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Is Design Thinking overhyped?
The origins of the methodology and how it became popular within the business world
I learned about Design Thinking while starting my career in UX. I soon realised that I’d followed the same process throughout my career in Architecture without knowing its fancy name. So why does one design discipline name this process and everyone gets excited about it while the other doesn’t?
“Design thinking is an interesting phenomenon, and there are many good arguments for the need for more design thinking in organizations, but the hype is problematic because it inevitably simplifies the situation and leads to a backlash.” — Johansson and Woodilla, How to Avoid Throwing the Baby Out with the Bath Water: An Ironic Perspective on Design Thinking, paper presented at the European Group for Organization Studies Colloquium, Lisbon, June 30–July 3, 2010.
Where did it come from?
Being overwhelmed by repeatable colourful diagrams, I turned to academic literature, hoping to find the origin of Design Thinking. Design Thinking articles and books started booming in the early 2000s. While its sudden impact may suggest a new innovative approach, Tim Brown from IDEO, in his influential article in Harvard Business Review, gives an example of Thomas Edison working in a Design Thinking way in the 19th century. So did Design Thinking exist before? Researchers defined five different roots within the design research, which led to Design Thinking:
1969 by Simon, coming from Economics & political science
Herbert Simon is a cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate for economics. He was most likely the first to claim design as a discipline separate from natural science, humanities and social sciences. Interestingly he doesn’t separate design from engineering. Design is about creating new things, while other sciences deal with something already existing.
“Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
— Herbert Simon, The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial, p. 67.
