Thread by @cwodtke

It was design for a service economy: memorable, saleable, repeatable, apparently universal, and slightly vague in the details. | n+1 | nplusonemag.com/?p=11657

"Horst Rittel had convincingly described the folly of trying to define or rationalize design’s “how”; IDEO’s template for design thinking brought back the “how” with a vengeance."

“Gainesville is not a Silicon Valley startup,” one resident told the Alligator, the newspaper of the University of Florida. “Looking good in a magazine is not a marker of true success.”

Beneath most problems (“competitiveness”), Horst Rittel would remind us, lie wickeder problems. “Design thinking” can’t solve the wicked problems in Gainesville’s inequality: poverty, income disparity, structural racism, environmental injustice, unregulated market capitalism.

You face wicked problems by struggling with them, not by solutioning them. You argue, you iterate, you fail, you grieve, you fight.

so good nplusonemag-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/issue-35/revie…

Horst Rittel believed design could entail that: it could mean fighting one’s way to an honest and collaborative approach to a problem of genuine complexity. Anyone could participate in such a fight. But there was no one method to get there and no guarantee that it would work out.

"This more recent vogue for design thinking seems more insidious because it promises so much more. It promises a creative and delightful escape from difficulty, a caper through the Post-it Notes to innovative solutions."
nplusonemag-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/issue-35/revie…

"Design may come in an elegant package, but it doesn’t always make things right."