Design Thinking And The New Spirit Of Capitalism: Sociological Reflections On Innovation Culture 3030317145, 9783030317140, 9783030317157

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 5
Translator’s Note......Page 9
Contents......Page 11
Chapter 1: Introduction......Page 13
But What Is Design Thinking?......Page 15
Design Thinking: The Legend......Page 17
Following the Design Thinkers......Page 19
Practice Theory and Praxeologizing As Method......Page 21
Contra the Reductionism of Practice Theory......Page 23
References......Page 25
Chapter 2: The Temporality of Design Thinking......Page 28
Time Pressure......Page 31
Timeboxing and the Logic of Iteration......Page 34
The Activation and Synchronization of Subjects......Page 39
Time Shortage......Page 41
Interim Reflections, Take One......Page 44
Empathy As Methodology......Page 47
References......Page 53
Chapter 3: The Materiality of Design Thinking......Page 56
Design Thinking As Laboratory Practice......Page 58
Translating People into Paper......Page 60
Representation or Construction?......Page 62
Representation Is Interpretation Is Construction......Page 63
Realities Made and Unmade......Page 64
Design Thinking Creates Problems......Page 65
Covering the Tracks......Page 69
Design Thinking As Pure Development Process......Page 70
Method As Tool......Page 75
Automated Workshops......Page 80
Interim Reflections, Take Two......Page 81
References......Page 89
Chapter 4: Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism......Page 93
User-Friendliness As a Promise of Authenticity......Page 96
Design Thinking As Emancipated Work......Page 99
References......Page 107
Chapter 5: Conclusion......Page 109
So What Now?......Page 112
References......Page 113
Index......Page 114

Citation preview

Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism Sociological Reflections on Innovation Culture

Tim Seitz

Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism

Tim Seitz

Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism Sociological Reflections on Innovation Culture

Tim Seitz Technical University of Berlin Berlin, Germany Translation by Lisa Cerami

Based on a translation from the German language edition: Design Thinking und der neue Geist des Kapitalismus. Soziologische Betrachtungen einer Innovationskultur by Tim Seitz. Copyright © transcript Verlag 2017 All Rights Reserved. ISBN 978-3-030-31714-0    ISBN 978-3-030-31715-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31715-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Two years have passed since my book Design Thinking und der neue Geist des Kapitalismus was published in Germany. Since then, I have joined the “Innovation Society Today” research training group at the Technical University (TU) of Berlin, and this institutional move has greatly impacted my recent thoughts about the topic. It is within the intellectual context of my colloquium at the TU that I have been able to oversee the translation of the book into English, and I want to share some thoughts about what has oriented my thinking during this process. As a sociologist, design thinking strikes me as a particularly rich “strategic research site”—borrowing from Robert K. Merton’s terminology— and I was interested to see what we can learn about the society we inhabit by examining design thinking closely. My assumption has been that many peculiarities of our present moment are concretized and legible in design thinking, wherein our world becomes visible as an “innovation society”— and where the solution to any sort of problem is simply “more innovation.” How did we get here? As Benoît Godin has pointed out, until the beginning of modernity, innovation was considered a threat to the existing social order and understood pejoratively. Only after our pre-modern static societal order became dynamic did innovation gain its positive connotation. Modern societies stabilize through change, and innovation is a central driver of this process. We—as modern subjects—are subordinated to a systemic imperative to innovate, and design thinking’s success becomes comprehensible in light of this imperative. In design thinking, creating innovation seems simple and intuitive: one merely needs to follow the appropriate method and complete the appropriate steps in a process. v

vi 

Preface

My book’s contribution to the field has been to consider design thinking ethnographically and to show how the innovation imperative unfolds in practice. A central argument of the innovation society-thesis is that innovation becomes reflexive. While we can find innovations throughout human history, to make innovation the explicit goal of one’s actions is a rather recent phenomenon. Design thinking’s sole purpose is the generation of innovation, the production of new solutions to problems. Innovation becomes an end in itself, and one can see how design thinking must contend with several conflicts that arise therein. On the one hand, there is the problem with newness. Can design thinking’s output always be understood as new when one knows from the beginning of the process that something new must emerge? In the book, I will discuss moments when it seemed to me that my informants had to struggle to name something new in order to keep design thinking’s promise alive. This is also related to the question of urgency. The motto of the school of design thinking in Potsdam is “Don’t wait. Innovate!” But how can one sustain this sense of urgency over time? And what does it mean to be constantly hurrying? It will become clear throughout the book that urgency is built into design thinking’s architecture, and it is necessary to constantly work to maintain it. Lastly, there is the question of deviance. Design thinking promises to unleash human creativity by creating an atmosphere in which creative expression, deviance, and “wild ideas” are encouraged. But what does it mean to establish “deviance” as normative? I will discuss instances in which design thinking participants complied with the process by “deviating,” and obviously, this had a quite conventional feel to it. In innovation society, the imperative to innovate is not restricted to the commercial sphere. It reaches into politics, art, education, and really every part of society. We can observe, too, that design thinking spreads into these realms as well. One can find design thinkers facilitating workshops in elementary schools, universities, and art schools as well as in public administration and politics. There are also initiatives that apply design thinking to social problems, and an informant once talked to me about his idea to develop a design thinking workshop on capitalism itself. All of this has consequences. A mode of thinking that originated in product design moves to areas that function according to different logics. To fulfill its promise as a universal problem solver, design thinking must describe any problem as solvable by a product, service, or process. Other fields must be

 Preface 

vii

adapted to design thinking’s problem-solving ethos that focuses on ­symptoms rather than causes. This evidences design thinking’s inherent blindness toward structures and, I would argue, reduces the horizon of social possibility, while conforming to the objectives of corporate product development and marketing. So what can we do? Is there a way out? As one might expect from a sociologist, I am not offering direct answers here. I see no easy way of repairing design thinking, but dealing with the topic allows us to touch upon some of the fundamental problems of innovation society and maybe modernity as a whole. Furthermore, resisting the innovation imperative cannot simply mean refusing innovation altogether. As Bruno Latour has recently noted, we cannot escape modernity by simply reversing the modern telos and returning to imagined ways of old. In response to design thinking’s demand—“Don’t wait. Innovate!”—I would offer that we ignore the initial imperative, that we in fact pause and reflect on what alternatives might be imaginable. Design thinking’s hunger for quick solutions is accompanied by a modern epistemic habit of distancing, separating, ordering, and cleansing. Design thinking fixes problems in a double sense: fixing as in repairing, but also in the sense of af-fixing, or pinning down. What would a problem-solving approach look like that acknowledges that problems are not clear-cut entities but a web of relations and competing interests between humans and non-humans? This asks for an approach that is not afraid of complexity and confusion, and one that is willing to stay with the trouble, as Donna Haraway encourages. This study was originally written as a master’s thesis in the field of Science Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 2016, the German Sociological Association awarded it a prize for outstanding thesis. I revised the manuscript again for publication and I am now curious to watch the book’s trajectory in the English-speaking world. This project would have been impossible without having observed design thinking in the first place, and for that I thank all the people in the field who received me with openness and curiosity, and who let me take part in their work. I would like to thank the many people who assisted me as this project developed: Johanna Block, Tim Flink, Susanne Förster, Anna Hipp, Sebastian Kramming, Lisa Kressin, Mareike Lisker, Felix Niggemann, Claudia Pilarski, Anika Redmann, Bente Sachs, Anita Šehagic´ and Carolin Thiem. Special thanks to Professor Dr. Martin Reinhart and Professor Dr. Tanja Bogusz, who advised me while I completed my study and who taught me how to do

viii 

Preface

research by acting as if I already could. I am indebted to the members of the DFG-research training group “Innovation Society Today,” with whom I have had ongoing conversations about what it means to exist within an innovation society. I am deeply thankful to Lisa Cerami for her careful translation. It was a wonderful experience to collaborate with her in this endeavor and to get to know the book through her interpretations. Berlin, Germany August 2019

Tim Seitz

Translator’s Note

It has been a joy to translate Tim Seitz’s Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism, and one aspect of the English version deserves to be highlighted—especially insofar as it seems to intersect with an original query by Seitz. In the German book, it was impossible for me to overlook how many citations, gathered in interviews, shadowing and participant observation, stood originally in English. Seitz and I decided that it would be too unwieldy to mark each utterance, and so the translation to a large extent erases these language markers. In some places, though the citations emerge in a slightly different vernacular than my own, they remain legible in grammar and syntax—but the distinctiveness that is readily caught in the German text is more or less obscured. Upon further reflection, it is not merely the linguistic conditions of workshops and trainings—led in many cases by German speakers and for German speakers, but in English—that might be noted. It is also important to consider that the design thinking’s material dimension often manifests in English. In Chap. 2, where Seitz investigates the materiality of design thinking, he notes that in preparing a design thinking workshop, the modular spaces are decorated with inspirational posters that proclaim the imperatives of the field: Build on the Ideas of others! Defer Judgement, Go for Quantity! Be Visual! Encourage Wild Ideas. The material tools of the trade, like the Time Timer, the conceptual tools that discipline the design thinker, like the deadline, have names derived from the English language but which take on meanings that are particular to design thinking itself. Design thinking—the field, discipline, praxis, and industry—is so named that I have long pondered on the odd nature of that title. These ix

x 

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

are obviously English words, and design thinking is called design thinking in Stanford, Potsdam, and most likely the world over. And yet, it is a peculiar use of the gerund that makes design thinking seem like a roughly translated and dissected German compound. A primary (English language) text that informs both the field and praxis of design thinking is Tim Brown’s 2009 book Change by Design. Seitz’s text draws heavily on Brown’s book, which, as Seitz describes, in part inspired some of the questions that animate Design Thinking and the Spirit of Capitalism. In the course of translation, I was often struck by Brown’s language. I found myself frustrated in many places by the slippage I noticed between my own English language renderings and Brown’s text. I came to the conclusion that the language of design thinking, its discursive vernacular, is particular unto itself. It derives from English, and some of its practices and materials have English language makers, but it is adapted to the conditions of the industry, and becomes something of its own language. It is also worth mentioning that this language is not grounded by communicating meaning, but communicating communicability. As Seitz will contend, design thinking’s factual dimension is often subordinated to its temporal and social dimensions, to the end of facilitating output that would otherwise be hindered or delayed by reflection or critique. To that end, English, as the language of markets and, one might add, global capitalism, serves very well as a conduit for the spontaneous and intuitive production of market solutions that escape meaningful critique. How the linguistic-communicative conditions of design thinking relate to the demands of the spirit of capitalism would be another book unto itself, but hopefully this note might bring attention to these questions that are concrete in Seitz’s original German book but are masked in translation. —Lisa Cerami, Visiting Assistant Professor in German, University of Rochester, USA

Contents

1 Introduction  1 But What Is Design Thinking?   3 Design Thinking: The Legend   5 Design Thinking Exists!   7 Following the Design Thinkers   7 Practice Theory and Praxeologizing As Method   9 Contra the Reductionism of Practice Theory  11 References  13 2 The Temporality of Design Thinking 17 Time Pressure  20 Timeboxing and the Logic of Iteration  23 Time Shortage  30 Interim Reflections, Take One  33 Empathy As Methodology  36 References  42 3 The Materiality of Design Thinking 45 Design Thinking As Laboratory Practice  47 Translating People into Paper  49 Design Thinking Creates Problems  54 Covering the Tracks  58 Design Thinking As Pure Development Process  59

xi

xii 

PREFACE

Method As Tool  64 Interim Reflections, Take Two  70 References  78 4 Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism 83 User-Friendliness As a Promise of Authenticity  86 Design Thinking As Emancipated Work  89 References  97 5 Conclusion 99 So What Now? 102 References 103 Index105

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  This introductory chapter departs from the citation of a design thinker: “We have to get into the boardrooms because that’s where you can change people’s thinking. If we make it there, we might really shake things up!.” This quotation captures some of the self-­understanding of design thinking as a general problem solver. It reveals a tension that underlies the entire book: how do the practices of design thinking relate to its great promises? I give a brief overview of the historical roots of design thinking as a research program that was later translated into a standardized method of problem solving. This is followed by theoretical reflections on the relationship of practices and discourses that set the base for my subsequent elaborations. Keywords  Practices • Discourses • Ethnography “We have to get into the boardrooms because that’s where you can change people’s thinking. If we make it there, we might really shake things up!” Fieldnotes, June 5, 2015

I am awed by Paul’s1 visionary spirit. We are talking at a launch party for an innovation agency in Berlin, and I listen, spellbound, to how he plans to change people’s thinking and thereby, change the world. I am doing participant observation in the field of design thinking, and the Trojan Horse with which Paul thinks he is going to hijack executive boardrooms © The Author(s) 2020 T. Seitz, Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31715-7_1

1

2 

T. SEITZ

is the object my study. Paul himself works for a design thinking agency in Berlin that has already been around for a few years. It is also the one that I am observing, in order to find out how exactly the aforementioned changes are supposed to come about. Paul didn’t come to this party in order to size up the competition that will consolidate at the new agency. On the contrary, he is excited about the growth of the industry, since everyone is in some way working toward the same ends, and there is more than enough work to go around. In any case, everyone here knows each other. The atmosphere reminds me of those departmental parties at the beginning of college where all the attendees knew each other from one thing or another. The connective element of this party was not like in those days; not Sociology, Freiburg but Design Thinking, Potsdam. The latter context is established through an additional certification program that almost everyone at the party has completed. But unlike sociology, design thinking sells itself as a service, and by providing such services one is qualified to start up an agency. It isn’t a discipline in itself, but a method by which disciplinary thinking ought to be overcome, insofar as the disciplines are no longer able to deal with the complexity of the world. It is thus not without irony that throughout my study, it is exactly the disciplinary function of design thinking that moves ever more into focus. My agency and the one whose launch we happen to be celebrating have very similar origin stories: the members know each other from their design thinking training program and decided together to put their education into practice and start up their own business, rather than looking elsewhere for a job. They became design thinkers in Potsdam, and after they finished at the d.school—that’s the name of the training institute—they wanted to stay on that track. Indeed, the objectives and forms of cooperation at other jobs that one could find on the job market are fundamentally different than working with the design thinking method. Of course, they could try to find employment in the field of their primary college degree, but in contrast to what design thinking promises to offer, those options somehow seem less appealing: Our society is becoming more complex. Through globalization and technological innovations, our pace of life is accelerating, and the way we live and work is becoming more diverse and sophisticated. Companies and institutions face an uphill battle. The pressure to change and to manage this growing complexity is increasing. This is where Design Thinking comes into play. (HPI School of Design Thinking 2019a)

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

But What Is Design Thinking? Generally, design thinking is associated with a “human-centered approach to problem solving” (Kimbell 2011: 287). Instead of departing from technological opportunities or managerial calculus, with design thinking the “user is the main focus of the emphatic approach and its development” (HPI School of Design Thinking 2019a). The design thinking creative process begins with observing and polling potential users in order to understand their experiences and identify the problems they might encounter. By way of methods common to empirical social research like interviews or participant observation, the process begins by generating information about users, which can then be incorporated into the development of solutions. With design thinking “[t]he user is seen from a social-scientific perspective, with a view that is always open to something new” (HPI School of Design Thinking 2019b). According to its promise, design thinking creates the conditions to develop user-friendly products and services that are able to solve the actual problems users encounter in their lives. The right product and the right service rather than senseless commodities—this is what design thinking promises. In specifically arranged modular rooms, interdisciplinary teams undergo the iterations of the design thinking process while always integrating user-sourced feedback, which stems from regularly testing interim results. Design thinking conceives of itself as operating with actual human beings in mind, in order to satisfy their real needs and in this way, make a positive contribution to society. This is the aspirational gesture of my study’s introductory epigraph that talks about executive access as the key to change. The term “design thinking” cropped up for the first time at the beginning of the 1980s to describe a research program in design that had already been around since the 1960s (cf. Mareis 2011: 34–54). At first, the term didn’t have anything to do with a specific method. The “design thinking” research program studied the specific work processes of professional designers in order to find out “how designers think” (Lawson 1983; cf. Rowe 1987). This community of researchers met for the first time at the 1991 Design Thinking Research Symposium in Delft. The introduction to the proceedings from the symposium (Cross et al. 1992) highlighted the participants’ intellectual concern with reforming design training programs, which were, since the 1980s, increasingly institutionally situated (cf. Mareis 2011: 54–60). As a theory of self-reflection (cf. Kieserling 2004: 56–63), design thinking research was primarily preoccupied with shining a light on the functionality of its object:

