Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I

Lucy Kimbell's 'Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I' reviews how the term design thinking, originally used to describe how professional designers solve problems, was taken up over the 2000s by management educators and consultancies as something of value to firms trying to innovate and to societies trying to bring about change. The paper identifies three common accounts of design thinking, as a cognitive style, as a general theory of design, and as a resource for organizations, and argues that each rests on problematic assumptions. These include a false separation between thinking and knowing on one hand and acting in the world on the other; a generalized notion of design thinking that ignores how diverse and historically situated designers' actual practices and institutions are; and an account that gives the individual designer too central a role as the agent of designing. Published in Design and Culture, 3(3), 285 to 306. Credits: Kimbell, L. (2011). Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I. Design and Culture, 3(3), 285–306. http://doi.org/10.2752/175470811X13071166525216