Critique of Design Thinking in Organizations: Strongholds and Shortcomings of the Making Paradigm

Abstract

Despite claims that design has moved beyond making artifacts and products, prevailing theories of design thinking in organizations remain entrenched in the making or technē paradigm. Ironically, this serves to maintain the status quo and stifle progress. Two highly visible technē models are intervention design, publicized by IDEO, and enterprise design thinking, popularized by IBM. While distinct, they deploy the same strategy: locate the vectors of organizational change in individual agents—in projects (as complex artifacts) or in professionals (as reified resources)—and implicitly argue that constant proximity or direct contact between design actors and non-design actors is necessary to generate systems change. This constant interfacing, a natural outworking of the technē paradigm, ultimately limits real transformation—it ignores the importance of social location and symbolic capital in social systems and assumes that human organizations are deficient by default. As a result, the technē paradigm resorts to a “surplus by numbers” approach that leads to the excessive proliferation of a suboptimal form of design. For design to flourish in organizations and build better theories, designers need to become more critical of the productive world and critics (in the ameliorative sense of the term) who can reshape the social world.