Why designers still aren’t design thinkers
So, I wrote in 2005 about why most designers aren’t design thinkers, yet. Unfortunately, I think that the rising popularity of design, innovation, and design thinking has actually been detrimental and limiting the growth of the industry’s design maturity.
The reason: as more and more coverage has been devoted to these topics, many designers have assumed an air of entitlement: “I’m a designer, therefore I must be doing that design thinking thing that they are talking about in BusinessWeek.” Nothing could be further from the truth - witness BusinessWeek’s own classic case study of a designer putting novelty (and ego?) ahead of user experience with the NEXT blog launch.
Bruce Nussbaum writes about the experience:
We have our great designer, David Sleight, arguing that he designed the new blogs so that they would break with the tired conventional forms out in the blogosphere.
Oops.
But there’s another reason beyond entitlement that limits growing design maturity, and that’s being sloppy. In the same story about the NEXT blog, we have Bruce saying:
My biggest difficulty with the blog design is that the designer didn’t do basic ethnographic research before designing it.
Wow! I didn’t know that ethnographic research was the same as sitting down and asking people what kind of work they’ll be doing. Wait — it isn’t. Ethnography is not a synonym for requirements gathering, and to use it that way is sloppy. This sort of vanillazation of design and innovation vocabulary is a large factor in establishing that dangerous entitlement mentality. It’s easy for a web designer to think that if all ethnography means is checking with a couple people before I design a site, then of course I do ethnography. And that’s dangerous to the profession because it breeds complacency and inhibits real insight or growth.
Here’s to less sloppiness, less entitlement, and growing design maturity so that we can increase our impact with clients, customers, and the world at large.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 9:18 am and is filed under , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
