There is reason for hope, though.

The greatest and most savage critic of design thinking has emerged from the heart of the design-thinking world itself. His name is Bill Burnett, and he is a comedic genius.

Burnett is the executive director of Stanford’s product-design program. As his bio explains, he has a “Master of Science in Product Design at Stanford and has worked in start-ups and Fortune 100 companies, including seven years at Apple designing award-winning laptops and a number of years in the toy industry designing Star Wars action figures.”

No one is really clear why Burnett broke. Perhaps he just got tired of pretending that making another Chewbacca figurine constituted a meaningful innovation. But about a decade ago, he began plotting to overthrow the design-thinking madness that surrounded him — solely through comedy.

Burnett’s first step was to found something called the “Life Design Lab” at the d.school and to create a new course, “Designing Your Life,” in which he would begin rehearsing his satirical material. The conceit was that you could use design thinking as a form of self-help. He called the class “d.life” to lampoon Stanford’s ridiculous fashions.

After nine years of creating and rehearsing jokes and one-liners in d.life, Burnett was ready for prime time. With his co-author Dave Evans, a lecturer in the product-design program at Stanford, he wrote and published the 2016 book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life.

In the vein of Stephen Colbert or Samantha Bee, Designing Your Life offers a wonderful satirical send-up of Design Thinking. “Design,” the authors write, “doesn’t just work for creating cool stuff like computers and Ferraris; it works in creating a cool life.” The book mocks design thinkers’ oversimplification of the world through absurd diagrams and formulas, like this one: “Problem Finding + Problem Solving = Well-Designed Life” (haphazard boldface and italicization in original). I have read the book aloud at parties and nearly killed everyone in the room.

At its most ambitious, Designing Your Life offers a kind of meta-commentary on design thinking’s hucksterism. Notice, for instance, how Burnett and Evans lampoon the term “reframe” — in DT, jargon for looking at a problem from a new angle — by applying it to self-help:

Dysfunctional Belief: It’s too late.
Reframe: It’s never too late to design a life you love.

The “reframe” is, of course, a reformulation of cognitive behavioral therapy’s core tenet, that “negative thought patterns” can be challenged or overcome via therapeutically reoriented habits of mind. This idea has formed the basis for thousands of self-help books, but Burnett and Evans make nary a mention of this fact. What they cleverly illustrate is that design thinking is the act of taking ideas that already exist, sexing them up with a bit of rouge, and putting them in other words. Typically, people with a bad case of the DTs do this without knowing they’re doing it — this is called “innovation.” The historians David Edgerton and Will Thomas have argued that by eliding whole traditions of thought, such bogus novelty claims actually produce ignorance. Burnett and Evans unmask all of this for us. Theirs is some of the smartest humor in decades.

Burnett has become the first comedian of the Post-Innovation-Speak Age. He’s showing us the path away from bullshit. As some book said once, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.” Burnett implores us to donate our Star Wars toys to Goodwill. With wry wisdom, he argues that we shouldn’t pretend that we can boil education — indeed, all of human life — into a five-point diagram for selling stuff. We should heed his warning.

Lee Vinsel is an assistant professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech. A version of this essay first appeared on Medium.