Blog #2: Is Design Thinking BS?

After watching Jen’s talk on Design Thinking and Barnfield’s perspectives that tend to contradict with her points, I feel like both of them have made really good points in their own words.

In Barnfield’s first point arguing on Jen’s claim about Design Thinking being nothing more than Post-It Notes and Hexagons, I totally agree with him. Barnfield has made a clear argument saying whether it is Design Thinking or not, every designer has to go through the process of criticism. Without criticism, we all acknowledge that we could never be able to proceed further in our career.

Moving forward to Jen’s second point, claiming that during the process of Design Thinking, critiquing is subtracted completely from it. Nonetheless, Barnfield goes against this point saying critiquing in Design Thinking is now embedded by making assumptions on the end-user experience about the design. I, again, agree with Bernfield’s claim on this. Receiving ideas from your fellow colleagues doesn’t necessarily prove to be a bad thing in the design process, but quite subjective in my opinion. As Barnfield states in his article, your work could never avoid biases from the audience, nonetheless, it’s better to receive outsider’s perspectives on your work than those who are close to you. It proves to be more objective.

Jen’s last point focuses on the fact that it is “messiness”, which metaphorically means “displaying your work”, that drives a successful design project. And messiness does not play a part in the process of Design Thinking. It seems in Bernfield’s article, he misinterprets the point where Jen demonstrates on messiness, stating Jen assumes those who seek creativity need to be messy in order to be innovative. What Jen really means to say is, end-users need to see evidence of how a project or a product comes to be, how the designer/engineer/scientist develops his ideas to the outcome.

In conclusion, Jen and Bernfield have both made really good points on whether Design Thinking is really needed to develop a completed concept. From this, I am able to see both what Design Thinking could bring to the table and what it couldn’t to apply to my future design career.