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Is Design Thinking Really BS?

A virtual debate between Natasha Jen and Marty Neumeier.

Ellen M. Shapiro
UX Collective
9 min readJan 4, 2020

One of the most memorable moments at any Adobe 99U conference was Natasha Jen’s main-stage presentation to a rapt audience of 1,000. The title of the talk was “Design Thinking Is Bullshit.”

An engaging speaker, Jen heads up the teams at Pentagram responsible for clients ranging from the Guggenheim Museum to Harvard Graduate School of Design to Chanel. Her talk included examples meant to show that solutions attributed to the much-touted design thinking process — for which the services of expensive consultants are apparently necessary — are the most obvious solutions: A hospital puts a colorful cartoon mural on the wall of their children’s MRI facility to help frightened kids relax. A beauty company whose customers are aging out begins to feature younger models in ads.

Natasha Jen at 99U

Jen focused on what she characterized as the lack of criticism inherent in a ‘outrageous,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘ridiculous,’ and ‘cult-like’ adherence to a process that consists of five steps, which are visualized by a neat little row of hexagons that contains the words: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. And that, in…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Ellen M. Shapiro

My career is designing and writing about design. Here, I can write about lots of things. My short fiction attempts to capture and evoke past moments in time.

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