- Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo
Although it is often advertised as a method that is as innovative as the solutions it promises to produce, it bears an uncanny resemblance to an earlier model of problem-solving, celebrated in the 1970s and 1980s for the superior solutions it was supposed to produce. Called the “rational-experimental” approach to problem solving, it was a simplified and popularized version of the scientific method, in much the same way that design thinking is a stylized — some say “dumbed down” — version of the methods designers use. It, too, was enthusiastically embraced by managers and policy makers, and was invoked to reshape practices in firms and government.….
They turn the everyday ability to solve a problem into a rarified practice, limited only to those who self-consciously follow a specialized methodology.