So I'm going to talk a little bit
about design thinking today. I'm a designer. I'm a practicing, I would say graphic designer. That's still the term that I would
like to use to describe myself, although our practice is extremely wide going from Brand Identity Design, to exhibition, to publication, to motion so and so forth. So, we have been living with this term 'design thinking' in our everyday life for a while now and has become such a buzzword. And that is my precise problem with design thinking in today's society and particularly in design community right now is a kind of complete lack of criticism on it. And I think that as somebody who like myself really, really cares about what we put out in the world, I think that we got to take a step back and really kind of look at what we mean by design thinking and what it does to our world and to ourselves. OK so, if you google design thinking and go to the image area, this is pretty much what you will see. So, this was found in May 1st 2017. Last month. You know, as you can see there is typically
visualized and represented as five somehow hexagons. I don't know why hexagons. So typically five steps right? And they go linearly. OK so, now look at us steps. OK so the five steps are: empathize, which we all know that we've got to, you know, understand the users, their needs, so on and so forth. And be very
sympathetic to a situation that they're in. Then we really got to define the parameter right. You know and then with the parameter defined, we ideate: we come up with concepts. And then we have to prototype very quickly to to realize these concepts and then test the prototypes with the users. It sounds all really reasonable right? And I'm sure a lot of us practice design or design thinking through this very linear a particular methodology but take a pause. Okay think about what is really lacking here when you present something, meaning design, to your colleagues, to people. The first thing that people will
react to is why I call 'crit'. So crit is completely missing from this process. What is design crit? What is design criticism? For those who have gone to design school, you know how important that is in every step of the design, every discussion. You bring forth an idea. You bring forth evidence, and then everybody crit the heck out of it. And that's when you can make
improvements, right? That's when you can begin to really evaluate if something is valuable, is good at all. But I think that this critical step of evaluating whether something is good or not is completely missing in today's design thinking conversation. And then my second problem is that design is now reduced to a single tool that is called 3M Post-Its. And you're probably pretty familiar with these images. Seriously. Go type in 'design thinking' and you will see these are the
images that come up in Google. And that is really telling, you know. And that, I think, is highly problematic because, as you know, the world that we're in right now is messy and is beautiful. It's inspiring. It's a lot of stuff. And there are many ways - tools too - to use to actually create and think about design. And why do we end up with a single medium here right now? And that's something I really hope
someone can explain to me. So here's sort of my definition of design thinking, that is design thinking right now. OK not as a pedagogy, but right now. It packages the designer's way of
working for a non-designer audience by
codifying their processes into a prescriptive, step by step approach to creative problem solving claiming that it can
be applied by anyone to any problems. Okay so that I think is highly, highly problematic. But what is even more problematic is that I haven't heard a voice or much noise from the design community to actually try to reshape this conversation. So, we've got to look back to how design
thinking came about. You know, again this is by no means an
in-depth study, but really a way to try to help myself and my team to understand where it
came about, you know, from from the pedagogical point of view. So, it was first you know kind of
presented - design as a way of thinking - by a scientist named Herbert Simon as well as an engineer Robert McKim, who wrote a really wonderful book called Experiences in Visual Thinking. You can still find it on Amazon. It's really wonderful. It basically describes how visual evidence is so critical in creative thinking. And then an architect named Bryan Lawson began to apply design thinking into architecture practice. And then a journalist, his name is Nigel Cross, wrote an article that advocated bringing design as a way of thinking or design thinking into education to actually talk to a broader audience. And another architect and urban planner Peter Rowe, who taught at Harvard. He first kind of really use the term design
thinking very significantly in his book title Design Thinking. And then Rolf Faste, who was a professor at Stanford, began to actually really put it into a curriculum. And then after that David Kelley we know from IDEO, he was the kind of the story the first one, I think, on the public record who
began to apply it into business courses. And then, there's Richard Buchanan who began to kind of address human
concerns through design. He was really the
one who talked extensively about very fundamental human needs and design. So, let's look at this one, the Oxo Good Grips. We're all really familiar with these products. What's really interesting about this