4 

T. SEITZ

Design thinking—the cognitive processes that are manifested in design action has become recognized as a key area of research for understanding the development of design capability in individuals and for the improvement of design practice and design education. The aims of this Workshop on Research in Design Thinking at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Technological University of Delft were to review the current state of knowledge in this research field and to identify ways and means of using this new knowledge in design education. (Cross et al. 1992: 1)

My current study has little to do with this research field. As I have encountered it, design thinking isn’t about accruing knowledge through researching design processes, but about a prescriptive method of the same name that has grown in popularity since the mid aughts and proports to endow anyone with the kinds of the problem-solving skills used by designers (cf. Dorst 2006) that are applicable in all areas of life—“no matter what the problem is” (Mareis 2010: 3). [A]s design thinking begins to move out of the studio and into the corporation, the service sector, and the public sphere, it can help us to grapple with a vastly greater range of problems than has previously been the case. Design can help to improve our lives in the present. Design thinking can help us chart a path into the future. (Brown 2009: 149)

So says Tim Brown, the corporate head and president of the leading globally-­operating market research and innovation institute IDEO, which is also constantly referred to as the birthplace of the design thinking method (cf. ibid.: 6; Kelley and Littman 2001). With his book Change by Design (Brown 2009), Brown popularized the concept and appointed himself as the “global discourse agent of design within the strong growth in practice oriented literature” (Weber 2019: 236). Brown makes appearances at TED2 (2009) as well as the World Economic Forum in Davos (cf. Rawsthorn 2010) in order to promote design thinking as a “general problem solver” (Jonas 2011). In in the course of this study, I will often utilize Brown’s introductory primer on the subject of design thinking in order to highlight its interconnected hopes and promises. Related to IDEO, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design was founded at Stanford University in 2005 and is led by IDEO co-founder David Kelley. The year 2007 saw the establishment of the HPI School of Design Thinking in Potsdam, also financed by the SAP-founder Hasso Plattner. My informants completed their post-graduate study in design thinking at the d.school in Potsdam.

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

There, students can enroll in a year-long basic or advance track course of study, and they carry out genuine design thinking projects throughout their respective training programs. The d.school in Potsdam is headed by Ulrich Weinberg, who serves a similar function in German discursive spaces as Tim Brown does in Anglo-Americans ones, and he will also be cited throughout this study.

Design Thinking: The Legend Those individuals who started examining design thinking as a research object in the 1980s have responded to the popularization of the design thinking method with increasing disaffection. They—the critics—claim that what method-apologists call “design thinking” is an idealized picture of design processes that are not grounded empirically or theoretically and have nothing in common with “traditional” (Jonas 2011) design thinking research. These objections often resemble descriptions of an enemy takeover, like when they allege that the traditional design thinking concept has been coopted by the industry as a basic approach to business management (cf. Badke-Schaub et  al. 2010: 41). The research clearly shows that there is simply no single design process that can be applied to all the problems confronting commercial organizations (cf. ibid.). But often when the term “design thinking” is appropriated, the relevant research behind it is consistently ignored (cf. ibid., cf. also: Mareis 2010; Jonas 2011; Kimbell 2011, Tonkinwise 2011). Without recourse to the “manifold roots and the controversial theoretical history” (Jonas 2011: 2) of the concept, it is impossible for the standard bearers of the method to explain exactly what design thinking is supposed to do: “[I]t is no surprise that those who support its application in management, or more broadly public service or social problems, have trouble articulating what it is, whether all designers can do it, whether it is something new or just a different name for what good designers have always done, and why it might be a good thing that non-designers can learn and do it too” (Kimbell 2011: 288–289). The definition constantly shifts and rings “more vague than certain, vacillating between the ‘specific capabilities of the professional designer’ and a ‘general inventive genius’” (Mareis 2011: 186; cf. also Salustri and Eng 2007: 19). According to its resume, design thinking is less an American invention from San Francisco and more an American commercial brand from San Francisco (cf. Marzavan 2015). The definition and history of design thinking is clearly contested. The d.schools at Stanford and Potsdam collaborated in 2008 and initiated the

6 

T. SEITZ

HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program, which meant to help the design thinking method accrue scientific legitimacy and to endow it with epistemic authority. This research program emerged through the publication of anthologies over the last years (cf. Plattner et al. 2012a, b, 2014, 2015, 2016) and is quite different from the design research tradition that was sketched above. The program treats design thinking as an already extant object and established method of innovation, and questions pertaining to the nature of or reasons for its emergence are not posed or answered. Instead, the research seeks to decipher the precise function of design thinking. “The HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program strives to apply rigorous academic methods to understand the scientific basis for how and why the innovation method of design thinking works and fails” (Plattner et al. 2014: 6). There are scattered references throughout this field to traditional design research without actually acknowledging any debt to the latter as a place of origin: “Within design research itself there is actually an established scientific discourse pertaining to design thinking, although this content is geared toward professional designers and doesn’t sufficiently reflect the interdisciplinary approach used at the d.school” (Lindberg 2013: 6). While the representatives of design research consider design thinking to be their discovery and describe the similarly named contemporary method as intellectual theft, they have little to contribute to that which the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program has established as a separate and sovereign concept. Interestingly, even where the method is named by contemporary practitioners, there is generally no consensus about what design thinking is. Instead, deliberate effort is made to avoid having to define design thinking at all. “The different interpretations of the concept, as reflected in the practitioners’ discourse, make it impossible to come up with a shared definition” (Schmiedgen et al. 2015: 49). That design thinking is difficult to define does not thwart my study. Instead, it provides an interesting point of departure, since the difficulty of defining design thinking must also be explained. A lack of terminological clarity can be productive and encourage, rather than hinder, the emergence and evolution of a field (cf. Mareis 2011: 191). And anyway, various individuals can use the concept without needing to agree on a definition (cf. Star and Griesemer 1989; Star 1992). Exactly because design thinking isn’t pinned down, it can be interpreted variously, depending on the ­context, as a method of innovation, a way of working, a life philosophy, a mindset, a tool, or as the Trojan Horse of social transformation.3

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

Design Thinking Exists! At this point, I will move away from the debates surrounding the emergence of design thinking and the various attempts to define it. It is not my intention to assess the method, to delegitimize it or to accuse design thinkers of forgetting their own history. The dispute concerning the copyright of the term “design thinking” will not be put to rest by me, and it is not my intention to chart its genealogy. Instead I aim to take design thinking—the innovation method that is taught and practiced—as my object of analysis. Thereby, I acknowledge its existence, which is exactly how the researchers in the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program engage in their work. Design thinking is a real thing, because it is institutionalized at the d-schools, because it moves people to launch their own agencies, because the demand for design thinking is currently very high, allowing for so many agencies to prosper. Another reason to claim that design thinking is real is that the individuals that are working as design thinkers are actually doing something and describe their actions in a specific way. In other words, design thinking exists discursively and as a set of practices. When interdisciplinary teams go through the iterations of the design thinking process in modular rooms, they are working: standing up, sticking up multicolored notes on the wall, and crafting prototypes. It is in this sense that design thinking is a praxis, one that is rooted in practical knowledge and that has a material basis in bodies, objects, and spatial arrangements (cf. Reckwitz 2010: 190). Design thinking, however, entails wholehearted and explicit forms of speech about its praxis. Design thinkers declare themselves to be avant-garde infiltrators of executive spaces, they declare the novelty of their ideas and promise user-friendly products and services. There are specific ways design thinking describes itself, that it is verbalized, legible, and observable in the field, and made accessible in documents and presentations. How do all of these things relate to one another? Is it possible to imagine the self-descriptions (Luhmann 2000: 244–316)4 of design thinkers on the one hand and their praxis on the other as relating to each other like two sides of the same coin? And, more generally, what does design thinking actually do?

Following the Design Thinkers The first things I encountered as I began my exploration of this topic were the aforementioned self-descriptions. In general, accessing a discourse is not as difficult as finding a way into a praxis. It is an easy business finding

8 

T. SEITZ

in-roads in the topic of design thinking, in light of the ubiquity of videos, presentations, and an expansive introductory literature, largely available online. But this inspires feelings of discomfort and doubt: does design thinking do what it says? How do we contend with its claims to transform society? I feel compelled to deprioritize media produced by design thinkers about design thinking in order to concentrate instead on what is really happening. This led me to choose an ethnographic approach through which I could observe design thinking in action. I surmised that one could learn more about the concept that way than through engaging solely with its discursive manifestations. I tried first to win access to the d.school through people who had graduated from the design thinking training program in Potsdam, in order to be allowed to observe a multi-week project and thereby describe it in its entirety for my study. But because of the threat of overfishing, this access was denied to me. Participant observation in such a project would have been maximally invasive, and the on-site organizers had decided anyway to only grant project access to in-house researchers at HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Programs. My contact at the d.school directed me to a design thinking agency in Berlin and told me I should try my luck there. I contacted them via email and three days later, I set up a telephone interview and had my foot in the door. The interview lasted for over 40 minutes, and I spoke with a staff person at the agency who warned me that the place was a “rather chaotic mess” (notes 05/03/2015) and also that he learned new things every day. He also made explicit what he had learned on the job: “Yes, I would find it very interesting if you would give us things to mull over through your observations and outsider perspective, but since I have been at the agency, I have learned to ask what things can do for us in a business sense. With that in mind, let me ask concretely: is there some product at the end of this onto which we can slap our logo?” (ibid.). I was not able to promise this, but the interest in my work compelled him enough to arrange a time with me to meet directly at the agency’s office. A week later, I spent the day at the agency as a guest and met the rest of the staff. At that time, the agency was made up of 5 founders, 2 full-­ time employees, and a network of about 25 freelancers who were ­contracted for specific projects. They were also in the middle of expanding: they received new workshop requests nearly every day and were also growing their staff. My meeting at the office was ostensibly about hammering out details; whether I would be able to do my fieldwork at the agency seemed to be no longer a question. We agreed that I could begin

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

my field research on June 1. I was supposed to just come by and then we would figure out which projects and workshops I would sit in on. As one of the staff members also worked as a coach at the d.school, the idea was floated that I might occasionally accompany her there. In other words, that which seemed problematic through official channels (i.e. access to d.school projects) was going to be relatively easy by shadowing this agent. I did need to modify my research slightly insofar as my fieldwork would now be situated in an agency, and the agency is largely compelled to offer “design thinking” as a marketable product. And while the d.school only undertakes prestigious multi-week projects, the agency depends on clients who order smaller design thinking workshops for their own employees. They occasionally contract bigger projects, whereby the agency puts design thinking into practice and develops solutions for clients, but in general their work is limited to disseminating their method. Insofar as communicating the method is also directly a form of praxis (see Chap. 3, section “Method As Tool”), it did not negatively impact my goal to study the practice of design thinking. During June and July 2015, I spent in total about seven weeks with the agency. I observed staff members in their office as they designed business plans and carried out projects, I accompanied them to their clients for workshops and shadowed one staff member at the d.school. Details from my field observations will be sequenced and integrated into this study, forming the basis of my practice-theoretical account of design thinking as delineated in the first two main chapters.

Practice Theory and Praxeologizing As Method Practice theory is to be understood not as a unified theory but as an assemblage of tendencies (cf. Hörning 2001: 160; Reckwitz 2003: 282). Despite many recent attempts to synthesize practice theory as a uniform approach (cf. Reckwitz 2003; Schmidt 2012; Hillebrandt 2014), it remains a field of theories which are characterized by their shared assumptions that sociology has traditionally neglected social practices: “It is a real weakness of cultural analysis to stress meaning and significance at the expense of social practice” (Hörning 2001: 157). Practice theorists locate the social in social practices rather than abstract systems of meaning and norms. By focusing on evolving social practices, they are able to identify certain aspects or dimensions that were hardly legible by way of practice-blind cultural theories, namely: the temporality, the embodiment, and the materiality of social practice (cf. Schmidt 2012: 51–69). Contemporary practice theory treatises tend to

10 

T. SEITZ

foreground these issues in relation to specific authors, who then count as the principle representatives of each of these new dimensions. In emphasizing these dimensions, the blind spots of other methods can be overcome. Among practice theorists, Pierre Bourdieu is a champion of temporality, and it is thanks to him that the difference between practice and theory has been emphasized in the first place. Judith Butler is celebrated as the emissary of the body; she brought attention to the socially constructed nature of gender and therewith undermined the separation between the social and the natural. Finally, Bruno Latour is renowned as the ambassador of artifacts who desegregates human and non-human actors. But often upon closer inspection, these classifications seem abridged. Bourdieu can also be read as a theorist of the body, who, with his concept of habitus, underscores the implicitness and embodiment of knowledge. It is easy to cast doubt Butler’s inclusion in practice theory if one engages with her discourse-analytic works (cf. Reckwitz 2003: 285). Latour can just as well be classified among French neo-pragmatists (cf. Schäfer 2012: 19). The authors are invariably read in a specific way as practice theorists and then categorized as such, even though the label might not always be fitting. I am not striking new theoretical ground in regard to practice theory (cf. Schmidt 2012: 28) but I am employing these theorists’ approaches as interpretative tools with a decidedly empirical focus, in order to decipher the practice of design thinking. Therefore, I am allowing myself to use these theories and theorists pragmatically, all while actively suppressing the despair that hermeneutic diversity sometimes inspires. What then does it mean to engage in praxeological research? Robert Schmidt (ibid.: 28–33) calls the undoing of the divide between empirics and theory a strategical feature of practice-theoretical approaches. What he calls “[p]raxeologizing as methodology” (ibid.: 28) posits an initial reciprocal relationality of theory and empiricism. There is no empirical observation without a theoretical escort, as there is no theorizing without an empirical point of reference. Practice theory should be understood as a theoretical approach that “constantly destabilizes, irritates and revises, insofar as empirical perspectives and theoretical lenses are constellated in interesting and exciting ways” (ibid.: 31). I am using this as my own approach, which is also evident in my chapter outline where no separate rubrics for “theory” and “method” are to be found. The decidedly practice-­theoretical aspect of this study plays out over chapters first two main chapters, which are respectively entitled “Temporality of Design Thinking” (Chap. 2) and “Materiality of Design Thinking” (Chap. 3). In

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

these chapters, my praxeological construction of the object initially foregrounds the temporality and materiality of the observed practices, but I proceed in an exploratory fashion, with theoretical and epistemological caution. What I undertake in this study, in other words, is not to be read as a presentation of rigid results, but as an epistemic process that unfolds in the act of writing. This is expressly different than codified or documented forms of knowledge. Thinking and writing, analysis and presentation are not separate stages, but go hand in hand with one another. Correspondingly, this study is the result of a “theory-oriented research practice” (Hirschauer 2006: 413) and is as such highly contingent and in itself to be understood as a tentative step.

