DESIGN THINKING: A USEFUL MYTH

Moral of the story: designers possess a mystical, creative thought process that places them above all others in their skills at creative, groundbreaking though. wait. what? you’re telling me they actually don’t? darn.

I, personally, think that this article is a bit dramatic. “…imbued with the mystical aura of design thinking”. really? it makes it seem like people think that designers are unicorns. or, wait, let me get this straight – designers think that other people think that designers think magical thoughts? and “yes, designers can be creative, but the point is that they are hardly unique.” ouch. i like to think that everyone (designer or not) is a unique snowflake. why does this article have to be so mean? i just really can’t think of any designers that go around ‘claim[ing] they have special modes of thinking’ that give them superpowers. WE DON’T NEED A THOUGHT POLICE.

NOW THAT WE CAN DO ANYTHING, WHAT WILL WE DO?

I like that this reading addresses designers as people “not as some extraordinary class of powerful overseer”.

The first step to its unfolding is to reject the binary notion of client/designer. The next step is to look to what is going on, right now.

The old-fashioned notion of an individual with a dream of perfection is being replaced by

distributed problem solving and team-based multi-disciplinary practice. The reality for

advanced design today is dominated by three ideas: distributed, plural, collaborative. It is no longer about one designer, one client, one solution, one place. Problems are taken up everywhere, solutions are developed and tested and contributed to the global commons, and those ideas are tested against other solutions.

take our place in society/ willing to implicate ourselves in the consequences of our imagination.