Codifying design thinking threatens it’s central value of flexibility
Fred Collopy has published a post on Fast Company discussing the similiarities of the emerging design thinking discourse and that of systems thinking, a management-based holistic discourse with resonances in complexity theory.
Fred’s central argument is that design thinking faces an internal threat from the normative desire to codify itself. As a new domain seeks to establish itself, it begins to construct expert knowledge that is arcane to non-practitioners. This codification plays an important social role in legitimising the expert knowledge, and not insignificantly creates a barrier to entry.
Fred argues that this drive to codification in systems thinking led ultimately to an unwieldiness that prevented mainstream acceptance. He warns that design thinking should seek to avoid this trap by “building an arsenal” rather than codifying a single set of principles.
This argument makes some sense to me. The codification of expert knowledge creates an unwieldiness and defensiveness that I think is the anti-thesis of what design thinking should be. If this movement were to emerge as simply a successor to the previous management fad, it would be an immense failure of a singular opportunity to introduce a level of ambiguity and flexibility into our toolkit.
The drive to codification appears to make sense, it seems that what’s needed is to talk the same language, to agree and to build a single edifice. However, in doing that we’d be creating that edifice on the grave of what design thinking can represent, which is the capacity for creativity that rationalism would seek to deny.
What I’d argue we need is to re-validate something of a black box, one that is considerably smaller, de-centralised and democratised, but a blackbox none the less. If design thinking represents anything for me, it’s the power of imagination, hope and inspiration. The ability to consider the future as flexible. Beyond that central thought, codification is a threat to flexibility, and flexibility is the central value that design thinking offers to our toolkits.
Comments (8)
Fred Collopy on 2009/06/13:
Let’s refer to what you have identified in your second last paragraph as the “edifice complex”. What do you think?