Designer’s Thinking or Design Thinking. Where do we fall?

Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash

Today, the number of designers around the globe are more than ever before in history. And design thinking is more coveted by designers than by any other professional. Despite this, designs continue to fail in delivering a human-centric user experience.

So, is this obsession with designer’s thinking or Design Thinking?

A designer’s thinking is something limitless and cannot be withheld from the world. It demands expression. For one, I have experienced myself such a burning desire and passion in the early days of my design career to bring some change to the world. How about you?

Fortunately, I realized quickly that every change is not progress, especially when it comes to upholding the ideal “user experience matters most”. Even though a designer’s thinking could bring out-of-the-box ideas and innovation, self-obsessed, biased, hypothetical narrative-based thinking could override the design process. “User experience matters most” becomes, simply put, “side-parked user experience”.

Let’s explore the pitfalls of designer’s thinking further. I’m sure you have heard that design thinking has 5 phases — Discover, Define, Ideation, Develop & Deliver. Out of the five, the part which designers love is Ideation, because they tend to believe that the Ideation phase means the whole design process i.e., sketching, art, drawings, scribbling, art jamming, brainstorming sketches, creating beautiful sketches, beautiful rendering, beautiful wireframes, etcetera, that is, the phase that makes them feel like designers.

While Ideation does include some of these aspects, it is not all that it stands for. It also means taking into account problem discovery and definition, if the product is to succeed in delivering a human-centric user experience.

Let’s ask ourselves a question:

Can we call ourselves designers because we take opportunities to show our creative thinking in the ideation phase (designer’s thinking) or is our community expected to bring selfless devotion to the entire design process (design thinking)?

In truth, it is the designers’ responsibility to align their creativity to problem discovery and definition.