Screw Design Thinking and the Horse it Rode in On

Design Thinking has taken the world by storm lately. It's being proposed as a solution to problems in fields ranging from medicine to engineering to the social sciences. There are popular courses on it available on YouTube, and countless successful people swear by it.

And I think it's a bunch of hot air.

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Basically, Design Thinking tends to ignore the fact that many if not most disciplines already have well constructed intellectual traditions. Call them modes of thinking in the same manner as design thinking, if you will. And in nearly all situations they will be superior to design thinking within their discipline, almost entirely due to the specialization of our society.

Take my discipline for example- geology. Geologists spend years in school learning the necessary modes of thought to deal with geology. You require intensely trained spatial reasoning abilities, a grasp of long periods of time unequaled in any other mental discipline save perhaps among a very few physicists and evolutionary biologists, the ability to rapidly switch back and forth between thinking in radically different size and time scales, and so on and so forth- and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a damn good reason that a master's degree is the working degree in geology, and that relatively few non-PhDs make particularly notable contributions to the science.

So what does Design Thinking offer geology? Can it solve the dolomite problem? Reconcile the seismic and lithographic Mohorovicic discontinuities? Or is it even likely it could streamline a relatively old hat task for geologists like finding oil?

Geology isn't by any means unique- all the sciences have similar mental disciplines that go far beyond just learning the facts of their fields. This doesn't even mention the scientific method, an umbrella mode of thinking which I can comfortably call absolutely superior and more important than Design Thinking. Similar ideas apply in the social sciences: I'm quite convinced that any given school of, say, historical thought is probably better adapted to the analysis of history than Design Thinking.

What about outside the sciences, though? Well, Design Thinking seems to have some applicability to Engineering and Architecture. Except, of course, it's more just design itself that has applicability- Architects and engineers can always use their help. I feel confident in considering design a different beast than Design Thinking in many ways. Engineering and Architechture both have their own associated mental disciplines, they don't need another more generalized one. The article even mentions a growing backlash against Design Thinking among architects.

I'm not, in fairness, entirely down on Design Thinking outside design. There are two fields where I've seen it have high utility- business and administration.

Both business and administration are fields that lack well-structured, coherent mental disciplines. (Despite what the American cult of the CEO would have you think.) There's no unified philosophy of how to run a business- there are, instead, more methods than you can shake a stick at. There's a reason why designers do so well in, for instance, customer research situations- Design Thinking lends itself really, really well to that. And, in fairness, these are the two fields that have most vigorously embraced Design Thinking.

Don't commit the sin of the physicist- avoid thinking that your mastery of your discipline grants you any special insight into other fields. We live in a specialized society- always be wary about ideas that claim they can revolutionize the methods of multiple compartments of our society at once.

This post began life as a Facebook discussion with some friends.