The excellent Alice Rawsthorn looks at IDEO designer Tim Brown’s new book in the New York Times and tries to decide if his ideas about design thinking hold any water:

Designers now also tackle intangible strategic and behavioral issues, such as helping businesses and government to organize themselves more efficiently and make their services more user-friendly. Mr. Brown describes this as the shift from old-school “design,” which he regards as “technology-centered,” to the “human-centered” discipline of “design thinking” — a term coined by David Kelley, who co-founded IDEO in 1991 originally to develop tech products for clients in Silicon Valley.Design thinking is an elusive concept, as Mr. Brown admits. His punchiest definition is that it is “about more than style.” In a nutshell, it involves the application of the traditional skills that designers develop, often without realizing, to identify problems and invent solutions in collaboration with experts from other disciplines, their clients and the people who will use the results.

Redefining a Profession (New York Times)

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