Design won’t save the world, Design Thinking will

We couldn’t help but notice the above poster, which was provocatively posted at our local café, The Wall recently.

An anonymous individual had obviously become annoyed at the growing awareness in the design community of its wider responsibility in the world and the exciting discussions that are now taking place regarding the power of design to help mankind in its hour of need. We’ve responded to the poster with our own asking people to visit this blog and begin a conversation (we’re also interested in hosting a round-table discussion in our studio, btw – more on that later).

My contention is that the underlying principles of Design – Design Thinking – can and will play a major role in the shape of the world.

Critical to the discourse is to understand what we mean by Design and what is important about it.

Some see Design as something subordinated to serve the dominant economic paradigm, rather than to challenge and improve it.  Just look around you: much of what you see is designed to support a system of mass consumption and constant desire. The result: inefficient systems, human suffering, environmental degradation and lots and lots of advertisements trying to sell us stuff we don’t need.

Perhaps our friend who wrote the note thinks of Design in this way. Or perhaps he or she thinks of it only as the creation of form and meaning (communication design, in other words, which encompasses a number of fields, including graphic design, information design, etc.).

Some understand that it’s also about function, but even that can be too narrow.

When people do think of functional design they often think it’s all about products. Again, while partially true (there’s no doubt products play a massive role in how our world is shaped), this is only a subset of functional design. Systems design (and its sub-disciplines, such as service design, urban design, and architecture – houses are in essence systems, after all) plays an even greater role in shaping how we interact with each other and the planet.

Broader again is not to think of Design as a set of disciplines at all, but to think of it as a process or a way of thinking. A good definition by Charles Burnette states that Design is:

“… a process of creative and critical thinking that allows information and ideas to be organized, decisions to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge to be gained.”

So it’s a way of thinking, apart from the dominant paradigm (in business at least) which is “judgment thinking”, as Edward De Bono calls it. This is really where the essence of Design resides. We began designing when the first ape picked up the first bone and decided to use it as a tool. The act of designing our tools and thus shaping our world has been with us since we first became self aware; it is an ancient practice, and as Kenya Hara says in his (fantastic!) book Designing Design:

“If design is the transforming of the world based on understanding, which forms our environment, the beginning of human wisdom may have been the beginning of design.”

Design is a thing, but it’s also a verb; it exists as a process, which in itself is made of a number of methods. When practised well, Design is inherently inclusive, a critical component of any approach intended to create sustainable social change. Design is not the sole domain of some wise and all knowing Design Guild (though of course you learn as a Designer to do it intuitively and with professional consistency); it’s a technique and an attitude as much as anything – and anyone can learn and use it to great effect.

So in a nutshell Design Thinking is:

• Collaborative, especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement
• Abductive, inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems
• Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk
• Personal, considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved
• Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages
• Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions.

The definition above is courtesy of Victor Lombardi, a visiting professor at the Pratt Institute, a leading design school in the United States. As Dan Saffer states in his blog, these individual approaches are not exclusive to Design thinkers – they are often found in part in many disciplines. The unique thing is the way Design Thinking combines them all to provide a potent tool for positive societal change.

So when our anonymous friend who has a passion for homeless issues says “Go work in a soup kitchen”, I think he should actually be saying “Hey, spend your time on a worthwhile cause, design out homelessness and fuck pretentions as you do it”.

Related Links

• Design Thinking – Next Big Thing