Contra the Reductionism of Practice Theory The foundational empirical (but also the theoretical) problem this study aims to confront is the concurrency of design thinking practice and, say, design thinking talk, or in other words, how the practice is described by practitioners, its self-descriptions. On the one hand, one can observe embodied and materially mediated activities and processes, and on the other, self-descriptions and self-interpretations abound. It is not a unique to this particular object that praxis and discourse exist simultaneously, but in the case of design thinking, self-descriptions are especially noticeable, and this compels me to put particular weight on how they relate to praxis. Self-descriptions literally initiated my ethnography and they should be kept well within sight. To understand the phenomenon and in order to answer the question “What does design thinking do?” it is crucial to keep both aspects in mind. To assert that the practice of assembling sticky notes and working while standing might be connected to social transformation is in the end quite an odd feature of design thinking discourse, and it demands an explanation. On the level of theory, the relationship between those two seemingly dissimilar things is not irrelevant. In order to make the praxis of design thinking legible in the first place requires a practice-­theoretical orientation. While design thinking self-descriptions are readily available, the practices must first be wrested away from the “silence of the social” (ibid.) by actually writing them down. Because practice theory came into being initially to downplay the emphasis on meaning and significance (cf. Hörning 2001: 157; Schmidt 2011: 91), it tends to completely overlook discursive elements. And while the “relationship between meaning and practice” (Hörning 2001: 157) was not sufficiently accounted for before the emergence of practice theory (in

12 

T. SEITZ

favor of centering meaning), this relationship (meaning/practice) seems to slip out of view when praxis is overemphasized. In this study’s intermediate reflections, I will review whether I have successfully attended to self-description in my treatment of the temporality of design thinking (Chap. 2, section “Interim Reflections, Take One”) and the materiality of design thinking (Chap. 3, section “Interim Reflections, Take Two”). It will be clear that I will not have done them justice in either case. As descriptions from the inside, that is, self-descriptions I report (cf. Kieserling 2004: 47), they are part of the object but cannot appear as such immediately in the first two main chapters. In the following chapter, I will build on the results of the preceding two, and with the help of French neo-pragmatists, pay greater attention to self-descriptions and how they related to practices. Accordingly, I am not proposing a theory that can seamlessly and simultaneously combine praxis and selfdescription but performing a shift in theoretical perspective as I go along, while also not forgetting the antecedent insights. Each of the three chapters has a theoretical figure assigned to it that relates to its focus. That doesn’t mean that the corresponding theories are strictly applied to my material, but that theory presents a specific perspective from which I grapple with the material praxeologically. The first main chapter is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s work concerning the temporality of social practices and it makes use of his differentiation between theory and praxis. In the second main chapter, I look at materiality as it is conceived of by Bruno Latour (and others) and I will be using Latour’s ethnographies of laboratories as a model for my own study. The third main chapter is associated with Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, and the self-­ descriptions I marshal will echo a critique of capitalism that is also legible in the practices themselves. In this way, the demand to combine observations of practices and self-descriptions is satisfied and design thinking is situated as a contemporary phenomenon in the context of a new capitalist spirit.

Notes 1. All the names in this study have been changed. 2. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is the name of a conference that foregrounds innovation and has become famous the world over because of the viral appeal of the TED-talks disseminated online. In these, leaders in their respective fields present “ideas worth spreading” in a personal and entertaining manner.

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

3. This is a sampling of the interpretations that I encountered in the field. 4. Luhmann (2000) calls self-description “description of the system by the system” and “the mode of operation by which systems generate their internal identity, whatever the observers of this process might think of it” (248). Throughout this study, self-descriptions are statements made about design thinking from within the field of design thinking, including both my informants’ accounts as well as published material by design thinkers.

References Badke-Schaub, P., Cardoso, C., & Roozenburg, N. (2010). Design thinking: A paradigm on its way from dilution to meaninglessness? In K. Dorst, S. Steward, I. Staudinger, B. Paton, & A. Dong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th design thinking research symposium DTRS8 (pp. 39–49). Sydney: DAB Documents. Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York: Harper Business. Cross, N., Dorst, K., & Roozenburg, N. (1992). Research in design thinking. Delft: Delft University Press. Dorst, K. (2006). Design problems and design paradoxes. Design Issues, 22, 4–17. Hillebrandt, F. (2014). Soziologische Praxistheorien. Eine Einführung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Hirschauer, S. (2006). Putting things into words. Ethnographic description and the silence of the social. Human Studies, 29(4), 413–441. Hörning, K. (2001). Experten des Alltags. Die Wiederentdeckung des praktischen Wissens. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft. HPI School of Design Thinking. (2019a). Mindset – Design thinking. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://hpi.de/en/school-of-design-thinking/designthinking/mindset.html. HPI School of Design Thinking. (2019b). Background  – Design thinking. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://hpi.de/en/school-of-design-thinking/design-thinking/background.html. Jonas, W. (2011). Schwindelgefühle  – Design thinking also general problem solver. Vortrag auf dem EKLAT Symposium. TU Berlin, 3 May. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from http://8149.website.snafu.de/wordpress/wp-content/ uploads/2011/07/2011_EKLAT.pdf. Kelley, T., & Littman, J. (2001). The art of innovation. Lessons in creativity from IDEO, America’s leading design firm. New York: Currency/Doubleday. Kieserling, A. (2004). Selbstbeschreibung und Fremdbeschreibung. Beiträge zur Soziologie soziologischen Wissens. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kimbell, L. (2011). Rethinking design thinking: Part I. Design and Culture, 3, 285–306. Lawson, B. (1983). How designers think. London: Butterworth Architecture.

14 

T. SEITZ

Lindberg, T.  S. (2013). Design-thinking-Diskurse: Bestimmung, Themen, Entwicklungen. Dissertation. University of Potsdam. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/ searchtype/authorsearch/author/Tilmann+Sören+Lindberg/rows/10/ docId/6733/start/0. Luhmann, N. (2000). Art as a social system. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (Meridian Crossing Aesthetics). Mareis, C. (2010). Visual productivity. Reflections on the foundations and correlations of design thinking, in: Proceedings of the 21st Congress of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. Mareis, C. (2011). Design als Wissenskultur. Interferenzen zwischen Design-und Wissensdiskursen seit 1960. Bielefeld: transcript. Marzavan, D. (2015). Vom Kopf ins Herz über die Hand zum Produkt. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from http://ffluid.de/blog/vom-kopf-ins-herz-ueber-diehand-zum-produkt/. Plattner, H., Meinel, C., & Leifer, L.  J. (2012a). Design thinking research. Measuring performance in context. Berlin; London: Springer. Plattner, H., Meinel, C., & Leifer, L. J. (2012b). Design thinking research. Studying co-creation in practice. Berlin; New York: Springer. Plattner, H., Meinel, C., & Leifer, L. J. (2014). Design thinking research. Building innovation eco-systems. Cham; New York: Springer. Plattner, H., Meinel, C., & Leifer, L. J. (2015). Design thinking research. Building innovators. Cham: Springer. Plattner, H., Meinel, C., & Leifer, L. J. (2016). Design thinking research. Making design thinking foundational. Cham: Springer. Rawsthorn, A. (2010, January 31). Debating Sustainability. New York Times. Reckwitz, A. (2003). Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken: Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 32(4), 282–301. Reckwitz, A. (2010). Auf dem Weg zu einer kultursoziologischen Analytik zwischen Praxeologie und Poststrukturalismus. In M.  Wohlrab-Sahr (Ed.), Kultursoziologie. Paradigmen  – Methoden  – Fragestellungen (pp.  179–205). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Rowe, P. G. (1987). Design thinking. Cambridge: MIT Press. Salustri, F. A., & Eng, N. L. (2007). Design as…: Thinking of what design might be. Journal of Design Principles and Practices, 1, 19–28. Schäfer, H. (2012). Kreativität und Gewohnheit. Ein Vergleich zwischen Praxistheorie und Pragmatismus. In U. Göttlich & R. Kurt (Eds.), Kreativität und Improvisation. Soziologische Positionen (pp. 17–43). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Schmidt, R. (2011). Die Entdeckung der Praxeographie. Zum Erkenntnisstil der  Soziologie Bourdieus. In D. Šuber (Ed.), Pierre Bourdieu und die Kulturwissenschaften. Zur Aktualität eines undisziplinierten Denkens (pp. 89–106). Konstanz: UVK-Verlagsgesellschaft.

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

Schmidt, R. (2012). Soziologie der Praktiken. Konzeptionelle Studien und empirische Analysen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Schmiedgen, J., Rhinow, H., Köppen, E., & Meinel, C. (2015). Parts without a whole?  – The current state of design thinking practice in organizations (Study Report No. 97) (p.  144). Potsdam: Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Softwaresystemtechnik an der Universität Potsdam. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://thisisdesignthinking.net/why-this-site/the-study/. Star, S. L. (1992). Cooperation without consensus in scientific problem solving: Dynamics of closure in open systems. In S. Easterbrook (Ed.), Cooperation or conflict? (pp. 93–106). London; New York: Springer-Verlag. Star, S.  L., & Griesemer, J.  R. (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects. Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387–420. Tonkinwise, C. (2011). A taste for practices: Unrepressing style in design thinking. Design Studies, 32, 533–545. Weber, S. M. (2019). Change by design!? Knowledge cultures of design and organizational strategies of creation. In M.  A. Peters & S.  M. Weber (Eds.), Organization and newness: Discourses and ecologies of innovation in the Creative University (pp. 233–246). Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV.

CHAPTER 2

The Temporality of Design Thinking

Abstract  This chapter explores the temporality of design thinking based on ethnographic data from projects and workshops. I describe how design thinking takes place in rigidly measured timeslots that create an atmosphere of constant time pressure without any room for alterations. Following Luhmann’s distinction between a temporal, social, and factual dimension of meaning I examine how time pressure privileges the temporal and social dimension over the factual one: there are no bad (or good) ideas because evaluations are suspended by the shortage of time. Therefore, design thinking creates an atmosphere in which all team members are equally activated and underlie the same time pressure. This generates a formally non-hierarchic process that encourages participants to come up with new ideas. I conclude that design thinking seems to be less about the actual output and more about creating a specific working atmosphere. Keywords  Temporality • Timeboxing • Activation • Synchronization • Empathy Social practices are characterized by being in and of time: they unfold over time, as a chronological series of present moments (cf. Reckwitz 2003: 295). They are “essentially linear” (cf. Bourdieu 1980: 83) and infinitely varied. Current social practices build upon those that came before and prefigure what will come about in the future (cf. Schmidt 2012: 54). © The Author(s) 2020 T. Seitz, Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31715-7_2

17

18 

T. SEITZ

People who practice are themselves completely bound in time, and their actions unfold within time constraints (i.e. under time pressure) so that actions can only be understood in the context of these constraints (cf. Bourdieu 1980: 80–85). This chapter will focus explicitly on the temporality of design thinking and describe the temporal structures that enable and restrict activities. To that end, I will now start describing my experience in the field. The following sequence of events takes place in a workshop that was organized by the agency. The workshop was designed to collect user-­ feedback in order to test the intermediate results of a development project. Gathering feedback from potential users theoretically guarantees that the product or service under development remains user-friendly, insofar as specific user-needs are then incorporated into the project design. The objective of the particular workshop I will describe in the following section is to present an agency-generated persona to participants and develop this persona further. A persona in this case is a construct developed in the course of design thinking projects that knits together some central characteristics of potential users. A persona is an ideal-user that is fashioned by way of surveys and observations (cf. Chap. 3, section “Translating People into Paper”). The extent to which the assembled workshop participants— the future users—recognize themselves in the persona verifies that the persona is a useful construct in the development of a user-friendly project. For this day-long workshop, participants were invited to travel to Berlin from their various residencies in Germany. The project in question involved a contract with a public institution to create an online tool for a routine task. The eight participants invited to Berlin to “test” the tool were individuals who would use the tool in their work in the future. The workshop was scheduled to fit into the participants’ work schedule. Three staff members representing the agency were present. I was introduced as an intern, and we divided ourselves to facilitate two four-person groups, two of us in each. The first test phase begins. Lars stresses again that our work in design thinking is hypothesis-orientated, and that hypotheses need to be either confirmed or thrown out. This would be the goal of today’s workshop. To this end, he expressly encourages all four of the test participants in his group to give honest and critical feedback, since even a rejected hypothesis gets us closer to our goals. He then asks the participants to come up and gather around the whiteboard, where the persona is printed out in template form

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

on a ledger-sized piece of paper. The template font is rather small, and the participants are compelled to gather tightly around the whiteboard in a semi-circle in order to see the printed text. Lars positions himself somewhat off to the side of the template, so that he can turn his head toward either the whiteboard or the participants. The somewhat crowded template lists the characteristics of the persona, divided into various rubrics. Lars again encourages the participants to interrupt him at any point and then he begins to read through each of the persona’s individual characteristics. Each characteristic is formulated as a declarative statement that concisely reflects a condition or quality of an ideal-user. After reading the first characteristic, Lars pauses and directs his gaze demonstratively in the direction of the test participants. The participants then start discussing their individual experiences on the job based on the characteristic Lars just read aloud to them. An open-ended discussion ensues, sprinkled with anecdotes about problems at work as well as solutions, and good and bad experiences. In the course of this discussion, the original hypothesis is neither validated nor falsified. Lars begins to jot down individual points on sticky notes and pastes them up on the whiteboard around the template. In this way, new ideas augment the original template on the board. The discussion moves quickly, and it is difficult for him to keep up with all of the different tasks he is trying to complete at once. While the discussion proceeds at a clip, Lars is seemingly torn between too many activities. Somewhat chaotically, he moves back and forth between trying to jot down notes, actively listen to participants’ feedback that he communicates through nodding, and directing the discussion back to the template by reading a new characteristic from the print-out. All the while, Lars is reaching into his pocket to pull out his smartphone in order to check how much time is left for this particular activity. As he writes he looks down into his left hand, in which he holds a pad of sticky notes, only to quickly shoot up his gaze in order to make eye contact with the participants. In this way he is constantly shifting his focus, and he is visibly stressed. He is sweating profusely, and his thoughts seem to be racing. Even as he is in the process of transcribing one note, someone calls out a new idea; there are any number of comments that never make it onto the whiteboard because Lars is still jotting down an earlier idea. The test participants are not orientating their discussion around the structure provided by the template and Lars tries best he can to mediate between them and template. Even though all the participants are standing directly at the whiteboard Lars is the only one who is reading out of the new comments. At some point he tries to encourage me to help him jot down comments, but I am in the midst of taking my field notes. In the end, all participant comments end up having to go through Lars to get up on the board, while the test participants indulge in their conversation and I concentrate on my fieldnotes. (Notes 06/11/2015)

