Tim Leberecht over at Frog Design, wrote an interesting article the other day relaying his thoughts on “design thinking” and the love affair the marketing world is having with it. Tim claims that it’s not something new, and has been around for a long time. Go check it out!
Here’s the comment I left, which I’d like to share with you:
Indeed, design thinking has become a buzzword in itself within the marketing community. Yet its essence has been around for ages - understanding customer needs, wants, desires and translating them into product concepts that are market, technically, and financially feasible. Then testing them before final launch to make improvements. On a similar vein lie the brand communications. Now all of this has been a standard defacto process for CPG, cars, and industrial products for decades.
So why has design thinking taken hold seemingly recently? While we can attribute some of it to a lack of qualified personnel with creative thinking skills and deep-customer orientations - industrial designers or not - in many small to medium-sized firms, I have to also consider the growth of the IT and related industries in HCI over the past 30 years. Many marketers have come in to support the communication and sales aspect of this business, but the product dev has largely been left to engineers. Individuals like usability professionals that can effectively act as a conduit between both realms are not seeked out enough.
Innovation, design, and trend agencies have become ever more popular. Their books and articles in the last 10 years have brought their consultative thinking to larger audiences which are eating all the ethnography and usability insights they can chew, believing it’s all magical wonder. In many respects this is great. Much traditional marketing has been limited to portfolio management, growth-share matrices, SWOT and five forces analyses, advertising, and more. Concept development and psychology are often neglected areas of NPD when taught in business education.
But of course there is a lot of hype, and marketing has effectively branded design thinking as a savior to the business world. While I admit there has been an overglorification to some extents, I believe also that it has helped build an increasing awareness of what design management brings to the business table, when for many companies there’s been an empty neglected seat sitting there the whole time.
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What do do YOU think?
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