This year, I did some exploring around the nature and process of design, in relation to some of the units I was studying. Something I kept coming across was the concept of Design Thinking— an approach popularised by IDEO, similar to the UK Design Council's Double Diamond. "Design thinking" wasn't new to me; I had learned about it during a Marketing course at the University of the West of England, in Bristol. At the time, I wasn't too receptive to it and revisiting the topic made me want to hear others' perspectives.

Natasha Jen, a partner at Pentagram, makes her stance against design thinking quite clear in two of her keynotes— Design Thinking is Bullshit (99U) and Design Thinking is Bullshit (Design Indaba)— where she articulates a lot of the things that I share a distaste for.

She begins by criticising the reductionist nature of design thinking, the way a lot of companies are trying to streamline design, as if it is a linear and predictable process. She makes a few other remarks, some about the excessive use of buzzwords and unnecessary vernacular; indulgence in "self-fulfilling loops" (writing own thoughts on post-it notes with the expectation of somehow finding something novel there); and above all, the failure of Design Thinking to deliver results which are in some way innovative, beautiful, or simply not mediocre.

Proponents of design thinking justify these shortcomings almost as a feature— Bret Waters explains in "Design thinking isn't about design at all" that design thinking is a tool for engineering, rather than visual design or communication (i.e. function over form).

Jen rightly renounces this diminished appreciation of beauty. Bruno Munari offers an example— relevant to Jen's criticism— in "Design as Art." He looks at several objects through this utilitarian lens: to illustrate its absurdity, he applies it to a rose and finds it to be an object "without justification," impractical, almost "immoral."

Munari, however, also talks a great deal about form. Something he reveals to us, which I found quite intriguing, is the notion of emergent or "spontaneous" form that an object assumes naturally— simply by lending itself to its most natural use. It is implied that it's the designer's job to anticipate an object's affordances and, in a sense, aiding it to take its own shape; "[helping] the object... to make itself by its proper means."

We can also turn to Don Norman. He holds a slightly different view, which he articulates with the statement "technology comes first." Norman, commonly regarded as the 'father' of user experience design, says that a product's design starts with the current state-of-the-art of technology, and not with the user's requirements and needs. We use available technologies, apply them to create new products, and only then do we retrofit those products to the users' needs. By this logic, the designer's job is to bridge those two ends between technology and the end user, again by foreseeing the affordances of a product— being able to predict how a particular design would be put to use.

Reading up on different designers' arguments made me rethink a few assumptions I previously held.

If design was all about responding to user requirements, couldn't anyone do it? What is it that a designer adds? Expertise? Knowledge of ergonomics and understanding of affordances, ethnography, human psychology?

If design was all about responding to user requirements, wouldn't everything look the same? This is another thing Natasha Jen warns of, in an interview she gave for the One More Question podcast, that user testing (though useful for validating functionality) carries the risk of converging towards the average, towards mediocrity.

So, what did I take away from my findings? One of the most important things I can do when producing work as a designer is to develop a holistic understanding of the problem space: not just through eliciting the "user requirements," but gaining a deeper understanding of the "history, precedents" and intricacies of the domain of the problem I am trying to solve. Besides this, it is important to place emphasis on craftsmanship, and artistry, while being confident to produce output that is opinionated rather than 'converging' to a safe option. Exploring, rather than constraining: working against the tendency (identified by Jony Ive) to 'gravitate towards the tangible.'