19

20 

T. SEITZ

Time Pressure The sequence described lasts for 30 minutes and ends when Lars looks at the clock and calls the activity to a close. The entire workshop is very tightly scheduled with no room for delays. Even as I arrived before the workshop started, one of the agency staff members related to me her anxiety that their timetable was too strict (cf. ibid.). Two representatives from the organization that contracted the online tool in question started the morning out with some words of welcome before the persona-testing activity was to begin, and this took much more time than had been initially planned for introductory remarks. For that reason, the workshop organizers already began the day’s first activity fighting against time. The workshop was scheduled to end at 4:30 p.m. so that the majority of the participants who lived outside of Berlin could catch their trains back home—this made it impossible to make up time at the end of the session. The start and end times of the workshop were therefore unalterable, and the time in between had already been carefully apportioned to each of the planned activities and testing phases. The agency staff members became even more pressed for time after the introductory remarks went longer than expected, thereafter shrinking the amount of time they had at their disposal. It became necessary to modify the schedule in an improvised fashion, as there was no opportunity before lunch for the organizers to regroup. When Lars repeatedly grasped for his phone he was not just signaling his mindfulness about the time left for the activity in question, but he was also attempting to simultaneously improvise and adapt to emergent time constraints. Eventually he just interrupted the phase I described in the sequence and asked the second group to draw their discussion to a close, so that he could move on to the next point on his agenda. Here it seems clear that the workshop’s procedural process is not subordinated to the content of the activities or their goals, but to a temporal logic, with clearly defined and time-bound structural principles. The aforementioned testing phase was not brought to a close because it had produced intermediate results, but because the clock ran out. There is no provision for testing whether or not the intermediate results might be good, completed, or even just acceptable. The testing phase just continues to develop as long as possible within the time allotted, and it ends when the objective external constraint—the workshop’s schedule—demands. Luhmann (1968) shows us that the “levels of aspiration” in the factual, temporal, and social dimension of meaning cannot be determined

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

21

i­ndependently of each other and tend to be exchanged for one another. In the sequence just described, one might observe that a temporal logic is privileged over a factual logic. The time crunch necessitates the “eschewal of fully communicating the relevant information and fully assessing all imaginable alternatives” (ibid.: 145). Keeping with the schedule’s formal structure and the deadline it creates, the workshop’s participants can only provide feedback about a persona insofar as the time allows. In other design thinking workshops that I observed, it was also the case that time pressure shaped the conditions for work. The workshops come about as project-orientated gatherings of different people and take place in a clearly defined temporal frame. For the participants, a workshop is an island in the midst of a normal workday. This is especially evident in the moments between intensive individual work phases. During the breaks, as if on cue, all of the participants reached for their smartphones to check their email or take a work call. Despite being released from their workday, it continued apace, and they needed to keep up with the flow of responsibilities (notes 06/16/2015). A paradox emerges here, rooted in the time pressure that constitutes design thinking as such, and which Ulrich Bröckling (2016) describes with an eye to the creative techniques and strategies within the field of innovation management. These techniques confront the paradoxical task to generate new ideas, which, insofar as they are contingent on a strict plan, remain largely elusive. New and creative ideas can be “enticed” “by perseverance or enthusiasm but not forced” (ibid.: 102). Design thinking must contend with this difficulty in order to create “serial singularity, ready-made difference” (ibid.: 114). By using creative techniques and methods borrowed from the field of social research, design thinking connects with a domain governed by different temporal rules than those that structure businesses and act on markets. “[C]reativity [and social research, T.S.] need leisure, while the market imposes acceleration” (ibid.: 117). Here, a contradiction appears. On the one hand, a kind of freedom emerges in spaces when market pressures are temporarily suspended in order to raise long-term productivity. The normative frameworks for short-term productivity are briefly—but only briefly—disabled (cf. ibid.). Within these spaces, however, goals would need to be achieved or else this freedom would no longer be validated. Design thinking is subject to the conditions of economic competition in the realm of ideas, where “time is a scarce resource” (ibid.). The temporal logic of companies that operate under competitive pressure conflicts with the logic of creative fields that inherently rely on having time to work. The

22 

T. SEITZ

temporal logic of the market is superimposed here upon the internal factual logic of creative work as such, and “the laws of unleashing creativity erode the conditions of creativity’s existence” (ibid.). The islands of time that are established for the participants were marked by a fragility that became noticeable in the breaks between activities. In those moments, the workday took back its rightful place in the consciousnesses of the participants. Emails and telephone conversations seeped in like water in a boat that had sprung a leak. The participants were temporarily shielded from their routines, but their jobs marched on in the background and they were repeatedly compelled to open themselves back up to their various responsibilities throughout the day—not merely after the workshop ended. In order to create something from scratch, one needs time and the freedom to concentrate one’s creative energy. With design thinking, the space to create new things is established in the temporally clearly defined workshops, which are always extrinsically constrained. For that reason, the workshops need to be organized as efficiently as possible, in order to fulfill the expectations that are bound up with the process. In practice, however, time pressure is not just an external constraint, but an atmospheric attribute of design thinking as such, internally conditioned by the use of the stopwatch. The space to think freely is indeed created, but it is also thoroughly structured and efficiently managed. At the d.school, projects are carried out over 12  weeks (for two days per week). This amounts to considerably more time than what would otherwise be available for smaller workshops. Each workday at the d.school begins with collectively determining the day’s schedule. The start and end times are specified, as well as how much time should be allotted to each procedural step. Each step that is carried out is framed by the time it takes to get it done. The activity is measured by a stopwatch—the so-called Time Timer—and it is stopped by a beeping sound. This acoustic signal, heard throughout the day in workshops and at the d.school, terminates activities for participants. For observers like myself, it demonstrates the pacing of group work and confirms the dominance of design thinking’s temporal logic. A stopwatch can be found at every group’s worktable and is also visible in numerous photos and illustrations about design thinking. Next to the sticky notes, the stopwatch would probably have a central position in the iconography of design thinking.

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

23

Timeboxing and the Logic of Iteration Time pressure exists not only as external pressure, but it is generated consistently from below, insofar as every step in the design thinking process must take place within a previously set time frame. During my field work, I never witnessed anyone ignoring the time limits for a given activity or deliberately breaking from an established schedule. Frequently, time pressure would intensify near the end of a session, which would inevitably quicken the tempo. The prearranged end time was almost always observed, and time constraints were generally never challenged. To complete each of the procedural steps within the given time frame, design thinkers employ a technique from the field of project management, specifically agile software development.1 The technique is called timeboxing (cf. Jalote et al. 2004) and it is an iterative process through which individuals work toward clearly defined goals within fixed and forthright time periods. The interim outcomes would need to be tested at the end of every time segment, and the next step is planned by building off these. Iterative logic can be understood as an attempt to resolve the essentially competitive relationship between temporal and factual dimension of meaning. Luhmann (1968) contends that “among the affairs that stand under time pressure, the factual meaning is distorted and, in some cases, […] even overridden” (cf.: 148–149), but iteration in the form of feedback loops can be interpreted as an effort counter this tendency. Constantly connecting back to a referential reality in the form of tests is supposed to safeguard factual meaning even within time constraints. In other words, one need not devote precious time to discussing objective problems that might just be outsourced and iteratively managed, yet still considered. Iteration is a central principle in design thinking. The testing workshop described at the start of the chapter advances the principle of iteration, insofar as a previously generated persona is further developed through collecting feedback. Iterative logic is one of the central foci of design thinking certification programs, it is a fundamental approach that students learn to apply in their work that should lead to better outcomes, faster. The predominance of this mindset can be experienced directly in the types of games that comprise the certification programs. I was able to take part in one of these, called the Velocity Game.2 We are playing the Velocity Game. The objective of the game is to produce more ‘magic pens’ than the other groups. Magic pens are produced insofar as we as a group circulate pens between ourselves in a prescribed fashion. There are five groups made up of five people each. The formula for making a magic pen is projected on the wall:

24 

T. SEITZ



1. Every team member has to touch the pen at least one time. 2. The pen is not allowed to touch the ground. 3. You cannot pass the pen to your direct neighbor. 4. The pen cannot be touched by two people at the same time. 5. The first person to touch the pen has to be the last person to touch it as well.

The coach, Jan, reads the rules aloud and then leaves them up on the wall so that everyone can see them. He explains that he will not answer any further questions about the rules; he will only direct people back to the wall where everything we need to know is listed. There are five rounds. Every round lasts one minute, and between the rounds we get two minutes so that we might build on the experience of the last round to plan the next one. Before the start of each round each group is required to estimate how many magic pens they will produce in the round. Jan writes each team’s guess down in table-form on a whiteboard so that everyone can see them. The game starts without further ado. Jan gives the signal and the first round begins. Our group gathers together in a small circle and attempts to get into a rhythm while following the prescribed algorithm projected up on the wall. The round is over quickly and our output (of magic pens) is pretty meager but similar to the other groups. We give Jan our result and he records it on the board next to the number we originally guessed we would produce. Our two minutes of preparation time tick away and we look around the room for useful objects that we can use to increase the number of magic pens we might produce. We place two stools in the middle of our circle to make it easier to adhere to rule number two “The pen is not allowed to touch the ground” and rule number four “The pen cannot be touched by two people at the same time”—with the stools as we can place the pens down to pass them instead of throwing them to one another. We also grab more pens which should also raise the number of magic pens we might make out of them, and then the next round is about to start. Jan asks everyone for a new guess and then gives the signal to start. We move closer together and get back into the rhythm we established in the first round. We are clearly better at it and make far more magic pens than we did in the first round. Our arms cross wildly and our bodies conjoin into a magic-pen-machine. Again, the production round ends and we do the accounting, comparing our output with the estimate we made before the round began. We repeat these steps three more times and we continue to optimize our process. In each round we produce more pens than we did before. (Notes 06/04/2015)

The pedagogical goal of the velocity game is obvious to the participants and doesn’t need to be explained further: iterative modes of operation increase productivity more than planning. Of course, none of the groups

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

25

really tried to see how many magic pens they could produce if the planning interval was longer and there was only one production round—this is also not how design thinking works. The point of the game is not to experiment with different modes of production to see which one produced the most pens, but so that all participants could have the opportunity to experience iterative work. Correspondingly, there is little reflection about the experience itself. Jan gives a short presentation about which he is initially apologetic, because after the game, the participants already know what iteration means, better than he could ever explain it. “I don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want to keep you too long from working on your projects” (ibid.). He resisted answering further questions about the rules themselves, but otherwise Jan elaborated on an additional point: “These are free markets. The rules are clear for everyone and it is up to you to make what you make out of it” (ibid.). In design thinking, economic context frames action, and while it often remains unstated, here Jan explicitly reminds the participants that within the game, they are agentive subjects competing in a free market. Because work is always directed toward collecting interim results and time is always short, design thinking’s atmosphere is saturated with permanent urgency and marked by equally permanent gradual progress. During my observations, I became aware of how “elaboration” as such was constantly devalued, and “thinking” that is not directly result-­orientated comes across as indecision, procrastination, and rumination—slow, and a waste of time. On the other hand, “doing” or in other words, the production of initial interim results, is wholly prioritized and considered to be dynamic and expedient. The d.school’s motto succinctly encapsulates this self-conception: “Don’t wait. Innovate!” (HPI School of Design Thinking 2019b). The motto communicates the extent to which urgency is internalized in design thinking, in harmony with the time constraints of economic competition that were legible to me in the field in the continual refusal to have longer discussions. In the following, I spoke with a coach at the d.school while his team was occupied with their work: Jan says that he sees conversations as dangerous, insofar as they waste time. One risks losing track of good ideas in overlong discussions. Instead of discussing things at length, people should instead build prototypes and then test these. In this way one doesn’t risk losing oneself and leaving one’s customer out of the development process. (Notes 06/04/2015)

26 

T. SEITZ

Jan’s statement here complies with the textbook formulation of the principle of iteration, through which teams approach their goals gradually through recurrence and feedback loops. In the production of interim results, one should actively orient oneself by user feedback and avoid discussions that are not result-orientated. Accordingly, the information generated by such feedback loops, not discussion or reflection, generates user-friendly products, since a product idea will be continually adapted so to better match a customer’s needs. This corresponds with the self-image that active “doers” have and propagate: “This is what happens at the d. school: it makes you do stuff, it ignites the maker spirit” (notes 07/08/2015). Do something, instead of thinking it over for too long; prioritize results instead of rationalizing3—the strict distinction articulated here was not entirely evident in the praxis I observed in the field. In the dichotomous separation between doing and thinking, the teams don’t always land on the doing side. They didn’t always arrive at new forms of knowledge in their work that could serve as the basis for next steps. The continual interaction with users is supposed to ensure that users’ needs are met, but knowledge about users didn’t immediately reveal itself either. In the course of my field work, I observed moments in which design thinkers were unsure how to proceed, because their contact with potential users obscured whatever guidance might have been supplied by the project’s factual dimension of meaning: The project at the d.school has been running for five weeks, which is quite a long time. The participating team members have already been in the field once in order to collect data. To that end, they created two separate questionnaires that now needed to be evaluated. Three people sit on the ground and take up the task of assessing the stacks of surveys. One of these stacks consists of letter-sized sheets with written-out answers to questions, and the other set consists of legal sized pages with ordinal rankings of various binary pairs, like applicable vs. inapplicable. The pages are then sorted into piles on the floor. At location A, the two surveys were administered to 16 people and at location B, to 10 people, so that there are two sheets laid out 16 times and two pages laid out 10 times. The three evaluators cannot really do much with the 26 piles, and they therefore conclude that they should collate the results from each of the surveys and each of the locations in order to identify the quantities at the two locations. In other words, the project participants transform the 52 sheets into 4 that can then be laid out on the floor side by side and compared. In this way the respective accumulative results become legible.

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

27

Those involved then attempt to decipher trends and frequencies on the basis of a purely visual model, instead of calculating them arithmetically. But particular abnormalities do not reveal themselves immediately. “Yeah, hmmm. Not so interesting!”, “Not so interesting I guess!”, “It’s almost the same”, “It’s not such a big difference, great!” Robert starts drawing arrows on the pages to make trends clear. He starts at the bottom but then hits an impasse, because there are no clear trends visible in some of the answers. He eventually solves this problem insofar as he draws double sided arrows, but this doesn’t help him reach any conclusions. No truly clear trends emerge. He asks “any takeaways then?” and thereafter stops. Jens says that he still thought that the product idea from last week was a good one, and Robert responds that he still had issues with it. At that point they bring this phase to a close, stand up and go on to the next work phase. (Notes 06/04/2015)

In this sequence the members of the team try to establish an overview of the attitudes of their target group by evaluating surveys that they distributed among potential users. Formally, it seems like any other small-scale quantitative research project, except for the fact that they evaluate the survey with intuitive and tactile methods rather than statistical ones. Robert’s attempt to use arrows to illustrate trends is characteristic of this practice. He is thinking with his hands when he attempts to make regularities immediately visually tangible, and his endeavor fails insofar as it does not reveal a pattern. His mode of action in the above sequence is marked by an absence—he has no theory of evaluating his data. It is therefore not possible for him to win any insights upon which future developments can be built. While in quantitative research, frequency is translated into numerical values in order to make calculations possible, Robert is attempting to uncover the hidden truth of the surveys pictorially, with arrows, and this fails. Instead of trying another method, the group wanders into a conversation from the week before about the final product. The phase ends without establishing any interim results. Design thinking’s iterative process should avoid getting stuck in questions and problems. Tasks should be simple and quick and not make strenuous analytic demands. Even though the applied techniques are reminiscent of the formal tools of social research, the attending theories are dispensed with. Statistical analysis is replaced with intuitively capturing or ­not-­capturing difference. If results are not forthcoming, or if intellectual resources (and time itself) are in short supply, knowledge is not generated, and attention is shifted to another task. The team simply directs attention toward tasks that are more likely to produce results; it is less important

