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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

I used to work for a company that makes CAD software for architects.

Quite a lot of our customers and potential customers that I'd bump into at conferences and the like were insufferable. They think of themselves as "designers" not "architects", and they wore black turtlenecks and talk about Changing the World through the power of Design. It's like a cult. No one can talk specifics, no one can point to a design that will change the world, just Design in general, and they even have their little uniforms.

I had to sit through so many goddamn talks about Design Thinking and how it's Revolutionizing Everything.

Three years in that job and I still don't have a clue was Design Thinking is. It reminds me more than anything of those useless "collaboration frameworks" that HR keeps coming up with.

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Architects live in a weird world. Putting a lot of effort into puffing yourself up via dress, language, charisma, and arrogance is tolerated and to some extent is even the norm. People tolerate it in their peers because they all understand how much can depend on their ability to impress people who have no way to judge their professional skill. Unlike software development, the profession of architecture appreciates architects who enhance its glamor and mystique. It's a weird thing, because they understand how ridiculous it is, but they also encounter clients who expect it. Sometimes they'll look down on someone who enjoys it too much or inhabits it too thoroughly, but at the same time, they respect it as a professional skill that they would use if they had it.

I empathize with that as I went to grad school in a school of architecture. Ended up specializing in software in their department of urban planning. Calling yourself a designer instead of an architect is just a way to be more inclusive to landscape architects, interior designers, material engineers, and everyone else who works in a the design software space.

Design thinking is just a concept for thinking about problems. Whether you're a plumber or a fashion designer, solving your problem with software first is the antithesis of design thinking. It's just a philosophy of first principles built for anyone who creates physical or digital products.

> Three years in that job and I still don't have a clue was Design Thinking is.

The things you create must have a form derived from how the people that interact with it think and what problem they are trying to solve.

I'd say it's Bauhaus adapted to complex products, but then, Bauhaus themselves were just adapting the idea too. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody has some source for the idea from Ancient Greece.

I wonder how much money I'd be making by now if I always wore nothing but black turtlenecks. There seems to be something to it in terms of convincing others that one is more competent than they are.

I once worked for a company that was kind of like this for Agile. They had an old legacy app that was the cash cow. The next gen thingy was agile w/ a capital A we'd say but we really just wasted a lot of time doing agile ceremonies and other nonsense.

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