I read a comment on another blog recently from an engineer who objected to designers wanting to “own” design thinking as if were a special skill only they (designers) posses.
I feel the commentator was justified in feeling that design thinking is being attempted to be owned, but from reading and participating in many debates on design thinking, I don’t think it is designers trying to hog the limelight.
True Many designers have commented that to be a true design thinker you need to be a designer, but I disagree. Even as children we design and everything we see, touch and experience has been designed. The question is, “is it good design?”
I am a mechanical engineer turned industrial designer. I don’t think designers are trying to own some esoteric process. In fact much has been debated that corporate, business and finance types are trying to own design and use it as the next breakthrough competitive edge.
The debate goes further into the differences between finance oriented thinking, where shareholder value is most important, and design oriented thinking is as the article suggests more people, solution, emotion oriented thinking.
Having the world witness the successes of design oriented companies (or design oriented at least at face value) seen a surge in profits in recent years, some are heralding design thinking as being the saviour of business.
Many designers protest that those would prostitute the art, dilute the very essence of design and devalue it.
It is however folly to think that design oriented thinking or finance oriented thinking alone can make any company successful. Any successful business is a combination of finely balanced and optimised parameters, (perhaps it’s the engineers thinking that will rule then?) working in harmony.
For some time the design industry has levied complaint at education saying that graduates have little or no commercial understanding. Now there is complaint that business doesn’t have enough design understanding.
In truth everything is designed and engineered and of course financed. Be that a business process, a service, a product of some advertising graphic. Where those designs embody the four behaviours of a designer
Inquisitive; where question after question is asked, (often very stupid ones but nonetheless effective by process of iteration and elimination).
Empathic; where designers go beyond simple user centred design study or focus groups and actually submerge themselves in the world of the consumer; much like a method actor would when preparing for a role in a play or film.
Lateral thinking; where designers often meld ideas not just from one sector but often make the most obscure connections between materials, mechanisms, functions and most importantly, people.
Passion; designers are sickeningly passionately to an idea and give up their whole sense of self to move an idea forward into realisation.
Merged with sound business reasoning (the fifth behavior of design thinking then) there will be success if that design is good. However we all know there are good design, good engineering, and good business and there is also the bad... sometime even the downright ugly.
***'Design orientation' and its derivitives is a phrase/s coined by Raymond Pirouz