28 

T. SEITZ

what exactly the next task entails. At the end of a work phase or after a brainstorming round, one can often find a whiteboard filled with sticky notes, and then need to ask how to proceed with the copious number of ideas that have been generated. In order to maintain progressive momentum and avoid the threat of stalling out, techniques are devised to vote sticky notes up or down, and determine which ones are popular enough to be used in the next procedural step (cf. ibid., notes 06/16/2015). Content-based and time-intensive discussions are thus avoided. Instead of asking about the best ideas according to content-based criteria, the personal preferences of team members dictate which ideas are prioritized, and whichever ideas have the most votes, win. This demarcates a clear end to the work phase and insures that the group continues to move forward. Democratically deciding on the next topic preserves the group dynamic, since it is clear for all involved which ideas will be further developed. The Activation and Synchronization of Subjects Along with timeboxing and the ways in which it structures processes, other forms of discipline stimulate individuals engaged in design thinking. “Has it ever occurred to you how quickly and effectively you get to work when you have to complete a task within a certain amount of time? You don’t dawdle, you concentrate on the essential, you focus yourself on the goals. Time-boxing creates the conditions of this focus deliberatively” (Scrum-Master 2015). At “go” a group begins to work together on their respective assignment, and the stopwatch beeps to indicate that the group should collectively cease working.4 Between the signals to go and to stop, total focus is demanded from everyone while they collectively attend to the task at hand. In this way, timeboxing not only determines duration, but also prefigures the objective content of the task itself. What is being done and for how long are simultaneously fixed. “To terminate asks the question to be, or not to be. Other concerns can be deferred and developed at a later point. Fixed-term tasks must in contrast be completed, or they lose their meaning” (Luhmann 1968: 147). Every phase of work manifests itself in carrying out one specific method (see Chap. 3, section “Method As Tool”) that is so structured so as to be imminently manageable, w ­ ithout throwing up any barriers that would impede working together as a group. In the following auto-ethnographic (cf. Chang 2008) description that I composed after participating in a design thinking-workshop, the activating effect of these structures becomes visible:

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

29

It was a strange feeling, how effortless it was for me to have a conversation with my interview partner, to take notes and from these, to identify her needs. While I worked, I felt as if I was being observed, which inspired me to take notes with gusto and thereby visually signal my activity. At some point a brainstorming session began and I too fully gave myself over to the process of building on the ideas of others and nodding enthusiastically when other people had suggestions. My feeling of utterly effortless fulfillment of duty applied only to the moment in which I was so engaged. The process was divided into phases each lasting four minutes at most, and this segmentation provided the framework in which I could actively participate without worrying whether or not I would founder. There were no demands made of me that I could not fulfill. It was abundantly clear that we could produce a final product in these four-minute phases. I felt that the objective was rather to lay the foundation for a product that would be developed in the future. By making myself fully accountable to the process, I could devote myself to the small and manageable tasks at hand. At no point was an idea of mine not good enough, because there was no point when my ideas were in any way evaluated. Everything that was said counted as an equally meaningful contribution to the process or to the final product and was thereby valued. The process was not results-driven in terms of the final product, either. It was more like we had all embarked on a journey together into the unknown, for which we just needed to put one foot in front of the other. (Notes 06/10/2015)

The imposition of deadlines creates time constraints and these limitations manifest the provisional character of the (interim) results that are generated. The participants are freed from the demand to contribute fully-­ formed or thoroughly thought-through ideas; they should instead work toward producing as many results as possible. “Go for quantity” is one of the rules that hangs on the walls at the d.school (see Chap. 3, section “Design Thinking As Laboratory Practice”) and decorates the rooms used for workshops. Time pressure cultivates an atmosphere of openness, in which every idea that is expressed is treated as a valuable contribution and people are explicitly discouraged from evaluating any comment. “Defer judgement” is another rule: one shouldn’t think about the final product during the process. The level of aspiration is lowered and time for making decisions radically shortened because “one can choose the ‘first best’ resolution and […] one is not required to work toward the highest ideals or one correct solution” (Luhmann 1968: 146). One only needs to trust that engaging in a process step by step eventually gets you to your goal, while accepting that one might make mistakes along with way: “The Design Thinking innovation process leads teams through iterative loops which

30 

T. SEITZ

take the participants through six phases. The process requires an open culture of failure” (HPI School of Design Thinking 2019a). In this way, the students learn to trust the process. So says one of the participants after a multi-day workshop: “We trusted the process! I was very confused yesterday, but now we came up with an idea! The process is more clever than us!” (Notes 06/18/2015). The methods confine the individual in a specific temporality, precisely in the interplay between intensive work phases and short breaks. A framework emerges that is responsible for organizing the process and structuring all content, rather than this being the responsibility of any individual within the frame of activity. The individual becomes purely a creative subject who can and must bring ideas into being. The process synchronizes the thought-processes of individuals by subjecting them to the same time constraints. They become a single organism with one pulse, governed by the interplay of activity and rest. To use another metaphor, design thinking can be compared with circuit trainings while academic research is more like long-distance running. In the first case, the length of each stage of exercise is determined according to clear specifications, and individuals move though each stage in a synchronized fashion. In the second case, one just runs at their own pace until one reaches the destination.

Time Shortage The difference between academic research and design thinking is evident in another way. Along with time pressure, which develops when an externally limited time frame constricts an activity, there is a condition that can be identified within a specific set of practices in design thinking.5 This condition, called time shortage, arises when design thinkers establish contact with users by employing a kind of “live” empiricism that is specific to design thinking. One can see it clearly in the sequence described at the beginning of the chapter, as Lars attempts to process the test participants’ comments while the discussion was ongoing, without using any d ­ ocumentary aids. Put another way, design thinking’s empirical research takes place in real time. In the first sequence, Lars experiences a time shortage because he cannot keep tempo with the briskly moving conversation between participants. While everyone else is exclusively engaged in an informal exchange about daily work experiences, Lars attempts to follow the conversation and simultaneously compare what is being said with insights that had been gained previously. The conversation itself sets the pace: “Practice unfolds

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

31

in time” (Bourdieu 1980: 81) and Lars tries to keep up. He makes an effort to understand, to analyze, and to select the participants’ utterances in real time while he is also responsible for keeping on schedule and facilitating the discussion. He is completely absorbed in the practices of administering a test and has to make decisions “‘on the spot’, ‘in the twinkling of an eye’, ‘in the heat of the moment’, that is, in conditions which exclude distance, perspective, detachment and reflexion” (ibid.: 82). Which ideas ultimately find their way onto sticky notes is not the result of a process of reflection exempt from time constraints, but the result of intuitive choices reached because of time shortage. Lars does not have any opportunity to calmly reflect on the things people are saying—this would mean taking a detour through theory. He is instead absorbed in the action as it unfolds in time and thereby finds himself in a tight spot. He is clearly under (considerable) strain. Profuse sweating, appealing to me to help him take down notes, and the way he jerked his head back and forth, making sure to keep everything in his gaze—these details suggest how difficult it is for him to take care of everything at once. It did not however strike him as abnormal or as an obstacle to generating results. Later during the lunch break, I lightheartedly mention how awed I am at how many tasks he can complete at one time, to which he answers that the work phases are “actually usually rather stressful” (notes 06/11/2015) and that this session is nothing out of the ordinary.6 I originally concluded that the initial delay at the beginning of the workshop shorted the time allotted for testing, and thereby forced the design thinkers to improvise and work over-quickly. This does not in fact correspond with the perspective of the staff. It is normal for Lars to have to collect the participant’s statements as they discuss in whichever way he can devise on his feet, because design thinking as a practice manufactures time limits but has not mainstreamed the technologies of de-­temporalization known to sociologists. For example, tape recorders are used in the field and transcripts are prepared to be able to evaluate statements at a later time. Lars doesn’t use either of these technologies because he values compliance with the activity’s temporal frame. It does not seem like this leads him to doubt the quality of the insights generated within the time constraints. Design thinking literature often refers to how it relates to academic qualitative research, and this might be the reason that one rushes to judge the seemingly problematic circumstance of working within the condition of time shortage, according to the qualitative evaluative measures practiced in the social sciences. Qualitative research is to a large extent a

32 

T. SEITZ

de-temporalized praxis.7 Collecting and evaluating data are steps that might be separated by months. One can always return to and consult an interview transcript and after a participatory observation, and “[r]eading one’s own writing (unlike listening to oneself speak) allows for a temporal distance from one’s own utterances” (Hirschauer 2006: 432). In contrast, design thinking happens as a sequence of consecutive moments and is characterized by impossibility of “going back” against the flow of time (cf. Schmidt 2012: 51–52). In the sequence I described, Lars is tasked with staying with the discussion. The comments that he is not able to register on sticky notes in the enthusiasm of the moment are simply lost. Only the things that seem important enough to him to grab his over-taxed attention are recorded. In that same sequence, I am myself confronted with the problem of time shortage. As an observer, time shortage dictates that I take notes in a highly selective fashion, but I am still able to concentrate fully on that activity. I don’t waste any time thinking about how I will evaluate the notes in the coming weeks, but I position myself above the fray to view all aspects of “the action from the outside, as an object” (Bourdieu 1980: 91). If I even sweat at all, it is only lightly. What conclusions can be drawn about design thinking after studying its temporality? It is notable how significantly time constraints structure the process—much more pointedly than questions about content. The methods used to generate ideas are more important than the product under development. While trusting that one needs to meticulously follow procedural steps to attain results, one avoids evaluating interim results according to objective criteria. The question of “how” is more important than “what” and the temporal dimension of meaning is prioritized over the factual one. Design thinking uses empirical sociological research models, but scientific evaluative practices are not carried over because the temporal conditions for evaluation do not exist. Design thinkers process the data they collect without referring back to theory and do so anyway under time pressure, so that another research method emerges that is different from those in academic contexts. Gaining insight is subordinated to dynamically progressing to the next step as a group. One answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this study “what does design thinking do?” is that the end product is subordinated to the process itself. Design thinking establishes a mode of teamwork that guarantees a particular group dynamic and motivates participating individuals. This aspect tends to escape from view if design thinking is only thought of as a method to develop user-friendly products and services. Throughout the rest of this

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

33

study, I will be keeping both aspects—product and process—in focus. In the next section, I will describe how empathy can be understood as a concept that leads to insights, making other theoretical frameworks obsolete (see section “Empathy As Methodology”). Here the question arises how the process itself is instructive when it seems like there is no theoretical knowledge at hand to help design thinkers orient themselves. I will devote the second main chapter to the materiality of design thinking, focusing first on the concrete output of products and the way and means by which they come together (see Chap. 3, sections “Design Thinking As Laboratory Practice”, “Translating People into Paper”, “Design Thinking Creates Problems”, “Covering the Tracks”, and “Design Thinking As Pure Development Process”). After this, I will return to questions about process and describe how applying certain methodologies structures process (see Chap. 3, section “Method As Tool”). First, however, I will sketch some preliminary theoretical results where I will examine how my descriptions of design thinking practices in the chapter on temporality can be compared with what design thinking says about itself.

Interim Reflections, Take One It is crucial to recognize the differences between the temporality of empirical sociological research and that of design thinking, in order to articulate what design thinking is and is not as a practice. Even though design thinking constantly refers to methods that derive from the social sciences and even employs some of these—by conducting interviews or distributing questionnaires—it can be shown how much these depart in from academic research models. A praxeological approach to design thinking demands that while it relates to social scientific research, design thinking needs to be considered independently and as its own praxis (cf. Schmidt 2011: 91). Bourdieu never got tired of pointing to the specific relationship between theory and praxis and to warn against theoretical mistakes that result from “presenting the theoretical view of practice as the practical relation to practice, and more precisely in setting up the model that has to be constructed to give an account of practice as the principle of practice” (Bourdieu 1980: 81). Similarly, to study designing thinking (as a sociologist) runs the risk of misperceiving the unique attributes of the object exactly because I center a theory-driven model of empirical, social scientific research. While I was in the field, the theory/praxis problem loomed especially large for me. As a sociologist, I already believed I knew how data

34 

T. SEITZ

collection in the field should look. It took some time before I recognized which social science theories I displaced onto my object of study and began to understand the design thinking practices as specific unto themselves rather than wrongly executed academic ones. Practical knowledge only arises in stressing the contrast between practical and theoretical logic. Bourdieu maintains that this distinction reminds us “that there is a practical knowledge that it has its own logic, which cannot be reduced to that of theoretical knowledge; that, in a sense, agents know the social world better than the theoreticians” (Bourdieu 1991: 252). Even while maintaining that social actors do know the world better in a certain sense, Bourdieu goes on to suggest that “at the same time […] they do not really know it and the scientists’ work consists in making explicit this practical knowledge, in accordance with its own articulations” (ibid.). Following Bourdieu, one needs to acknowledge the practical knowledge of social actors in order to deny that they possess theoretical knowledge. They “cannot become fully cognizant of their praxis, even when they know what to do” (Celikates 2006: 81) and accordingly, it is the goal of praxeological research “to capture and sociologically interpret the experiential reality of social actors with tools borrowed from sociological research” (Hillebrandt 2009: 376). In the concrete case of my research object, this means approaching design thinking as its own praxis and interpreting its specific logic based on observations of its practices. However, this approach runs into problems insofar as it is unable to adequately consider design thinkers’ self-descriptions. It is clearly the case that design thinking cannot be described as a deficient form of qualitative sociological research, but an independent praxis in its own right. At the same time, I do not mention qualitative sociological research here hastily, to give me an occasion to apply theories that are distant from praxis—of which one might accuse me with Bourdieu. Rather, in their self-­descriptions design thinkers themselves refer to their practices as a form of qualitative research, though these have almost no place in a theory of practice that derives from Bourdieu, where it “seems that […] there is no room for a definition of praxis that centers the creative, autonomous and self-reflexive aspects of individual and social activity and judgement” (Celikates 2006: 85). A kind of distrusts manifests in Bourdieu’s attitude toward self-­ descriptions. He distinguishes between “scientific experience and naïve of the social world” (Bourdieu et al. 1991: 20) and contrasts the deficient “spontaneous sociology” (ibid.: 15) of social actors with his own scientific

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

35

(i.e. correct) sociology that is better equipped to understand what social actors do and why they do it. With this study I, too, am claiming that I can more saliently describe what design thinking is than design thinkers themselves, because I assess their experiences and add my perspective as an outsider to their self-­ understanding. Also, without a doubt, disengaging from the knowledge of design thinkers in the field has been a productive intellectual experience. At the same time—and this is the hazard of using Bourdieu—social scientific assumptions do stand in a competitive relationship with statements from design thinkers about themselves, with the former being valued as more correct and therefore singularly useful. Devaluing design thinker’s statements or relativizing them as exchangeable rather than part of the object of study and part of a social reality, squanders the potential for knowledge. But how does moving the knowledge of social actors into focus work? Expanding one’s focus to include the knowledge of social actors means that “social phenomena cannot be understood solely from an ‘objective’ outside perspective, since the practices, interpretations and self-­understandings of agents are interwoven with these phenomena in a matter that can come into view only when the participant perspective—in particular the selfunderstanding of the agent and its articulation in self-­interpretations—is understood as irreducible or even fundamental” (Celikates 2018: 5). In other words, instead of driving a wedge between practices and self-descriptions by setting objective and subjective accounts in competition with one another, one might ask how practices and self-­descriptions can be understood as two sides of the same coin. Shifting epistemic interest in this way implicitly invites “a fundamental dislocation of the sociologist from one position to another […]: He ceases to be a diagnostician and analyst who excavates the ‘unconscious’ of social actors by translating their actions into a general sociological grammar. Instead of this, he takes up their specific knowledge and their genuine practical meaning and transforms them into specialists of their own social space, i­ntegrating this knowledge into his arsenal of interpretive tools” (Bogusz 2010: 35). From this point on, two possible paths emerge upon which I will travel for the rest of this study. On the first, I will continue a project of reconstructing the logic of praxis. I have laid out my thoughts about the temporal aspect of design thinking as the foundation, and I will now continue to build upon this in examining the role of empathy (see section “Empathy As Methodology”) and then the materiality of design thinking (see Chap. 3). One is forced to contend with the concept of empathy because it has

36 

T. SEITZ

so much significance in the field, and the examination of the materiality of design thinking is important because non-human actors—things like clocks, sticky notes, white boards, and so on—play such a significant role. With Latour (and others), I will produce a symmetrical description of the design thinking process that makes visible the contributions of both human and non-human actors. This undertaking will also hit a wall to the extent that I am unable to adequately integrate design thinkers’ self-­ descriptions. The sociology of translation, to which I will refer, also tends to position itself in opposition to the knowledge of social actors. This leads to the second path (Chap. 4) upon which I will transition from a praxeological to a pragmatic description of the phenomenon. At this point, I will ask the question how we might understand practices and self-descriptions of the same phenomenon.

