btw. even your article got some points believing that design-thinking would make the world a better place without sounding the implication of an economic drive and thus interests for “something” is still pretentious, even more since you mentioned the holistic approach in the point “integrative”.
There is a categorial mix-up between the moral “good” and “better” and the “good and better for something” which is eventually not moral.
Even if you “design out homelessness” the requirements are economic ones and not moral.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to do that and eventually, to stay with that example, homeless wouldn’t care for the reason that makes their lives better – but for anybody doing so there are will be interests related. I just want to point out that “doing good and talk about it” is not the moral good but the functional good – and if we obscure design (including service, systems, thinking) to an extend that we deceive ourselves about the role we have in the capitalistic system – we’re pretentious fucks

Thanks for the comments and insight. Ive heard a lot of good things about Second Road and certainly agree Design Thinking is a tad nascent and needs more work to permeate business and organisations in a substantial way. I’d love to meet up and discuss these ideas further – i’ll be in touch.

It’s a very good point you make – i feel that we need to act as change agents wherever possible and as designers we should look to do what many other people across industry are doing, and that is to migrate ourselves away from the dominant paradigm and boxed in thinking over time. For many it’s not practical to change your design business or role overnight but we should all be making plans to move away from the old approaches as soon as possible. If you work for yourself set a target for the next year (that includes the client base and work type not just carbon offsetting etc etc) and then across say 2-5 years move your business model to where you are personally comfortable with the mix. Ideally that would mean mostly sustainable work.

If you work for a corporation you could work from within and try and improve what they do and eventually help them to rethink it. i would suggest you start small, use Design Thinking methods and prototype ideas, keep the risk low – get your boss to commit to working groups of say 2 hours per person a week (match it with your own time perhaps to show your personal commitment) and show them what can be achieved in terms of saving in energy use and improvements in staff morale alone. Report on the results then go from there. (iterate!)

My girlfriend is currently studying her Masters in Design Mgmt here in London and is planning to do her major project on how design thinking is/can/should tackle social challenges. I’ll put her in touch asap. In the meantime, she might make use of the excellent, illustrative (!) images from this post (assume that’s ok!).

Number of interesting social design thinking orgs over here, most notably http://thinkpublic.com/ who you should check out…

The next question, however, is how everyday designers—the people who bring home a paycheck by producing creative for corporations—can do a better job of using Design Thinking to improve the world. How much work is there that doesn’t ask people to make the world more consumerist? What do you do if you are good at design thinking, but also want to support your family? This is the conundrum that so many working designers face.