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Before design thinking, we need design therapy

Modern designers need to be skilled in the performative arts of stakeholder alignment as much as delivering human-centric experiences to the end-user. Without the former, the latter suffers.

T. Robert Roeth
UX Collective
6 min readMay 6, 2021

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A historical photo of family gathered around a table sharing conversation and a Thanksgiving dinner.
The Crouch family at their annual Thanksgiving dinner in Ledyard, Connecticut 1940. Lomax collection. Photographer, Jack Delano. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, Reproduction Number LC-USF34–042716-D.

Over the course of my career, I’ve had a broad range of experiences in design that have taken me to far-flung corners of the creative economy. As the years accumulate, my resume should begin to possess the weight and merit of a Tolstoy novel; a tome rich and dense with professional accomplishments, intellectual achievements, and valuable results. Instead, my job skills and responsibilities are starting to feel more like Hemmingway’s prose on a bar napkin.

Design Skills: I figure it out.

The problems designers face are not getting any easier. The one constant is ambiguity. Business, Technology, and People move too fast for complete and clear definition even on the best of days. To be a successful designer today, it is requisite to define, understand, and design for a group of end-users of a given experience. That’s the idea. The methodologies of Design Thinking is one widely adopted approach to achieve these ends. That helps designers get their job done. Halfway.

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by T. Robert Roeth

Working in design, business and tech, and for the people in between ↬ toddroeth.com

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