Empathy As Methodology Because of the numerous references to qualitative research methods in the self-descriptions of design thinkers, I started my fieldwork with the implicit understanding that I would come across decidedly qualitative methods in my research. For example, Tim Brown’s (2009) Change by Design is scattered with references to qualitative research. Every design thinking project is comprised of “an intensive period of observation” (ibid.: 43) in which the user’s environment would be made accessible with “observational tools refined in social science” (ibid.: 45). Knowledge about users (typically accrued in qualitative interpretations) would be generated through “innovative ethnographic techniques” by “watching what people don’t do, listening to what they don’t say” (ibid.: 43). Contrary to Bourdieu’s objections, I was not the one who was importing theories unrelated to praxis into design thinking. By reading introductory treatises about design thinking, I had expected to find qualitative practices that resembled my own, and so I was initially surprised to find no such academic methods in the field. Methodology was simply never discussed. Qualitative research in design thinking more closely resembles asking one’s way than it does a methodologically controlled research project. I encountered a person in the field who had completed a degree in sociology prior to starting a design thinking certification, and I asked her specifically about the role of qualitative methods:

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

37

Yasmin was working as a freelancer for the agency and was completing the advanced track certification at the d.school. She had majored in sociology and received her diploma a few years earlier. I asked her whether studying sociology helped her in design thinking and her answer was affirmative. For example, she said that she was less inclined than her peers during interviews to take down answers verbatim and more inclined to think about the meaning behind their words. She did not use any technical terms while we were talking, despite the fact that I had identified myself as a sociologist. I asked her if she was encountering methods courses at the d.school that were familiar to her from her studies, ones that she could describe as social research. She answered in the negative, that that kind of thing did not exist at the d. school. (Notes 06/03/2015)

This conversation was productive for two reasons. On the one hand, my informant suggests that by studying sociology, she is more inclined to look behind the statements made by social actors. On the other hand, her comments make no reference to any formal methodological learning. While the abstract description of research would depend on knowledge that can be explicitly formulated and that refers back to related academic disciplinary discussions, the propensity to look behind the words people use is an aptitude developed by repeatedly doing qualitative research. In other words, a research praxis is habituated and becomes tacit knowledge as one’s hermeneutic faculties grow more and more sensitive (cf. Helfferich und Kruse 2007). This practical knowledge seems to be of central importance in design thinking, while the ability to verbalize theoretical methods clearly only plays a supporting role.8 But how can we understand what this practical knowledge consists of? At the start I noticed that the term empathy was important in the literature and in the field, and it became clear what that word meant to the design thinkers themselves. Brown (2009) introduces empathy (or lack thereof) as that which sets design thinking apart from academic research: It’s possible to spend days, weeks, or months conducting research […] but at the end of it all we will have little more than stacks of field notes, videotapes, and photographs unless we can connect with the people we are observing at a fundamental level. We call this ‘empathy’ and it is perhaps the most important distinction between academic thinking and design thinking. (Ibid.: 49)

This quote clearly illustrates the meaning of empathy for design thinking. At the moment that qualitative research processes normally begin evaluating data—after collecting “stacks of field-notes, videotapes and photo-

38 

T. SEITZ

graphs” (ibid.: 49), design thinking employs empathy. Working intuitively instead of in a controlled and traceable manner effectively eliminates theory in the design thinking research process. Working empathetically— using empathy as a method—means concretely to adopt the perspective of an interlocutor as one’s own. We build bridges of insight through empathy, the effort to see the world through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and feel the world through their emotions. (Ibid.: 50)

The call to take on the perspective of one’s object of study is strongly reminiscent of the earlier forms of ethnographic research, especially those of Bronsilaw Malinowski. The goal of these—the adoption of the “native’s point of view” (Geertz 1974: 26)—is to establish an intense personal and emotional closeness with the object of study. One can see however how this idealized notion of ethnographic understanding falters in Malinowski’s posthumously published field notebooks from 1967  (Malinowski 1967), insofar as he in no way shows himself to be especially sensitive to or even like the people he observes in the field. One can contrast the “myth of the chameleon field-worker, perfectly self-tuned to his exotic surroundings—a walking miracle of empathy, tact, patience and cosmopolitanism” (ibid.: 27) and the image one derives from Malinowski’s personal sketches. In his reflections, one sees a scientist driven by lust, plagued by boredom, and infused with an antipathy for the people he observes. The value of Malinowski’s scientific contributions is not called into question with the publication of his notebooks, but their release did ignite a disciplinary debate about the conditions for ethnographic understanding: “What happens to verstehen when einfühlen falls away?” (ibid.: 28). Good ethnography was henceforth not primarily connected with sympathy, humanity, or other personal attributes of scientists who saw themselves as neutral observers of an event. Instead, good ethnography started to be understood as a process of systematic reflection conducted by people who saw themselves as part of the object under observation (cf. Linska 2012: 42–44). The strict separation between subject and object was fundamentally called into question (cf. Lissner-Espe 1993: 41) and ethnography became a more systematic and self-reflective practice. “Ethnographer’s Magic” (Stocking 1992: 12–59) no longer sufficiently explained the scientific process. Design thinking seems however to slip into this magic; the reflective turn is still not evident. Its self-descriptions are infused with representa-

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

39

tions in which the act of empathizing is stressed: “[W]e must empathize, not simply scrutinize with the cold detachment of statisticians” (Brown 2009: 56). The design thinkers in the field highlighted again and again the subjectivity of the research process when they talked about how design thinkers need to find their own style (cf. notes 07/08/2015) or that it was up to the individual to choose which of the participant’s statement would be classified as relevant. “Other people always had different ideas than I did” (notes 06/09/2015). Empathy functioned as a methodological placeholder, releasing the process from the demands of reflection while its actual function remained vague. Design thinking seemed primarily to be an intuitive activity rather than a reflexive one; it was no wonder why my informants in the field often remarked that design thinking needed to be practiced in order to truly understand it: “It is hard to explain design thinking. You have to experience it in order to understand it” (Notes 07/08/2015; Notes 06/04/2015). The term empathy is used in different ways in design thinking. For example, it is described as an “effort to see the world through the eyes of others” (Brown 2009: 50) and relatedly, empathy is characterized as an endeavor to understand others. Additionally, it is described as an important personality trait and an integral component of the “design thinker’s personality profile” (Brown 2008: 87), comprised of attributes like integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism, and collaboration (cf. ibid.). Furthermore, design thinking is understood by practitioners as a process that produces empathy, and empathy is understood as a goal to be reached and a condition to be wrought: I am speaking with Andreas about the testing-workshop that is coming up and he says that he is very excited for it because the users still seem ­unfamiliar to him. He has only spoken with them on the phone and the empathy is still not quite there yet. (Notes 06/09/2015)

Because the term remains blurry, it can be employed in such a way so as to bring meaning to the process without concretizing how things are going to work. Empathy is an immediately understandable concept and seems like a medium through which to actualize user-friendliness without having to explicate the steps one would need to take to get there. It also produces a narrative of becoming-emphatic, thereby saving itself from needing to make methodological decisions, the absence of which I noticed with curiosity at the beginning of my study.

40 

T. SEITZ

Empathy is an epistemological instrument of dubious quality that nonetheless plays an important part in design thinking. It solidifies the impression that processing objective considerations not centrally important to design thinking. Generating knowledge about individuals that withstand critique or pass disciplinary muster does not appear to be a primary concern. Empathy doesn’t directly dictate the process of accruing knowledge in design thinking or the respective steps that should be followed. Instead, it justifies the process as an intuitive and emotional one of becoming sensitive to the needs of others. The epistemological form of design thinking is experiential rather than analytic. The individual steps in the process needn’t be understood or rationally imbued; to follow them is sufficient. Design thinking doesn’t happen in the mind. “[D]esign thinkers […] ‘think with their hands’ throughout the life of the project” (Brown 2009: 106) and they don’t need to deal with their instruments reflexively. In accordance with the dichotomous differentiation of thinking and doing, they can profess their allegiance to doing rather than thinking and avoid reflection that doesn’t immediately lead to results. However, if their process is not guided by methodological considerations, how do they know what to do?

Notes 1. The techniques in question, which emerge in agile software development (the most well-known example is the company Scrum), have to do with a specific organizational understanding and the socio-cultural condition of coding (cf. Schmidt 2012: 183–189). Programming is understood as a “collective, physical and public process which from the start involves working with clients, who are supposed to be integrated into the development team” (ibid.: 186). Design thinking is itself considered an agile method (cf. Komus 2014) although design thinking and agile software development have not yet been systematically compared. 2. In Scrum training programs, the game is called the Ball Point Game. There, instead of manufacturing magic pens, they make magic balls. For an ethnographic description of this, see Schmidt (2012: 191–193). 3. It is difficult to distinguish between these two things and design thinkers themselves run into difficulties. For example, Ulrich Weinberg, the director of the d.school in Potsdam, explained at the 2012 Entrepreneurship Summit at the Free University in Berlin that “the best method we have so far encountered is the way that designers work intuitively. That’s why we call this whole thing ‘design thinking.’ We could though also call it design doing, because it is design thinking and doing” (Weinberg 2012: 6:35 min).

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

41

4. Individuals are synchronized even at the level of individual tasks in design thinking through methodological structuring (see Chap. 3, section “Method As Tool” and Chap. 4, section “Design Thinking As Emancipated Work”). 5. Time pressure is created when one has several tasks that have to be completed in a limited amount of time. In contrast, a time shortage is not just a matter of having short externally imposed time limits but arises in relation to other processes within the time frame. In chess, for example, a time shortage is created when one is playing with a timer and one player has used up more than her appointed time, leaving her opponent with relatively less time per move. In other words, a time shortage does not result from the use of a timer alone, but only when a player manages to make her moves faster than her opponent. A player can also create a time shortage and manipulate her opponent psychologically by making several moves in quick succession. Time shortage is thus a relational concept that is determined by an opponent’s speed—or generally, by the temporality of other practices. 6. By comparing design thinking with academic research, I am not suggesting that the former arrives at comparatively false conclusions. It is merely notable how the different dimensions of meaning (temporal, spatial, factual, etc.) are respectively at play. Simply put, design thinking does not address objective questions about content that would need to be discussed or defended in an academic context. 7. Bourdieu insists that science is oblivious to time: “Scientific practice is so detemporalized that it tends to exclude even the idea of what it excludes. Because science is only possible in relation to time which is the opposite of that practice, it tends to ignore time and so to detemporalize practice” (Bourdieu 1980: 81). The detemporalized nature of science is to my mind above all important for Bourdieu’s argument in order to stress the temporality of practices. However, the practices of science and of theory have their own temporalities. Relatedly, Robert Schmidt (2012) notes that we still are missing an “extensive reflexive praxeology of the temporal logic of scientific research” (ibid.: 54) that might include “report deadlines, pending evaluations, accruing project grants, publication deadlines and the like” (ibid.) in the analytic frame (cf. also Hirschauer 2008: 170). 8. I am not suggesting that my conversation partner in the preceding sequence didn’t possess theoretical knowledge about methods. I am also not accusing her of forgetting what she had learned as a sociology student. What she does or does not know is completely irrelevant for practice theory, because knowledge is not conceptualized as theoretical thinking that precedes praxis (like would be the case for Mentalism). Instead practice theory would understand knowledge “as a practical knowledge, an ability, know-how, a conglomeration of daily techniques, a practical understanding in the sense of having ‘learned how to do something’” (cf. Reckwitz 2003: 289) that

42 

T. SEITZ

only reveals itself in praxis. It is not a question of what kind of knowledge a person has and stores in their head but rather what knowledge might be applied for specific social practices (cf. ibid.: 292). Mental life is not separate from practices and does not precede them, but it is itself constitutive of practices (cf. Schmidt 2011: 95). For this reason, practice theory does not speak of the knowledge of social actors but the knowledge of social practices. “The social is ‘located’ […] in ‘social practices’ which can be understood as know-how dependent behavioral routines solidified in practical knowledge. Subjects have ‘embodied’ knowledge of their routines though this knowledge also takes the form of routinized relations between subjects and the material artifacts they ‘use’” (Reckwitz 2003: 289). Practice theory thus localizes knowledge not in the head, but in “social bodies and in material things” (Hillebrandt 2014: 91).

References Bogusz, T. (2010). Zur Aktualität von Luc Boltanski. Einleitung in sein Werk. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Bourdieu, P. (1980). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). “Meanwhile, I have come to know all the diseases of sociological understanding” An interview with Beate Krais. In P.  Bourdieu et  al. (Eds.), The craft of sociology: Epistemological preliminaries (pp.  247–259). New York and Berlin: De Gruyter. Bourdieu, P., Chamboredon, J.-C., Passeron, J.-C., & Krais, B. (Eds.). (1991). The craft of sociology: Epistemological preliminaries. New  York and Berlin: De Gruyter. Bröckling, U. (2016). The entrepreneurial self. Fabricating a new type of subject. Los Angeles and London: Sage. Brown, T. (2008). Design thinking. Harvard Business Review, 86, 84–92. Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York: Harper Business. Celikates, R. (2006). Zwischen Habitus und Reflexion. Zu einigen methodologischen Problemen in Bourdieus Sozialtheorie. In M.  Hillebrand (Ed.), Willkürliche Grenzen. Das Werk Pierre Bourdieus in interdisziplinärer Anwendung (pp. 73–90). Bielefeld: transcript. Celikates, R. (2018). Critique as social practice: Critical theory and social self-­ understanding. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Geertz, C. (1974). “From the native’s point of view”: On the nature of anthropological understanding. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28(1), 26–45.

