Rethink design thinking

In the book The Way to Design, the author says that the idea of design thinking needs changes.

The idea became a victim of its own success.

Core tenets have been watered down or misapplied.

Empathy overload

• Rethinking Design Thinking - The Way to Design by Steve Vassallo #[[Roam-Highlights]]

• It’s perhaps inevitable that when an idea gets this popular, it becomes a victim of its own success. And I think, to some degree, this has happened with design thinking. People who are barely trained in the process become so-called design-thinking instructors. Practitioners struggle to define the term clearly. And, worst of all, some of the core tenets of design thinking have, in my observations, been watered down or misapplied.
• as the world has grown more complex, I believe that the version of design thinking that we’ve been working with for the past generation needs to evolve
• design thinking needs tuning up and updating

• Empathy Overload

• in design circles and many other fields, empathy has become little more than a buzzword, which, at its most vacuous, seems to mean nothing more than a soft bleating sound made when a small animal is in pain. At its most cynical, it’s a Silicon Valley euphemism for market research
• other reasons to be cautious of being overly led by empathy. For one, empathy as an emotion has its limits
• “Empathy” was David Kelley’s shorthand for this type of ethnographic research. And, to be fair, that’s what some design thinkers still have in mind. But over time, through overuse, when most designers talk about empathy, they don’t seem to me to be referring to fact-gathering at all, but something more like feeling-broadcasting. Empathy in design has gone from an outward-facing action to an inward-turned affect. I think it might be too late to protect the design-thinking denotation of the word from the layman’s definition. Regardless, I would urge us as a discipline to practice rigorous evidence-based compassion, rather than trying to feel people’s pain
• decisions were often made at the end of sentences that began with phrases like “I believe” or “I feel.” But today, we don’t have to rely solely on gut emotions like empathy, and we can go even further than ethnography. We can let the data tell us what will work and what won’t. We can use tools like Optimizely to test multiple designs in real-time; to compare alternative concepts in minutes and hours rather than weeks or months; to let data weave its way into the design proces
• isn’t to say you should always defer to the data. Algorithms can’t fully account for the human element. Joe Gebbia said that if he had listened to the analytics in 2008, when Airbnb had zero growth, no investors, and a lot of credit card debt, he would’ve shut the service down and cut his losses. For months, the data were telling him this idea was never going to take off
• In a way, he was refusing to listen to the users, as well, because they were telling him that they weren’t very interested in what he was currently offering. Instead, he soldiered on and did still more things that couldn’t be defended by the numbers—like fly to New York to try to plumb the causes underlying their lack of growth, in order to save the company. Because the data can tell you what’s happening, but they can’t tell you why it’s happening—especially when it comes to radical new ideas. And, most importantly, Joe didn’t give up because he had a vision. In the final analysis, no amount of empathy is a substitute for having a vision
• too much empathy can kill your company. If you think design is going out, ex ante, asking users what they want and then trying to give it to them, you will fail. As Jobs said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Or, as I sometimes like to put it, invention is the mother of necessity. Build something, put it out in the world, collect data, collect feedback, make adjustments. Build; don’t ask.
• design thinking, which emphasizes solving problems holistically, needs to look at a bigger whole by incorporating another body of thought: systems thinking
• Systems thinking is a mindset—a way of seeing and talking about reality that recognizes the interrelatedness of things. System thinking sees collections of interdependent components as a set of relationships and consequences that are at least as important as the individual components themselves. It emphasizes the emergent properties of the whole that neither arise directly, nor are predictable, from the properties of the parts
• The Iceberg Model is a helpful way to explain the concerns that drive systems thinking. Events are at the top of the iceberg. They’re incidents that we encounter from day to day—the hurly-burly of life. Patterns are the accumulated habits or behavioral “memories” that result from repeated, unconsidered reaction to events. Systemic structures are how the components of the system are organized. These structures generate the patterns and events that confront us. Mental models are the assumptions we have about how the world works; they give birth to systemic structures. Values are the vision we have for our future—what we aspire to. They’re the basis for our mental models.
• moral character or human error are blamed for what are really system failures
• Systems-savvy designers will know the real answer is to unearth what patterns or assumptions are generating those suboptimal behaviors
• Two key concepts to understanding systems thinking. The first is emergence. What makes a system a system rather than just a collection of parts is that the components are interconnected and interdependent. Their interconnectedness creates feedback loops, which change the behavior of the system—in fact, they define the behavior of the system. Emergent properties arise that exist only in the system as a totality, and not in its disparate components, making it impossible to understand the system without looking at the whole
• analyze systems with an eye towards finding__ leverage points__
• —the second key concept in systems thinking. Rather than attempt to design a wholly new, perfect solution, oftentimes it’s better to find areas where an incremental change will lead to significant renovation in the system. The smallest nudge for the biggest effect.
• It’s not always possible in real-world cases to reasonably model very complex systems in ways that lead to good design strategies and outcomes.

Reference: https://thewaytodesign.com/manifesto/rethinking-design-thinking/