Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle

Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle by Lee Vinsel in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2018.

But significant change in art, technology, science, and culture starts by building on what has come before, not by throwing it away. In jazz, Bird, Coltrane, and Herbie Hancock all spent years understanding the tradition — thousands of hours of listening and practice — before making their own breakthroughs. In computer programming, there is an idea called "Chesterton’s fence," "the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."

What they cleverly illustrate is that design thinking is the act of taking ideas that already exist, sexing them up with a bit of rouge, and putting them in other words. Typically, people with a bad case of the DTs do this without knowing they’re doing it — this is called "innovation." The historians David Edgerton and Will Thomas have argued that by eliding whole traditions of thought, such bogus novelty claims actually produce ignorance.

Design thinkers and the UIF teach a thoroughly adolescent conception of culture.

Edmund Burke once wrote, "You had all of these advantages … but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you." The brain-rotting illness of innovation-speak leads us to see everything around us as objects in our way, and to overvalue our own uniqueness.