as as a kind of example on design thinking is that, first of all, you see that there are
many, many, many levels of iterations
through this. This is something that is as
simple as a vegetable peel. But what I did was that it began to kind of understand certain extreme use cases from everyday people like you and I, to athletes who are really, really strong, to people who have arthritis, so that you know the grip and the shape and the material
become extremely important. But what's interesting here is that you see that there are tangible
evidence that we can actually look at and begin to critique, whether the thinking behind it is good or not. And then we can actually iterate and improve upon it. I think the idea of improvement is really important and demonstrated in this image. But then the problem with design thinking as a diagram is that you really can not
understand what is the outcome of it and without outcome you cannot
critique how good it is. So in design thinking started out really as a kind of very
important methodology for industrial design, but in recent years, you know, I think there has become this kind of thing where other adjacent design fields began to opportunistically latch onto it in order to fulfill their own needs. That's a problem. So how's it going today? Let's look at some examples. So, here you see that there is an
MRI scan for children by GE. And allegedly this project as you see that there are a
lot of murals with tigers, on the wall. This result was done through design thinking. So, now just take a pause and think that MRI scan for children, let's put you know cartoons on the wall, do really need design thinking to actually do that? Isn't that a little bit obvious? Next examples. So, OK, you know, let's talk about target markets and you know users. So Oil of Olay is a very well-known, you know, legendary skincare product and they started to lose market
share in the elderly women market. And then they decided to
kind of just take it down to a slightly younger generation of women in their 30s and 40s again. Again, that itself is a pretty
obvious thing you know and you don't really
need this kind of five step design
thinking process by IBM to accomplish that. That itself is human
intuition. Next one. This is you know interface done by IBM. OK so, allegedly this - I think, it's a portal - it was also created through a really rigorous design thinking process. But then, if you look at the result, I have to say, this is pretty similar to a lot of portals that I have seen in my life. So what? So, what is design thinking? So, these are words now they are associated with design thinking. I'm not going to read through each of them, but you may kind of find some of these are really just ridiculous. As real designers, we really don't use these terms to describe our work. We use really, really hard and you know tangible words to describe, to critique our work. None of these words are real criticism of anything. They are buzzwords to sounds like corporate jargon, you know. So what happens to design? So, I think that in today's world right now I think design has become
this box that people just want to check off. And that's a problem. I think designers or anybody who has anything to do with design, we've got to be really critical of it. And also let's look at how design was done before design thinking came about. First of all Charles and Ray Eames, as you can see, the complete lack of 3M stickies on the board. So they really practiced learning by doing, you know. By doing so, they learned how divine the needs and constraints of every project before designing and they were one of the most prolific designers, you know, in our time ever. And Steve Jobs, again, look at his home office, you know. Really messy. And he also applied his way of design thinking which is intuition by really focusing on people's desires and needs, rather than business needs. So, by doing so he actually created some of the most iconic and cultural shifting products ever. This is an image of a Pentagram, and as you can see, it's a pretty messy office. It's me sitting there with Paula talking about design as you can see we have a wall of our work, you know. We want to exhibit our
work to remind ourselves where the standard is; where we have been. And also, to use the opportunity to actually self-critique and kind of, you know, use that to make us work better. Again, there is evidence right
there. And this is a model wall of really renowned architecture firm that OMA built so far. As you can see, these blue foams, they don't look really interesting, but they're actually
the predecessors of all the amazing architecture that OMA have built so far. So, as you can see, that these are all evidence that we can critique on and improve on. So, what I think you know, what I still truly believe
is that real designers surrounds themselves with evidence. You've really got to have the
evidence and you've got have crit in order to make the world better. So, look at this environment. You know, this is a very typical designer's environment. Again messy evidence is not this kind of five step, linear hexagon based process. So, my challenge to design thinking practitioners is to really share the evidence and the result and the outcome that you have
produced and allow us to crib it and to comment on it and to really kind of see where we can go from design thinking. Thank you.
