
On Design Thinking - luu
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-35/reviews/on-design-thinking/
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k1m
I studied Interaction Design in Sweden in 2008 and design thinking and IDEO
was all the rage. It felt very superficial to me and just another way to
indoctrinate students into believing business people really wanted to solve
real, difficult problems, rather than just sell more stuff. I wrote a little
about what I saw as the conflict between business and design here:
[https://keyvan.net/2011/07/interaction-design-serving-
corpor...](https://keyvan.net/2011/07/interaction-design-serving-corporate-
needs/) and [https://keyvan.net/2010/03/interaction-design-in-the-
corpora...](https://keyvan.net/2010/03/interaction-design-in-the-corporate-
world/)

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serverQuestion
I've also studied interaction design and service design. In my experience the
conflict between what a user/designer wants and what the business wants are so
completely different it's just frustrating to work in projects like that.

Getting everyone onboard every time, when they are only looking for you to
solve their problem the way they want it solved is just horrible.

~~~
meheleventyone
You see this time and time again where products that were well received are
turned into hellscapes to extract more money from users.

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TiredGuy
Very interesting to read about one of the failed IDEO projects. It's hard to
find anything even remotely suspicious of IDEO or its ideas, and that alone
makes this piece worth a read.

The author talks about how Rittel and others rejected building design
methodologies to apply to Wicked Problems, but once you define an alternative
approach, how do we distinguish that from a design methodology?

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meheleventyone
A design methodology is supposed to be taken whole cloth to new domains.
Whereas without one you are free to approach each new piece of work and domain
differently.

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anongraddebt
One of the leaders at IDEO (and part-time prof. at the business school) spoke
to my grad. class. He gave one of the slickest powerpoint presentations I've
ever seen.

Good article, but I don't think it says much that should surprise us. Large
corporate firms will inevitably end up talking corporate-speak, and sell a
service whose actual value is lower than its luster. Moreover, in every field,
there will be some practitioners who hold a myopic view when it comes to
problem-solving.

There seems to be an aura about/around design stuff/work that blinds people to
the very real fact that it is still just a business.

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uxcolumbo
Slickest presentation? In what way? Is it online somewhere?

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anongraddebt
Not that I know of.

It was slick because of how high quality the designs, and colors, etc for each
slide were. Most importantly, though, it was the best 'story-telling' I've
seen in a presentation.

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rchaud
Design and presentation is IDEO's bread and butter, so it makes sense that
make sure to get those things right when speaking to outside audiences.

~~~
anongraddebt
Slick wasn't meant as a pejorative.

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a_c
Good design don't come from just asking question, it comes from understanding
the need. Often time when dwelling in a problem space, an industry, a customer
sector, there is a underlying common problem to be solved. But everyone
articulates the problem differently. A good design is to find a general
solution to all these seemingly random problem.

Have seen quite a few "designers" who drinks the koolaid of design sprint,
design thinking, etc by asking everyone what everyone thinks the product
should look like, then proceed to prototype a frankenstein that "addresses"
everyone's concern. Not once did it end well

~~~
c0nsilienc3
My girlfriend is a design strategist and I don’t see that at all amongst her
colleagues and friends. I think that’s a very outside perspective on what
designers must think like. Good designers are a lot smarter than that, and
I’ve seen first hand how bad your example can end up. Usually, it’s not the
designer’s fault, but the client.

Often, a client or your company has an idea about how something should look or
function regardless of research, prototyping and testing. I’ve seen the
process take place over wasted weeks just for a client to say, “Yeah, but
that’s not what we wanted or envisioned. Make it like this or make it fit
somehow.”

That’s when I’ve seen products and services fail spectacularly while the
designers and researchers ask themselves, “What was the point of all that work
then?”

Edit: There’s also kind of a branding problem with design strategists where,
as someone else pointed out, a lot of them are just good at packaging and
presenting mediocre ideas into really slick powerpoints and presentations. And
many of these strategists even present themselves as very artsy and slick and
can spout off very woo-woo lines of magic and dazzle with their charisma. It
gives people who are exposed to these designers the impression that they’re
all just a bunch of snazzy consultants who offer no real value.

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whatitdobooboo
Good article. I think a lot of times, including with myself, design is used as
a "hack" to somehow skips steps. It's not like IDEO had to design the whole
mac, or design how the FIRST mouse would work, or the wiring, or the
bluetooth. They had these tools and had to put them together, with already. If
there is a goal way too far out and "design" is supposed to get you there, I
would guess there will be a lot of speedbumps on the way.

Was the iPhone design thought largely out of thin air? Or was it brought about
by people who understood and worked the the technology for years and that is
what drove the design focus?

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deltron3030
Design thinking requires total control between input and output, and applied
to the real world on a large scale this includes politics, which isn't
compatible with democracies.

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itronitron
Great article. I think many people in the design community measure their
success by how many eyeballs they can catch. Ultimately it was the city
commission that led to the poor management. They could have adopted a staged
process but were likely getting misplaced advice from outsiders. From what I
read, Ideo could have done a better job of setting expectations.

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waylandsmithers
I can't do design, and I have a lot of respect and admiration for those who
can, but I have a lot of trouble seeing design thinking as anything other than
formal terms applied to things that are obvious and intuitive ("human-
centered") and the freshest buzzword phrase to make clients think something
ordinary is actually special.

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cgio
The irony ... in order to solve for the stakeholder’s assumed problem
statement, the advice was to avoid assumptions...all assumptions, I assume,
except the assumptions of the report.

From the article

> They prototyped and tested solutions to municipal problems. Finally, in
> collaboration with the Blue Ribbon Committee, the IDEO team published a
> report. It aimed to address the problem—an absence of “competitiveness” for
> new business and talent—that Mayor Braddy had diagnosed.

And further down the article from the report itself:

> (“Instead of assuming,” for instance, “that the right answer to dealing with
> trees cut as a result of development is a policy to limit the amount of
> trees that can be cut, why not ask the question, ‘How can we maintain a
> desirable degree of shade and tree coverage as part of Gainesville’s overall
> design?’”)

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meristem
From a human factors engineering POV, this is straight usability research.
Instead of assumptions, use observations and interviews— then form problem
statements. Instead of a single solution, form ‘how’ statements about intent.
In Product Management parlance: speak in terms of problems, not solutions. The
design cycle then moves to create product/refine product.

~~~
cgio
Don’t disagree. It reads like they didn’t eat their dog food though.

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oftenwrong
I recently read about an example of IDEO "missing the forest for the trees" on
the subject of transportation and urban planning:

 _The limits of design thinking: The most difficult design challenge is asking
the right question_

by Joe Cortright (2019)

[http://cityobservatory.org/designed-to-
fail-2/](http://cityobservatory.org/designed-to-fail-2/)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190509170145/http://cityobserv...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190509170145/http://cityobservatory.org/designed-
to-fail-2/)

Essentially, they applied "design thinking" to transportation without
considering the role that locality plays in transportation.

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chrisweekly
IIRC, I first read about IDEO in "Creative Confidence", a book I enjoyed and
found personally inspiring. Looking fwd to HN comments on this ~recent
article.

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MobileVet
Hard not to be cynical. IDEO is a design hammer... so they hit the nail that
Gainesville gave them.

