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I find in interesting that, to the question of "can someone explain in plain English what is Design Thinking?", your answer is a link to a Stanford crash course, and some story about a company that produces vapes, with a link to a long-winded article about them.

This makes me strongly suspect that Design Thinking is indeed BS.

Yes.

> explain in plain English

doesn't generally mean 'download a deck of cards' from Stanford.

I would argue design thinking had less to do with Juul's success than, say, quality product design from multiple product iterations, quality hardware, and quality electrical engineering that can be mass produced like an Apple product.

Quality that starts with the electronics and ends with an appealing form factor and sleek fit and finish. Of course the UX needs to be thoughtful and as least frustrating as possible, which arguably has more to do with your typical interaction design and usability testing methods in the realm of UX design and research.

Juul combined great product design, engineering, product iteration, and support from management from the top down to make the best product possible that is typically seen in design driven companies such as Apple.

I think design thinking definitely has the power to break down silos in organizations with heavy engineering culture but you need the right org chart and executive support to create game changing products no matter how much 'design thinking' goes on behind closed doors. I agree it is a hot marketing buzzword sold to clients to win business as mentioned by others, and that we need to acknowledge the fact that you need executive management support at the highest levels or you're dead in the water.

Was design thinking responsible for the Tesla Model 3, or was it more about innovation in tech and manufacturing combined with quality electrical and hardware engineering + funding driven by a leader with a vision hell-bent on creating a game changing product and fostering a culture conducive to that end goal.

> I think the real skill involved is Visual Thinking. Good old fashioned pencil and paper flow state ideation. If there is one practice I wish I had spent more time acquiring it would definitely be illustration / drafting ;)

You hear a lot about design in corporate discourse these days. Visual art tools like mind mapping, whiteboard animation, and even storyboards are getting prime time in the context of business.

This is partly legitimate. Sketching is one of the best ways to understand complex concepts and come up with new ideas. Both are valuable skills. But organizations also love to boast about how much design-oriented they are. Talking about "design thinking" or "mindful design" and so forth doesn't mean anything changed. Fads come and go.

Today techniques like boards, graphs and sketches are making a comeback within companies. How much is hype versus how much is due to people unwilling to focus for a long time on something? Visual concepts tend to get the point across fast. It's great as long as it is not to the detriment of in-depth analysis.

As an illustrator/designer, companies saw you as a disposable executant who made things pretty. That is, versus a writer who was more on the conceptual side of things and understood the overarching strategy. Not sure the designers gained any more respect in the process but that is another story. It will change again.

I can tell you speak from deep experience, great insights thanks!

I do not mean to attack you, but my initial reaction is similar to OP - this just reeks of BS.

> How Juul, founded on a life-saving mission, became the most embattled startup of 2018

A life-saving mission? They are currently being banned by the FDA, the organization that Trump just defanged, for their sale of questionably safe products targeted at children.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/health/juul-ecigarettes-v...

Did they really target children, or just create flavours that were desired by both adults and children?

What flavour should they make that don’t (theoretically) appeal the children? Beer? Anchovies? Broccoli? Mesquite BBQ?

Adults can like bubblegum or sweet and fruity flavours. I know I ask for them from my dentist for my cleanings instead of mint.

Yeah it's odd that Green Apple Smirnoff Ice can continue to exist and yet flavored JUUL is banned.

The differences in addictivity between alcohol and nicotine seem like a pretty significant difference

Except alcohol is directly harmful, nicotine is barely harmful.

And nobody has ever died from nicotine withdrawal. Or smashed their car after inhaling nicotine.

Literally tens of millions of people have died because of nicotine addiction, so your comment is so frankly ridiculous it doesn't even deserve a more considered response.

That's not entirely fair because there's a distinction between nicotine and smoking.

The method of delivery killed those nicotine addicts. None of those nicotine addicts died as a direct result of what nicotine does to the body. Combusting tobacco and inhaling the smoke is what killed them (ignoring chewing or snorting).

If I used a patch, I can continue my nicotine addiction without fear of lung disease. I can't do the same with smoking.

There's no method of delivering a habitual psychoactive dose of alcohol that doesn't cause harm.

But all said and done, I'm not sure vaping nicotine, with all those flavours, has been proven safe. There's a lot of talk about popcorn lung.

I read their comment as making a distinction between nicotine intake of arbitrary delivery system vs smoke inhalation of a tobacco + MAOI panoply ('cigarettes'). I can envision a world where nicotine addicts don't have to hurt themselves nearly as much to get their fix. I say that with the disclaimer that I don't think that makes it good, per se - just pragmatically a lot better.

Maybe ban advertising for that as well?

Culture is complex and produces inconsistent behavior. That doesn't mean we should try to do better.

You have a point on the flavors but the problems with the marketing in Juul’s early years we’re pretty evident... https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2018/11/16/t...

The SRITA archive is pretty damning

It doesn’t seem any more damning than typical alcohol advertising.

> His archived Juul ads are filled with attractive young models socializing and flirtatiously sharing the flash-drive shaped device, displaying behavior like dancing to club-like music and clothing styles more characteristic of teens than mature adults.

