Design Thinking is a popular and, sometimes, controversial topic in the design community.

If your work relates to innovation, you probably have been part of a conversation about design thinking or will be soon. To navigate, understand, and improve the discussion, we need a repertoire of perspectives. Here are two interesting ones:

“The divisiveness of design thinking” by Jon Kolko

Read on http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2018/the-divisiveness-of-design-thinking

Two paths of design are diverging. There are people and firms practicing design thinking by making things, driven by practitioners aware of the history of making things and skilled in the craft of making things. And then there are people and firms practicing design thinking by, well, thinking about things. The difference is profound.

“The core of ‘design thinking’ and its application” by Kees Dorst

Read on https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2011.07.006

Often, in popular literature, many disparate, vaguely creative activities are combined under the label of ‘Design Thinking’. We hope to have shown in this analysis that the design professions stand for quite specific and deliberate ways of reasoning, and that design practices can interface with organisations on different levels, requiring the application of different kinds, levels and layers of design practice (see Section 3) each requiring specific designerly abilities. Confusion about these application levels seems to be partly to blame for the general confusion about both the nature and the merit of ‘Design Thinking’.