“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” – George Box
I’ve said it myself: “Design thinking1 is dead.”
I wasn’t the first, and I won’t be the last. In fact just today I saw another passionate Linkedin post lamenting the centrality of humans in ‘human centered design.’ “What we should be practicing is “‘life centered design!”2
Yes. Of course.
There have been several fantastic deconstructions of design thinking and human centered design over the last few years;3 I mostly agree with the critiques and fully embrace the proposed suggestions. These have been good conversations highlighting inequity and the perpetuation of destructive capitalistic tendencies in design paradigms and practices. But I fear these conversations are no longer serving the design community and have regressed into polemic banalities in search of clicks and shares. I also believe these conversations miss the point – specifically that design is innately an epistemological and phenomenological practice – an embodied web of beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors from which something new comes into existence. As Jessica Helfand says, “design is to make things known.” As such, no singular model will ever capture the fullness and nuance of Design, nor prove adequate for discovering the most preferable of possibilities.4
So what do we do with design models? First, we acknowledge that all models are wrong, but some are useful. We shouldn’t toss them out. Secondly, we acknowledge that, despite our best efforts, even the useful ones are incomplete and far from universal. We need diversity in our processes and methodologies. Third, we shift the conversation from design to imagination, and recategorize design models as tools to be collected and counted among a diverse toolset5 that we use in the practice of Applied Imagination.
Let’s break this down. ‘Applied’ generally means put to use. ‘Imagination’ generally means the ability of the mind to form new ideas.6 So Applied Imagination means ‘to put the mind’s ability to form new ideas to use.’ Now think about all the ways our minds form new ideas – from aimless wandering and daydreaming to highly regimented practices, there is an almost infinite amount of ways we do this with a vast array of disciplinary and contextual flavors.
To practice Applied Imagination is liberate oneself from the disciplinary constraints of one tradition of praxis. Why limit yourself to the process of design thinking or life centered design when you could also encounter radical possibility in the form of play, or day dreaming, or grief therapy, or somatics, or poetry, or farming, or philosophy, or dance, or artificial intelligence? In this practice, no process, method, tool, ritual, or context is out of bounds – there are no disciplinary containers that predetermine the shape and size of our approaches to forming new ideas.
I believe the disciplinary transcendence of Applied Imagination is desperately needed. Not only does Applied Imagination reconcile the debate of which design model is best (as the answer is purely ‘yes, we need it all’), it also democratizes any creative endeavor – while some have had more practice, imagination is innate to all humans. To imagine does not require a certificate from a “d.School.”
So stop saying you do ‘design thinking’ or ‘human centered design’ and merely say you practice Applied Imagination. Design thinking is just a tool, one of many, that you can use in the pursuit of framing and solving complex and systemic problems. You can also use other methods and practices from a diverse array of creative disciplines, social sciences, and other forms of making the unknown known. In doing so, you will find your design practice richer, more diverse, and more relevant.
RESOURCES FOR FURTHER READING
Thomas Wendt, Design for Dasein
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From
Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create
Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World
Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy
The word “design” throughout this post should mostly be read as a verb, not a noun. I’m not concerned here with the ‘designed thing’ so much as I am concerned with the activity of design in an enterprise context.
I’ve written my own critique and proposed “dream thinking.”
My post about love, language, and the disclosure of reality may be helpful context here, along with my post about imagination and evidence in decision making
This “compendium” of design models by Hugh Dubberly is a pretty fantastic collection.
Don’t read “mind” here as “brain.” This difference deserves much more explanation which cannot be unpacked here. If you would like to explore this further, I suggest starting with Evan Thompson’s book ‘Mind in Life.’ In short, “mind” is an emergent property of the brain and body’s interaction with the environment.