2  THE TEMPORALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

43

Helfferich, C., & Kruse, J. (2007). Vom ‘professionellen Blick’ zum ‘hermeneutischen Ohr’. Hermeneutisches Fremdverstehen als eine sensibilisierende Praxeologie für sozialarbeiterische Beratungskontakte. In I.  Miethe (Ed.), Rekonstruktion und Intervention. Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur rekonstruktiven Sozialarbeitsforschung (pp. 175–188). Opladen: Budrich. Hillebrandt, F. (2009). Praxistheorie. In G. Kneer & M. Schroer (Eds.), Handbuch soziologische Theorien (pp.  369–394). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Hillebrandt, F. (2014). Soziologische Praxistheorien. Eine Einführung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Hirschauer, S. (2006). Putting things into words. Ethnographic description and the silence of the social. Human Studies, 29(4), 413–441. Hirschauer, S. (2008). Die Empiriegeladenheit von Theorien und der Erfindungsreichtum der Praxis. In H. Kalthoff, S. Hirschauer, & G. Lindemann (Eds.), Theoretische Empirie – Zur Relevanz qualitativer Forschung (pp. 165–187). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. HPI School of Design Thinking. (2019a). Mindset – Design Thinking. HPI School of Design Thinking. (2019b). School of Design Thinking. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://hpi.de/en/school-of-design-thinking.html. Jalote, P., Palit, A., Kurien, P., & Peethamber, V. T. (2004). Timeboxing: A process model for iterative software development. Journal of Systems and Software, 70, 117–127. Komus, A. (2014). Status Quo Agile 2014. Zweite Studie des BPM-Labors der Hochschule Koblenz. Online verfügbar unter https://www.hs-koblenz.de/ fileadmin/media/fb_wirtschaftswissenschaften/Forschung_Projekte/ Forschungsprojekte/Status_Quo_Agile/Studie_2014/2014.07.23_Bericht_ Interessenten_final.v. 1.01.pdf vom 27.01.2016. Linska, M. (2012). Selbst-/Reflexion in der Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie. Norderstedt: Books on Demand. Lissner-Espe, A. (1993). Janusköpfe. Eine Rahmenanalyse des ethnographischen Dilemmas. Unpublished dissertation, Free University Berlin. Luhmann, N. (1968). Die Knappheit der Zeit und die Vordringlichkeit des Befristeten. In N. Luhmann (Ed.), Politische Planung. Aufsätze zur Soziologie von Politik und Verwaltung (pp. 143–164). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Malinowski, B. (1967). A diary in the strict sense of the term. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Reckwitz, A. (2003). Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken: Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 32(4), 282–301. Schmidt, R. (2011). Die Entdeckung der Praxeographie. Zum Erkenntnisstil der Soziologie Bourdieus. In D. Šuber (Ed.), Pierre Bourdieu und die Kulturwissenschaften. Zur Aktualität eines undisziplinierten Denkens (pp. 89–106). Konstanz: UVK-Verlagsgesellschaft.

44 

T. SEITZ

Schmidt, R. (2012). Soziologie der Praktiken. Konzeptionelle Studien und empirische Analysen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Scrum-Master. (2015). Time-Boxing. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from http:// scrum-master.de/Scrum-Meetings/Time-Boxing. Stocking, G. W. (1992). The ethnographer’s magic and other essays in the history of anthropology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Weinberg, U. (2012). Design Thinking. Entrepreneurship Summit 2012 in Berlin. Freie Universität Berlin. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=WDCZ8u6YZ6I.

CHAPTER 3

The Materiality of Design Thinking

Abstract  Following an Actor-Network Theory (ANT)-approach I analyze the material arrangements that are set into place before a design thinking workshop can start. Design thinking is made visible as a laboratory practice that can only take place in specific environments. Based on this I discuss the epistemic practices with which information about end users and their problems is created. By highlighting the materiality of these processes, I argue that design thinking does not actually generate information about end users and their problems. Instead, it constructs specific imaginations of people and their problems in such a way that design thinking can offer convincing solutions. Herein lies the rhetoric strength of the concept: it describes people and their problems in such a way that a solution seems in reach. These solutions only exist as ideas, as stories of problem solving that can keep their persuasive simplicity because they are not instantly put into place/challenged. Keywords  Materiality • Problem-solving • User • Persona • Laboratory If empathy alone is enough to supply meaning to the design thinking process without driving action, how does the actual work of design thinking take form? What exactly happens during the process and how do design thinkers know what to do in any instance? In order to answer these ­questions, © The Author(s) 2020 T. Seitz, Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31715-7_3

45

46 

T. SEITZ

we need to center a concept that until now has only been implicitly thematized: design thinking’s specific materiality. Here I will begin to grapple with the spatial conditions of design thinking and its concrete yields (sections “Design Thinking As Laboratory Practice”, “Translating People into Paper”, “Design Thinking Creates Problems”, “Covering the Tracks”, and “Design Thinking As Pure Development Process”) and continue to uncover what drives action (section “Method As Tool”). The term “design thinking” clearly suggests a specific kind of thinking, and design thinkers insist that it can be understood as a specific mindset (cf. notes 06/02/2015; notes 06/17/2015). But by examining it through the lens of practice theory, we can see that design thinking doesn’t focus on thinking as such. Ethnographic study cannot access what happens in the minds of participants, and praxis occurs elsewhere—between their heads and the rest of the applied materials: sticky notes, whiteboards, markers, and so on (cf. Reckwitz 2003: 289). The sociology of translation (cf. Callon 1986) will be useful to describe this praxis. It is a paradigm that Latour and others developed in their earlier scientific ethnographies (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Latour 1999a) where they “examine in detail the practices that produce information about a state of affairs” (Latour 1999a: 24)1 The sociology of translation is a praxeological approach that studies scientific practices which can be observed in a laboratory, like chemicals, humans, animals, instruments, tools, and paper. Reflecting on the specific approach that he used in his study of laboratory science, Latour writes, “I was struck, in a study of a biology laboratory, by the way in which many aspects of laboratory practice could be ordered by looking not at the scientists’ brains (I was forbidden access!), at the cognitive structures (nothing special), nor at the paradigms (the same for thirty years), but at the transformation of rats and chemicals into paper” (Latour 1986: 3). To describe laboratory praxis in such banal terms like “the transformation of rats or chemicals into paper” seems odd, but this approach has succeeded in opened up completely new possibilities in the study of scientific praxis. It reliably strips away all of the presumptions about science that have gotten in the way of describing it properly. “This mysterious thinking process that seemed to float like an inaccessible ghost over social studies of science at last has flesh and bones and can be thoroughly examined” (Latour 1983: 162). Now we understand the laboratory’s output as paper, rather than facts and theories. Though at first it was an enormous shift, it was then suddenly possible to describe scientific praxis without first granting it special status, revealing that nothing unusual or even “scientific” per se (Knorr-Cetina 1991) was going on in the lab.

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

47

Laboratory studies broke with their historically naïve faith in science and became agonistic.2 In order to get at design thinking in a similar way, one— myself and this study included—also needs to break from dogmas. In the case of design thinking, especially considering the role of self-­descriptions, the central dogma that needs to be disrupted is that design thinking generates user-friendly products and services. To doubt this particular doctrine is doubly significant. On the one hand, I will be calling the self-evidence of the concept user-friendliness into question, and on the other, I will maintain that only ideas for products and services result from the design thinking process, not the products themselves. We might notice something similar in the sciences. For a long time, it was never questioned that scientific methods produced true statements: this is just what science did. A similar danger applies in design thinking when one assumes that user-friendly solutions will be developed because user-friendly solutions are exactly what design thinking is responsible for. To avoid this tautology, we must examine the production of user-friendliness in detail. Insofar as a client is presented with a report that lists ideas (which result from the process of engaging with human beings), we can ask, analogous to Latour’s approach, whether and how design thinking translates people into paper.3 What is the chain of translations that connects one with the other? Do these connections follow design thinking’s mission, which Tim Brown (2009: 49) formulates in this way: “The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that improve lives.”

Design Thinking As Laboratory Practice Just like there can be no laboratory science without a lab, design thinking is not conceivable outside of the specific spatial arrangements in which it takes places. During my field research, I got to know the rooms at the d.school in Potsdam and I often helped prepare rooms for design thinking workshops. Regularly, the agency was responsible for transporting their supplies: mobile whiteboards, standing tables, stools, writing and crafting material, and decorations for the rooms that had been rented for the duration of the workshop. A room that has been prepared for design thinking consists of a specific number of standing tables, however many would be needed to accommodate the number of teams that will be formed. The tables are set up all over the room, surrounded by whiteboards that can be shifted during the workshop. Additionally, there are several seating possibilities like stools or beanbags that can be easily relocated throughout the

48 

T. SEITZ

room as needed. Posters are hung up with design thinking imperatives printed on them. These commandment-like rules are supposed to instruct the participants in how they should behave: “Build on the Ideas of others!,” “Defer Judgement!,” “Go for Quantity!,” “Be Visual!,” “Encourage Wild Ideas!,” and so on. The tools—blocks of multicolored sticky notes, felt pens, push pins, and also the aforementioned “Time Timer”—are then spread out within the modular infrastructure. Finally, all of the tables are equipped with crafting materials that can serve to build prototypes: Lego blocks, pipe cleaners, paper, scissors, glue, and so on. The website at the d.school advertises these modular rooms as the third pillar of design thinking, next to interdisciplinary teams and the iterative process: A team needs optimal spatial conditions so that it can develop its creative process. These include flexible, movable furniture, adequate space for whiteboards and presentation surfaces as well as materials for prototyping design ideas. These variable rooms can be adapted to the needs of each project. (HPI School of Design Thinking 2019a)

Corporations that want to implement design thinking usually furnish an extra room on site for workshops. “So integral are these project spaces to our creative process that we have exported them, whenever possible, to our clients” (Brown 2009: 35). While I was doing my field work, the agency was also in the midst of negotiations with companies to help them design their own workshop space (cf. notes 06/01/2015). In the first main chapter, I explained how temporal “spaces” must first be created in order to facilitate the design thinking process; the manufacture of design thinking’s spatial dimension is analogous. Design thinking can only happen after a room is set up and the appropriate instruments are spread around. Comparable practices can be seen in the laboratory sciences, which also depend on spatial arrangements. Even though the tools employed in design thinking processes are less complex than those in a lab, their importance (for praxis) should not be underestimated. If we understand the laboratory with Latour as a place within which heterogeneous things might be compared (cf. Latour 1986: 26), then the spaces in which design thinking happens—as will become clear in the course of this chapter—can also be understood as laboratories.4 The ways in which design thinking is bound to specifically prepared spaces is reflected in the utterances of practicing design thinkers. Their statements help us understand the spatial separation between an interior and an exterior and, relatedly, an us and a them.

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

49

What are the projects that already made a change, that are already out there? (Notes 07/08/2015) This is Design Thinking, we adapt to the environment, we adapt to the people around us. (Ibid.) Walk into the offices of any of the world’s leading design consultancies, and the first question is likely to be ‘Where is everybody?’ Of course, many hours are spent in the model shop, in project rooms, and peering into computer monitors, but many more hours are spent out in the field with the people who will ultimately benefit from our work. (Brown 2009: 43)

Like in the preceding chapter where we saw how design thinking time was cordoned off from regular corporate routines, here we can see the spatial separation5 between the design thinking laboratory and the world out there, one also dividing design thinkers and users (see section “Design Thinking Creates Problems”). Once the rooms are set up and relevant separations made, design thinking can begin.

Translating People into Paper The design thinking process always starts by amply researching potential users in order to develop user-friendly products and services. The initial phases—Understand, Observe, and Define6—should generate likenesses of future users so that developers might know for whom they are developing and what problems these individuals may encounter and need solving. The following sequence derives from a workshop that was set up to instruct staff members from a large corporation in design thinking. I spent the day with one five-person group out of total of three, and the workshop was structured by an activity called a sprint in which the whole design thinking process is completed in the course of a day. This was the second multiday workshop the participants had taken part in within the framework of becoming certified as design thinking moderators. After completing this certification, they should be able to facilitate companies’ internal design thinking projects. In other words, in the workshop they got to know design thinking better while alternating responsibilities in the moderator role. The participants are back from their interviews. While they were in the field they prepared handwritten notes where they recorded the answers informants gave to interview questions, and the moderator asks the participants to transfer their notes onto sticky notes. In practice this means that every piece of

50 

T. SEITZ

information—every insight—would need to be recorded on its own sticky note. The participants then go off on their own to transfer each of the ideas from a particular person onto a sticky note of a particular color. In this activity the participants transform the letter-sized pages that were inscribed during the interviews into 5–8 sticky notes per interview, each noting a central insight. While this was happening, the moderator draws a graph on the whiteboard with four fields, one that was illustrated in her method booklet.7 The method that the group is about to use—the Empathy Map—is one of 25 techniques illustrated in a booklet that was handed out to participants at the beginning of the workshop, putting the tools of design thinking in their hands. The moderator continues drawing an empathy map on the board, and she sketches a person’s portrait in the middle of it. With rudimentary lines she makes a head, ears and a nose, but doesn’t yet flesh it out any more than that. As it is sketched in her booklet, she titles the four fields of her graph “Think”, “Feel”, “Say & Do”, “Hear & See.” Once she is finished writing, the participants gather around the whiteboard in a half circle and one by one stick up their colored notes in the appropriate quadrant. They first read each note aloud and sometimes say a bit more about it before posting the note up. It seems to be clear to everyone where each note should go. Many notes are stuck on the board without any hesitancy at all, sometimes a participant will check in briefly with the rest of the group. Within each of the quadrants, the thematically related sticky notes are grouped together. Each of the four fields on the whiteboard are slowly filled in with colorful sticky notes until it bursts with a cheerful chaos. With the different colors, it is still apparent which notes comes from which interviews with which people, but this classifying system becomes less relevant once all the notes are posted and they are structured according to the four quadrants. By being organized in this way, the sticky notes don’t refer back to the individual informants as obviously as they refer to their respective fields and the topics according to which they are grouped. This corresponds with the principles of deductive (four fields) and inductive (thematic grouping) coding which I learned about qualitative research methods courses. The moderator then adds more detail to the sketch of the face at the center of the quadrants—eyes, hair and jewelry. Before our very eyes a persona comes to life and is given a name—Heike. She appears as a person with specific needs and problems that are indicated in the accumulation of sticky notes. She can hear, feel, speak and act and hear and see certain things, and can be understood by the participants who are also able to feel empathetic toward her. (Notes 06/16/2015)

In this sequence, I was able to observe how collected data is processed in design thinking. In the words of my informants, this is the moment in which the foundation for user-friendliness is laid. I could describe what transpired

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

51

in the sequence—the transposition of data points onto sticky-­notes, the arrangement of notes in quadrants, and finally, sketching Heike—as a form a qualitative social research, a traditionally scientific praxis that is applied in this new context to identify users’ needs and to address them with the respective products and services. I could just carry over what the process calls itself into my own study, but were I to do so, I would only be reproducing design thinkers subjective accounts. To describe the praxis of generating personae as qualitative social research would transform it into something it is not. I would like to avoid this (scholastic) mistake. The sociology of translation is not interested in whether or not design thinking is associated with qualitative research. Instead, it supplies a vocabulary that enables me to describe the sequence without reiterating such things as gathering users’ needs. This authorizes a sociological description that successfully “make[s] a difference” (Hirschauer 2006: 439). Representation or Construction? Design thinking is supposed to satisfy fundamental human needs. It claims “to create new ideas, that will serve unmet needs, and that will have a positive impact” (Brown 2009: 76). But how can one discover what these fundamental human needs are? Can they be identified at all? There isn’t actually any room in design thinking for humans and their needs; these have to be converted into a form that is compatible with the design thinking process. Products and services are not developed with human beings, but for human beings, and to that end these (humans) need to be designed in the course of the process as well. This happens when field observations or surveys are recorded on paper and later translated into notes, which are then posted up onto a partition around the persona, who is hereafter ascribed with certain characteristics, feelings, and problems. In this way, translations create “the possibility that one thing (…) may stand for another” (Law 1992: 386). In order to be compatible with design thinking, individuals must become sticky notes, and these must become personae. The methods employed here—the sticky notes, the whiteboard, the method cards—can also be described as “inscription technologies” (Latour and Woolgar 1986: 51). With the help of these technologies, the human informants are translated, and this establishes the connection between people and personae. Without the inscription technologies, there would be no personae developed on the whiteboard, personae for whom the products and services might be developed and whose needs should be met.

