Design Thinking: A Solution to Fracture-Critical Systems

“Design think­ing is prac­ti­cal. That’s its hall­mark. It’s not orna­men­tal at all. Design is fun­da­men­tal­ly tied to pro­duc­ing some­thing that’s use­ful. And that’s where the pro­to­typ­ing and the iter­a­tive process comes in. Design moves from think­ing to mak­ing to think­ing to mak­ing, in a con­tin­u­ous cycle.Design think­ing is also about opti­miz­ing. Design is the process of cre­at­ing solu­tions that address the great­est num­ber of issues—with the least num­ber of steps. It’s the ele­gant solu­tion. “– Tom Fish­er via DMI News & Views — View­points — Design Think­ing: A Solu­tion to Frac­ture-Crit­i­cal Sys­tems

I real­ly appre­ci­ate many aspects of this inter­view with Tom Fish­er because it touch­es upon mul­ti­ple sub­jects I have become pas­sion­ate about recent­ly. I am so tempt­ed to quote almost every­thing he says in this post, but I’ll lim­it it to this one. I high­ly rec­om­mend read­ing the inter­view in its entire­ty to see the scope of prob­lems design think­ing has the poten­tial to solve.Over the past 12 months, I have been on a jour­ney to find out exact­ly where I want to move with my career and how to get there. I found myself strug­gling with a lack of pas­sion at work and felt boxed in with a set of lim­it­ed design prob­lems set before me each day.Many peo­ple think the only role of the design­er is to “make things look pret­ty”, and that can be quite frus­trat­ing. I have always seen design, and my role as a design­er, as more than adding the fin­ish­ing touch­es on some­thing to make it look bet­ter. The projects I enjoy most are the ones where I have input at the begin­ning and get to fol­low the project all the way through. My inter­ests also lie beyond pack­ag­ing, web­sites and col­lat­er­al. I enjoy the cre­ative process and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to come up with inno­v­a­tive solutions.I real­ized in order to move beyond this set of lim­i­ta­tions, I need to fur­ther my edu­ca­tion in a way that will pre­pare me, as Fish­er says, “to work in an econ­o­my that increas­ing­ly needs us not to design things, but to apply design think­ing skills to a whole range of prob­lems and activ­i­ties” (ok, I lied and quot­ed him one more time). This is why I am going to grad­u­ate school this fall at SCAD to get my MA in Design Man­age­ment.