Do you know what design thinking is?
Your answer to that question will depend largely on where you sit. Design thinking is often centrally associated with the fabled design and consulting firm IDEO, most famous for crafting Apple’s first mouse and the look of the Palm V personal digital assistant. But in recent years, it is Stanford University’s design school (or “d.school” — their asinine punctuation, not mine) that has become most associated with design thinking. IDEO will charge you $399 for a self-paced, video-based design-thinking course, “Insights for Innovation.” Stanford will charge you $12,600 for a four-day “Design Thinking Bootcamp” called, likewise, “From Insights to Innovation.” Clearly, there’s money to be made from design thinking.
If you’re confused, you’re not alone. Confusion is a common reaction to a “movement” that’s little more than floating balloons of jargon. If design thinking (for short, let’s call it the DTs) merely involved bilking some deluded would-be entrepreneurs, well — no harm no foul. The problem is that faddists and cult-followers are pushing the DTs as a reform for all of higher education. In the last couple of years, The Chronicle has published articles with titles like “Can Design Thinking Redesign Higher Ed?” and “Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?” The only reasonable answer to these questions is “Oh hell no.”
Both articles feature DT enthusiasts taking pilgrimages to Stanford’s d.school. In “Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?” Peter N. Miller, a professor of history and dean at Bard Graduate Center, explains the d.school’s various origins. First, there is the product-design program in Stanford’s engineering school. Second, there is the Esalen Institute, a retreat center in Big Sur and home to the Human Potential Movement and other New Age nonsense. Stanford community members started hanging out there in the 1960s, where they picked up terms like “creativity” and “empathy.” Finally, there is the Stanford design alum David Kelly, who got deeply into the empathy thing and started IDEO in 1978.
After founding the company, Kelly was an occasional instructor at Stanford. In 2005, he approached the software billionaire and IDEO fan-client Hasso Plattner, with, as Miller writes, “the idea of creating a home for design thinking.” Plattner donated $35 million, inaugurating the d.school, or what you might call “IDEO.edu.”