I fear this may be the week I finally have a total meltdown about a Design F**king Thinking

Like I get it and everything. But I’m getting sick of seeing human-centred design watered down to the point it’s just opinionated stakeholders “empathising” and ideating”

I get that you need to call it “design thinking” to win work off a certain kind of executive. And it helps explain what design does really simply.

But there comes a point it starts to seem like you think design thinking IS user-centred design. And that’s where I have a problem.

User-centred design is not getting a bunch of people together for a workshop to talk about what they think the user need is. It doesn’t matter what we THINK the user need is. User-centred design is doing the hard work to go and bloody find out from actual users what they need.

So yeah it turns out it’s definitely the week I have a meltdown about Design F*****g Thinking

You’ve been Design Thinking about a problem for two months and you still haven’t interviewed one single user, or shown a prototype to one single user. But yes gosh that is a very nice PowerPoint deck and requirements spreadsheet you have there, no wonder the Execs are impressed.

For the - mostly men - in my mentions. When I said “I get it...” in the first tweet, I do know this is not how design thinking is supposed to be done. That does not change this this is exactly what a lot of consultancies mean when they say they do “design thinking”.