By now we all know more or less what has driven us into the current 'recessionary environment.' (Their words are so poetic). CDOs, SIVs, LBOs, Private Equity, all enabled by cheap-to-free capital that originated under the mattresses of America's poorest and often first time home-buyers. Unforgivable, indeed, but at least now we know what we are dealing with.
From here, though, we now have a HUGE opening for designers and design thinking. Designers love constraints. Without constraints the cleverest parts of our brains are not awakened. As myriad crises—ecological, political (perhaps not for much longer), religious (unfortunately probably forever), and now financial—build and become the norm, there has never been as critical a time for design thinking to be at the center of things civic and commercial.
Design thinking is abductive. It asks, what might be? What hasn't been tried yet? It is not, though, willy-nilly, do a bit of this then do a bit of that. It is, at its core, research-grounded and empirical. At the same time, it is humble, in that it assumes that the first go at solving a problem might be really good but might also be crap. It starts from the point of view that users need to have a crack at experiencing it, then tell the designers how it is going. Subsequent iterations are built out, and then on and on.
Design thinking assumes that we never quite get there, but we get a bit better all the time. Contrast this with the DIC (Decider-in-Chief), who has made up his mind, knows he's wrong about many things, but can't help himself because he has no humility and has become the world's ultimate Anti-Designer.
Proposition: Scratch the Department of Homeland Security (whatever that is and whoever is there), and replace it with a Secretary of Design, who heads up the Department of Design Thinking.
Steve Jobs in '08
The Butcher
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