The strong suit of design thinking is the ability to identify a need and work towards a solution within a constraint space. It also provides a large variety of design methods that can be useful in many creative processes and teamwork in general.
The peril of design thinking is the assumption that the process can be applied to every single problem out there. The process was established with physical and digital products in mind. It was not designed to solve climate change or the governing of a country. The danger is that the problem is too big and complex and the “simple steps” offered by design thinking guides are not enough to address system-scale issues.
As described in the article, one of the pitfalls of design thinking is the perceived generalisation and simplification of problems onto a one sentence need statement. Also, the observations conducted and users interviewed during the project might not be representative of the entire population addressed by the final design. After all design thinking was born within capitalist structures where finding new needs to address and new products to sell might be the not-so-secret goal. And after all who will buy those products? The marginalized?
Here is one example of a failed design thinking process that I can speak to: During an innovation class in healthcare a fellow student team was placed in the ER of a hospital to observe the day to day and interview patients, doctors and nurses to find a medical need and ultimately create an innovative product to address this need. After a few weeks into the process they realised that the problem was that there were too many people at the ER. Instead of creating an idea around countering medical staff shortage or why some people ended up in the ER (e.g. no health insurance), they came up with a chat bot app that would intercept patients before they even came to the ER. The app performed an initial diagnosis and suggested medical offices in the area to patients. The project failed because the problem was too complicated to be grasped within a short amount of time and too complex to be handled with a lean design thinking approach to innovation.
Ultimately, design thinking sells the illusion that there is a reproducible process with a guarantee for innovation. It is an attempt at the industrialization of creativity.
