In Chapter 11 of 17 in his 2011 Capture Your Flag interview with host Erik Michielsen, designer and educator Jon Kolko interprets design thinking. He talks about the rise of "Design Thinking" philosophy, specifically using design methods to solve strategic business and organizational problems. Kolko notes its shortcomings, specifically how design "doing" must complement design "thinking". He notes the "doing" part is often thought of as menial - commoditizing and offshoring product design for mass production overseas. Kolko argues against this, noting overseas designers will solve local design problems. Because design is connected to culture, problems must be locally solved, or at least locally engaged. Kolko is the executive director of design strategy at venture accelerator, Thinktiv (www.thinktiv.com). He is the founder and director of the Austin School for Design (www.ac4d.com). Previously, he worked at frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). He has authored multiple books on design. Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

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Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What is design thinking and where did you learn it?

Jon Kolko: Huh…I’m not entirely sure I know what design thinking is but I know what popular culture is starting to refer to it as; I suppose it’s using the power of design to solve large scale thoughtful problems.

My problem with that approach is that it implies that you can do design thinking without doing design doing, that as if there’s somehow two separate things. You can’t, they are the same thing and the designerly approach is always one that involves thinking and doing. So, presently, that’s – it’s en vogue to describe a design thinking approach to problem solving and you can credit you know Bruce Nussbaum’s use of the word in Businessweek or any of the – the D school folks over at Stanford as hyping design thinking and – and props to them because now it is common vernacular in the language of business owners--this design thinking stuff. My problem is that I learned design thinking when I was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon, my first class was called design thinking and so – it’s not necessarily anything new and it’s just a small piece of the larger puzzle and there’s a real – there’s a real potential for problem in teaching design thinking in MBA curriculum – one or two classes and saying, ‘Okay, you are now ready to do design.’ And I’ve seen that fall apart miserably because one isn’t ready to do design with simply one or two classes in the way that design could be applied to large scale organizational change or to large scale cultural change. You really do need to have – have skills in making a thing whether it’s a physical thing a digital thing or a systematic service oriented thing.

Just thinking about it isn’t gonna get you any sort of impact and so the larger discourse that occurs around design thinking needs to take into account design doing as well. I think there’s a fear amongst a lot design practitioners that a focus on design doing tends toward commodification, it can be commoditized and then off-shored and then will never – we’ll never hear from it again.

That may or may prove to be true, I feel pretty strongly, it can’t be although we’re starting to see a great deal of Chinese and Indian designers that’s awesome, they’re gonna solve Chinese and Indian design problems and they’re gonna do it with the rich context of China and India. The problems in the United States and Mexico and Canada respectively have United States, Mexican and Canadian context and culture to deal with and because design is so fundamentally and inexplicably connected with culture, I don’t – I don’t think you can offshore that, put another way I think one needs to immerse themselves in the culture of the problem that they’re solving.

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