Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Elina Zheleva Campanello (Doorbell) by Giovanni on Flickr

The relationship between design and design thinking has never been an easy one. In a recent post I wrote at length about this love-hate relationship.

My main thesis was that design thinking is empowering non-designers to think and work like designers when looking for a solution. With focus on the end-user, in collaboration, iteratively and boldly. But are designers really working in this way?

Part of my job is about training people in design thinking, and I usually start my workshops with the question “How does a designer think? What do designers do differently?”

Surprisingly the answers I get are not what I want to hear. More often than not — people would point to examples of unusable product designs, flashy objects, egocentric designers and an authoritarian creation process.

I talk about design thinking to a lot of designers too — architects, interior designers, furniture creators, digital startup founders, and I hear the same story. Designs are constantly being created in a linear manner, in isolation from the end user or other experts and with sole focus on the dollar sign or a potential magazine feature.

And then it struck me — design thinking is for designers too. In the design thinking community we’ve been trying to establish design thinking as a standalone discipline for non-designers, but design thinking might as well be the next iteration of design itself.

In 1996 when IDEO created the Gripper — the revolutionary big fat toothbrush for kids, the common designer’s standpoint was “because kids are small, their toothbrushes should be small too”. Sounds logical, but in fact it is just another lazy, ego-centric, overly confident and void of creativity point of view that will lead to design that is out of touch with users.

The Gripper, IDEO design for Oral B

Last year two architects that I know were participating in a contest to redesign a children’s hospital. They spend a lot of time at the hospital — observing and talking to staff, parents and kids to understand what’s broken in the current design. Their design suggested “invisible improvements” like relocating entrance to reduce congestion at reception, redesigning the receptionist counter for improved visibility, improving the readability of the information board, new wayfinding system and space for children to draw while waiting. Their design did not win. The project that won had colourful paintings on the walls. Because guess what: “children hospitals are for children and kids like colour”.

This happened in 2016. 20 years after IDEO created the Gripper and started talking about design thinking. 20 years later we still have designs based on lazy, ego-centric, overly confident and void of creativity points of view!

Design thinking is about stopping this. Design thinking is about working for people, in collaboration, iteratively and boldly. It is there to eradicate bad design. Whether it is a standalone discipline, a methodology, a mindset or a movement is irrelevant. Instead of arguing about semantics, let’s just bring design thinking back to design.

About the author:

Elina Zheleva is a Design Thinking Evangelist trained at the HPI School of Design Thinking and Stanford d.school. She travels the world to teach design thinking and work with organisations to help them transform into more customer-centred and innovative workplaces. She is the co-founder of Refacilitate — a company dedicated to connecting organizations with independent design thinking facilitators.

Let’s bring design thinking back to design! was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s bring design thinking back to design!

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