Preparing for and runing a Design Thinking, Gamestorming and Creative workshop

> To everyone who thinks design thinking is just the obvious way to do things

Things always seem obvious as someone explains them, but not when you're wondering what to do without prior experience or knowledge of what works.

I have an idea of designs I like, I have no idea how to go through and replicate those designs necessarily and they may not be what my boss or the client wants. I've been led down paths of building awful designs by clients, but they're paying so... I just do what they say, till they realize what we realized long before the design was implemented (and trust me, no amount of telling them works).

> In the same way that we cannot see anything innovative about "agile" without understanding the standard that was "waterfall."

Yup. The most important thing to understand about "waterfall" that it was a strawman describing a hypothetical bad practice, created to contrast against better ways of managing projects. People who failed at reading comprehension ran off with this and started talking about waterfall as if it was a real thing everyone was doing.

> With "design thinking", you would not start with brainstorming "ideas". You would brainstorm problems to solve. (People not putting on their turn signals). Then you would go out and see if that really is a problem, and maybe interview people. If its not a problem, you would discard it without anyone voting on it.

This is barely "focus on problems to solve instead of particular solutions", and "verify the problem is actually a problem". Not following this is a trap everyone falls into more or less often, but alone that doesn't a design ideology make. We don't need the capitalized Design Thinking™ for this.

I've been involved in Design Thinking workshops, and my take is this: like Agile™, it's a core of good concepts. Not new concepts, just concepts that a random person may follow, but not figure out to name them and consider them explicitly. That core has accrued a large layer of nonsense, Capitalized Phrases, and other trinkets that make it look Serious. Is there a value in this? Not in terms of applying it to solving your problems. But definitely in forcing common sense down the throat of a company. Managing your bosses is unfortunately a thing, and a Named, Serious Methodology is frequently a useful vector to sneak in some reason that would otherwise be shot down by management.

Every time "design thinking" comes up the responses around here are similar: That's it's an obvious and somewhat natural process.

I think that's part of the point. It's a natural process for creative people with development experience and critical thinking skills. But those people are often not in charge of projects. Those people in charge need these concepts formalised into a process to even consider it. In my experience, many development frameworks come from developers trying to get average managers to sort their shit out.

I witnessed time and time again that if you can give something a catchy name and somehow promise that doing / having that thing gives you an edge over someone else, you can make a lot of money.

I should try to make a course out of this single realisation (by repeating the same thing over and over) and call it "brand thinking, the most usefull skill a product manager can learn in the digital age". Or something.

It probably already exists.

As much as I agree, given the sheer lack of ability in lots of companies to "have a think about things", giving it a proper noun might actually make it enough of "an thing" to allow it to happen.

Of course, if you're paying an external agency a hefty fee to run the workshop, that also makes it even more of "an thing" too.

Packaging things in a process and giving it a fancy name makes it easier to push (both in the sense of selling something for money and to sell it internally as something to implement), and the process might actually help to get results by making it harder for people to skip thinking about some things?

I went to a Design Thinking workshop during an internship and while it felt a bit odd and oversold, I also think the process adds something over just saying "think about it!"

Thinking is badly defined and can mean all kinds of things to different people. One key aspect of design thinking is that it tries to get a group of people to actually think about the same problem.

> How did "having a think about things" get its own proper noun?

I thought that was called "Philosophy" :)

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