Design Thinking Is a Failure?
This week, one of Design Thinking’s long time advocates, Bruce Nussbaum, declared the practice a failure and announced he was moving on to a new conceptual framework for expressing the value of design. Bruce is a former assistant managing editor for Business Week and a Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design.
In the article Bruce says,
Design Thinking broke design out of its specialized, narrow, and limited base and connected it to more important issues and a wider universe of profit and non-profit organizations. I believe the concept of Creative Intelligence expands that social engagement even further.
So what is Creative Intelligence, or CQ? Above all, CQ is about abilities. I can call them literacies or fluencies. It is about more than thinking, it is about learning by doing and learning how to do the new in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex space–our lives today.
At the center of Bruce’s disillusionment with Design Thinking is the business community’s high valuation of the process versus the intended deliverable: creativity. Business latched onto Design Thinking as a method to achieve innovation without all the messy, emotional, conflict-driven circularity of creative work. But this preference for work-flow and avoidance of creative-stretch, crippled Design Thinking projects and produced far more failures than successes.
Though I agree with Bruce’s observations, I disagree with his solution, Creative Intelligence. Jumping into yet one more buzz-word filled concept instead of staying engaged with, and defending, the Design Thinking process appears to devalue the future contributions designers can make to business and social problems. The gem of Bruce’s article, and candid assessment of the design practice, is an interview with IDEO’s Tim Brown. Tim, a thought-leader and advocate for design’s promise, talks frankly and optimistically about the results we’ve achieved so far and the opportunities that lie ahead.
From the comments Bruce Nussbaum, received it’s clear his article has stirred up new debates. In a time when the collective design-consciousness of the business community and the global community continues to rise, the conversations are sure to be lively.