In a country where you have to be 21+ to get into a club, what club music is characteristic of teens instead of adults?

> It doesn’t seem any more damning than typical alcohol advertising.

That strikes me as a pretty low bar. People used to say the same thing about cigarette ads. Which in retrospect were horrific. I once chatted with some people researching at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library: https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/

They had story after story about the depravity of the tobacco advertising industry. The one that stuck with me was the advertising campaign targeted at developmentally disabled adults. Once hooked they were very loyal consumers.

Yeah I'm not so sure Juul is that special.

There are tons of competitors in what is effectively a new and disruptive space with tons of potential upside by re-legitimizing nicotine addiction.

For whatever reason, they're winning, but there are so many factors beyond design that I'd be very reluctant to postulate this was the decisive factor.

Marketing, branding, operations, access to large markets, talent, social proximity to 'free press', soft lobbying (i.e. close relationships to various institutions through hiring or serendipity etc.).

> relegitimizing nicotine addiction

You should visit Europe where smoking doesn't have nearly the amount of stigmatization it does in America.

There are smoking rooms within my office in Germany, and the rooms smell like an American restaurant circa ‘95.

Yes, I lived in Germany, it's a throwback. But your comment makes it seem as though the Euros have some bohemian progressive outlook in the issue; this is not nude sunbathing, this is smoking, it kills people for sure :).

I'm not sure whether you can generalise over Europe that easily. There's quite the stigma on smoking in the Netherlands, which has for the largest part gained a foothold after banning smoking in working places (including cafés and bars). I haven't heard of a Dutch workplace offering special smoking rooms so far.

Can you smoke in Dutch bars? One thing that I was horrified by in the Netherlands was people smoking right at entrances to buildings. In the US, you have to be 20 ft (~6 meters) from entrances when you smoke.

Smoking in general has been prohibited for a few years. Many bars still have special smoking rooms, but they are on the verge of being prohibited as well. Smoking near entrances is, indeed, still often allowed, but that too is getting more and more pushback, and the number of places that allow it is clearly decreasing.

Point being: there's a clear stigma against smoking here, and wherever we're "behind" in terms of pushing back against smoking, we are heading in the same direction.

Don’t generalise Germany to the whole of Europe. As a Swede that just came back from a visit to Germany I was actually appalled by how much you smoke there.

Nicotine delivered through e-cigarettes is not even remotely as addictive as classical cigarettes. I also know 3 people that stopped using cigarettes using vapes, 2 of which stopped altogether.

It's the same nicotine, and a nearly identical delivery method, and it's just as addictive - if not more so in some cases. The reason I believe it can more addictive is because of the constancy of vaping for some: with cigarettes, you 'have a break' and go out now and again. With vaping it can be 'all the time'. The higher frequency makes for ready addiction.

Using people who are 'trying to quit smoking and using vaping as a mechanism' is a poor measure of determining the addictivity of vaping because people are already trying to quit.

Personally, I quit 'light smoking' with vaping rather easily.

But then I took up vaping for about a year, and quitting was brutally hard. I was not even a heavy vaper. It consumed my entire body.

Quitting smoking I would get 'pangs' or 'acute' points where I wanted to have a cigarette - if I could get past that, it would be fine. With vaping ... it was like a constant pain. I think this was related to the nature of usage.

And I was using a log mg vape, I could have easily moved up.

Vaping is a really, really bad idea. Though the nicotine addiction is not nearly so hazardous alone, it's far worse or addicting than say, a coffee addiction - particularly for young people this is a bad idea.

I've quit smoking involuntarily thanks to vaping: A friend told me to try vaping since he thought I might enjoy the 'manual part' (wrapping coils, mixing liquids).

After 2 weeks of vaping I wanted to smoke a cig again. It tasted so awful that I instantly stopped smoking cigarettes and continued vaping (I still never intended to stop consuming nicotine, but the positive effects of not smoking were showing pretty immediately)

My coils drifted into the subohm range pretty fast, mechmods and 100W+ boxes was what I needed to produce cubic meters of vape. But upping the volume of vaped liquid allowed me to reduce the relative nicotine contents (improving the taste of the liquid further) up to the point where I started asking myself whom for I'm consuming nicotine.

Stopping to vape was pretty easy at that point.

Never looked back.

Fully concur with both comments - for those who actively want to quit smoking, vaping can really help.

It just opens the pandora's box to youth vaping. And also full-on vaping addiction as well.

If I was king I would ban advertising for vaping other than as smoking cessation. In Quebec where I live , you can't even have vaping products in the window. All of the signage and rules are strictly limited, much like the limited packaging on cigarettes.

It's amazing to see that if you separate brand and advertising from a product, how hard it is for companies to be successful. Tells you a lot about human behaviour!

I agree that it's not a good habit to start, but my wife quit smoking by switching to a vape and gradually reducing the nicotine to zero (over years). So all I can say is mileage varies on that.

It's great if you want to quit and it helped me too. But it's not great if you just start, it's not great if you are a teenager who will dismiss parents or older people's advice to not get into it, just because it's cool and they know what they're doing.

Anecdotes are fun, but we observe higher degrees of nicotine use among young people now than we did before vaping exploded.