52 

T. SEITZ

The advantages of translation for design thinkers are clear. First, it is more expedient for design thinkers to work with sticky notes rather than human beings. Sticky notes keep to their word, and they don’t change their minds or contradict themselves. Second, distilled as sticky notes, temporally and spatially distinct actors can be brought together onto the whiteboard and simultaneously considered. Third, sticky notes can be moved around and recombined. They can be shifted from one frame or field to another, and the connection between these and the people from whom they derived can be arranged in new ways, like for example the persona categories in the above sequence: “Think,” “Feel,” “Say & Do,” and “Hear & See.” It is therefore possible for a design thinking team to organize and assess the sticky notes in a way that would be difficult when working with human beings. Sticky notes can’t complain or disagree with the design thinkers’ interpretive choices. In direct contact or dialogue with the individuals to whom the sticky notes refer, these interpretative choices might be questioned. Through translation, a design thinking team can alone decide what is relevant and what should constitute the needs and problems of a persona. The human informants are separated in time and space and would otherwise never come together without the intervention of design thinkers who combined their characteristics to create the persona (ibid.: 39). Representation Is Interpretation Is Construction But which characteristics will find their way to the whiteboard? In the sequence above, we do not see what Latour would call a “literal, word-for-­ word translation” (Latour 1983: 146). The sequence’s resulting persona in theory refers to the individuals who were surveyed out in the field, people out there in the real world. She is supposed to represent future users, insofar as the characteristics of people surveyed in the field are unified in her, Heike. The characteristics that come together on the board are insights that are deemed relevant by the design thinkers. From this point on in the process, design thinkers will generate ideas for the persona rather than the individuals surveyed in the field. Design thinkers no longer need to consider a diffuse and confusing mass of discernable people, but just Heike, the persona with clearly discernable qualities who takes form on the whiteboard. In principle there are an infinite number of qualities that could be noted or observed, but not all of them appear equally relevant or worthy of selection. For each informant only five to eight statements/ insights are selected and transferred to sticky notes and then to the white-

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

53

board. Heike is in other words not the totality of insights but only those which are selected in the process and extracted from the pile. Since Foucault (1971: 22), we know about the violence one inflicts on a thing when speaking about it because “the sign is already an interpretation which is not given as such” (Foucault 1990: 65). Heike is thus configured to represent the informants in the field although she is an amalgam of just a few specific attributes that derive from their feedback. Design thinkers prioritize certain elements that they fit into the structure of the empathy map. Instead of representing people, Heike defines who these people out there are; she is herself only a collection of sticky notes. Realities Made and Unmade In translation, “Actors [are] constituted anew, redefined or effaced” (Kneer 2009: 25). Design thinking develops ideas not for the people out there, but for the persona in here, who is supposed to reflect informants. Critically, the persona no longer refers to the entire theoretically describable reality out there, but just the specific extract that is relevant for design thinking. By way of the five to eight sticky notes with specifically selected features that land on the whiteboard, a specific world out there is conceptualized in which people with these and only these qualities, needs, and problems exist. In the last sequence, one can observe not the reproduction of reality as such, but the construction of a specific reality. Two things are constructed in this process: in the design thinking laboratory, a persona is constructed that refers to an external reality, but this reality is different than the potentially describable reality, insofar as it is dependent on ­whichever insights become affixed to the persona. We are thus confronted with the obviously constructed qualities of an out there and a persona in here. The persona refers back to the qualities while creating the impression that it merely reflects reality (Law 2004: 84). This reality’s invisible remainder is that which is not relevant to design thinking and doesn’t refer to the persona. John Law (ibid.: 13, 38–42, 83–85) describes the process of making realities visible and invisible as method assemblage. “The general lesson is that to enact out-thereness is to make silences and non-realities as well as signals and realities. This double movement—realities made and realities unmade—is constitutive of method assemblage” (ibid.: 107). Three discernable categories emerge here: “(a) whatever is in-here or present [Heike, T.S.]; (b) whatever is absent but is also manifest in its absence [the world of design thinking, T.S.]; and (c) whatever is absent but is

54 

T. SEITZ

Other because, while it is necessary to presence, it is not or cannot be made manifest [everything else, T.S.]” (ibid: 84). The key to understanding design thinking lies in isolating these three categories. Design thinking doesn’t merely produce ideas for products and services, but instead it creates its own world, or category (b) according to the paradigm above.

Design Thinking Creates Problems How might we characterize the world constructed in the design thinking process? How is it distinct from other worlds? With Foucault, we can now ask from whom the interpretation comes, because “[t]he origin [principe] of interpretation is nothing other than the interpreter” (Foucault 1990: 66). This question can be expanded in two ways. On the one hand, we can ask where the interpreter is located, or in other words how the interpreter is socially positioned.8 We must also reformulate the question as a praxeological one: what we have here are not people who interpret, but a praxis of interpretation that consists of the interplay between human being and artifacts. Only in this way does the construction of the world in its specificity become visible. The characteristics that crystalize as Heike point to needs or problems that distinguish themselves as those that can be met or solved with products and services. In this world human beings are understood as users or consumers; their problems are solved with products and their needs are satisfied with services—as long as users/consumers adopt and buy what’s on offer.9 In this world, design thinking supplies the solutions for problem—whether they be individual or social in nature. A competent designer can always improve upon last year’s new widget, but an interdisciplinary team of skilled design thinkers is in a position to tackle more complex problems. (Brown 2009: 7) We are at a critical point where rapid change is forcing us to look not just to new ways of solving problems but to new problems to solve. (Ibid.; 153)

Design thinking converts problems into market opportunities. In the world of design thinking, problems are not structurally rooted but just wait for the not-yet-existing product solutions. According to this worldview, design thinking would be in principle universally applicable. Every problem can be translated into something manageable. It is irrelevant

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

55

whether people dislike buying vacuum bags (cf. HPI School of Design Thinking 2019b), whether people have psychological problems (cf. Thienen and Meinel 2014), of whether they suffer from poverty or illness (cf. Brown 2009: 203–225). Design thinking can always furnish the appropriate solution. This explains why design thinking makes rhetorical reference to global problems, to grand challenges or wicked problems, notable insofar as these problems cannot be fully described, isolated, or viewed objectively (cf. Rittel and Webber 1973).10 If we need to set priorities, the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals would be a good place to start, but ‘eradicate poverty’ and ‘promoting gender equality’ are far too broad to serve as effective design briefs. If the Millennium Development Goals are to be met, they will have to be translated into practical design briefs that recognize constraints and establish metrics for success. More promising questions might be: How might we enable poor farmers to increase the productivity of their land through simple, low-cost products and services? How might we enable adolescent girls to become empowered and productive members of their community through better education and access to services? (Brown 2009: 217)

In each of these briefs, a ghostly, yet-to-be-developed product shimmers through, making it seem as if all it needed to become manifest was to submit itself to the design thinking process. A problem is translated into something fixable that merely waits for its solution in the form of a product. When the problem and the product are combined, they react with one another to create a new situation in which the problem is solved, and the world is delivered. In this way, design thinking seems like a universally applicable problem-solving process, so long as its potential can be unlocked: “Today we have an opportunity to […] unleash the power of design thinking as a means of exploring new possibilities, creating new choices, and bringing new solutions to the world” (Brown 2009: 242). One can also say that design thinking searches for solutions to the problems it creates. Design thinking work happens at the intersection between constructing problems and developing ideas for their solutions. Obviously, it doesn’t provoke problems—it cannot be said that design thinking causes global poverty. Individual or social problems can however be translated in such a way that they can be connected to the kinds of solutions that design thinking provides. Heike was constructed with needs and problems that are specific to her, and I described this as a process of

56 

T. SEITZ

problem-­definition. Like in Heike’s case, problems that are compatible with design thinking seem like direct representations of real problems. Because Heike has been so constructed, it seems like it would be possible to isolate and objectively contemplate the problems she is saddled with and work to solve them. This fixer mentality, the belief that problems can be easily defined, was seriously disrupted in the debates about strategic planning in the 1970s: “By now we are all beginning to realize that one of the most intractable problems is that of defining problems (of knowing what distinguishes an observed condition from a desired condition) and of locating problems (finding where in the complex casual networks the trouble really lies)” (Rittel and Webber 1973: 159). There is no place in design thinking for acknowledging this because in this context problems must appear like a blank space that could be filled with a product or a service. Otherwise, it is conceptually nonsensical. A script is always imbedded within the process of defining problems, whereby different roles and actions are specified as if in a drama and the story of solutions is narrated (Belliger and Krieger 2006: 44; Latour 1994: 31).11 A design thinking story can be narrated quickly, usually as a three-­ act drama: first act presents a problem-afflicted original condition, the second act convenes users and product, and the third act describes a conclusion in which the problem is overcome. Describing design thinking as the staging of a play not only works as an analytic metaphor, it also explicates the praxis. Presentations of product ideas are often staged like three-­ act plays. I participated in a number of workshops where staff members of large corporations donned costumes while passionately performing their product ideas (cf. notes 06/16/2015; notes 06/18/2015). In design thinking’s self-descriptions, the importance of storytelling is accentuated. Mostly we rely on stories to put our ideas into context and give them meaning. It should come as no surprise, then, that the human capacity for storytelling plays an important role in the intrinsically human-centered approach to problem solving, design thinking. (Brown 2009: 132)

Certain roles are fixed in this plot, of which the briefs are exemplary. “Poor farmers” or “adolescent girls” enter the story as collectives with specific problems that are imagined to be born from deficit. The end product ultimately fills in what is missing, which from that point on is only visible as an absence (i.e. a problem that now that it is solved, is no longer a problem). As the narrative wraps up, the people with problems become users, and the

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

57

product, hero of our story, vanquishes the problem. There is another role in the story that the aforementioned briefs reveal: the entity referred to as “we.” It is the task of the “we” to develop a product and make it available.12 “We” refers to the design thinkers themselves, who can observe the participants and assess their situation objectively. They define the participants’ problems and develop ideas about how to solve them. To keep with the dramatic metaphor, they stand backstage, and their role isn’t legible in the script. They are un-situated, empathetic beings without self-­interest, who emerge in the course of the process in order to unleash the power of design thinking if other people have problems. As numerous citations show, they seem to be moved by a quintessential desire to help: “helping users” (Brown 2009: 98), “helping people” (98), “help customers” (119), “help parents” (119), “[help] Bank of America” (119), “help managers” (122), “help us” (149), “[help] establish companies as diverse as Procter & Gamble, Nike, ConAgra and Nokia” (159), “help the blind” (209). With their combined altruism and omnipotence design thinkers—those who help—play an almost divine role for those who receive help. The helpers exist apart from and above the social realm (cf. Kimbell 2011: 296–298). The division between the helpers and those in need is however frequently suppressed: “It’s not about ‘us versus them’ or even ‘us on behalf of them.’ For the design thinker, it has to be ‘us with them’” (Brown 2009: 58). Within design thinking’s conceptual frame, it is impossible to unify consumer and producer, whether or not this is theoretically intended and likewise reiterated. Design thinkers are always producers who speak in the name of consumers and therefore stand above them in a paternalistic fashion (cf. Nussbaum 2010). This paternalism reminds us of systems analysts in the 1960s and 1970s, whose problem-solving competency was already declared dead in 1972: With arrogant confidence, the early systems analysts pronounced themselves ready to take on anyone’s perceived problem, diagnostically to discover its hidden character, and then, having exposed its true nature, skillfully to excise its root causes. Two decades of experience have worn the self-assurances thin. These analysts are coming to realize how valid their model really is, for they themselves have been caught in the very same diagnostic difficulties that troubled their clients. (Rittel and Webber 1973: 159)

As is also true today, to claim that one can solve other people’s problems presupposes dominance over them, and that one knows better than they do about what they need. The logic of design thinking is firmly anchored in this sort of paternalism.

58 

T. SEITZ

Covering the Tracks In design thinking, the bulk of one’s work is dedicated to constructing specific users that should represent the “people around us” and a realm “out there.” Namely, the needs of potential users are conceived in the material setting of the design thinking laboratory, although the design thinkers describe them as objective entities (cf. Latour and Woolgar 1986: 64). How do they maintain that their creations are direct representations, and why do participants believe them? How does the belief in this simulated reality arise? The answer to these questions revealed itself to me one evening after a long and intensive workshop: After the workshop, I helped clean up. The participants left the room and left quite a chaos in their wake. Throughout the day the room had been filled with lively activity, and now I am totally alone. While the agency staff members are out on the terrace smoking cigarettes and looking back on the day’s events, I begin to take each sticky note off the whiteboard one by one, take down the large pieces of paper, and sort the rest of the materials. While I take down the notes and the sheets of paper, I relive the individual process steps in reverse. The prototyping, the brainstorming, creating the persona, preparing the interviews, coming up with the design challenge together— with every sheet of paper that I take down from the whiteboard, I go backwards one step in the design thinking process until I reach its beginning. In the end, all that is left in the room is a huge pile of paper and hundreds of colorful sticky notes. In itself and without structure, it is all just a worthless pile of paper. Two hours earlier, it would have been unthinkable to take it all down. It resulted in three legal sized sheets of paper with the prototype templates. The ideas that were developed—“three totally awesome ­prototypes!!”—are recorded here. Only in the presentation of the product ideas do the rest of the paper scraps lose their meaning. (Notes 06/16/2015)

What happens when the product ideas are written down? Why does the connection between the product idea and the originally surveyed people become unnecessary? Why was I allowed to rip all of the material off the walls? Had I done so earlier in the day, my field work would have presumably been terminated early. Latour and Woolgar (1986: 176) describe an analogous process in the laboratory: at a certain moment in the production of knowledge, when a statement is stabilized and supported by a sufficient number of references, the connection between the words and the object that they give form to begins to be severed. The work of design thinking is largely to construct representations in here that refer to a spe-

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

59

cific reality out there. It is almost as if the persona that is written into the product idea outwardly projects a virtual image of itself, which gives the impression that it might exist independently from the persona (cf. ibid.). At the point when the projection achieves the requisite amount of stability, erasure begins. As I took down the sticky notes from the wall, I erased all of the connections that were made visible as the product ideas came together. A reversal takes place. Before the erasure, the users written into the product idea were the virtual imprint of the persona. After the link is erased, it seems as if the persona just reflects real people out there. The persona and users become “split-entities” (ibid.). Only after the connection is erased does it become possible to speak of “user-friendliness.” At that moment, it seems as if the users were there from the start, even though they only come into being—step by step, sticky note by sticky note—in the course of the design thinking process. In other words, design thinking doesn’t create user-friendly products and services in the sense that they converge with independently existing users in the course of the process. Instead, product- and service-friendly users are created and developed within the respective ideas. To speak with Marx: “Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object” (Marx 1993: 92). “User-friendly” in this case seems like an invalid category, since it suggests an objective user at a fixed pole that might be approached throughout the project. An alternate understanding of design thinking, one orientated by the sociology of translation, would stress instead that both sides—users and products—are in movement. The sociology of translation positions itself “at the exact place where innovation is situated, in this hard-to-grasp middle-ground where technology and the social environment which adopts it simultaneously shape each other” (Akrich et al. 2002: 205).

Design Thinking As Pure Development Process In the erasure of the link between persona and the constructed user reality, the latter becomes real. After a project design exists, the connection is not only no longer necessary, it has to be expunged in order to make the process of construction invisible and so that the product design can seem like as a solution to an already existing problem. One might then legitimately ask what happens with the product designs once the products themselves exist. At that point, one might say that a product’s eventual market success would prove that design thinking had in fact developed a user-friendly

60 

T. SEITZ

product. If people eagerly buy the product, wouldn’t that provide evidence that actual user needs had in fact been identified in the course of the process?13 The fate of products and services designed by design thinkers however remain uncertain, because the process’ immediate yields are only the ideas for products and services. Their realization—as products and services—is not part of work of design thinking. This also creates problems for design thinkers out in the field. Work at the agency is permanently organized around the execution of design thinking projects and workshops. The paradoxical demand for “serial singularity” (Bröckling 2016: 114) is their day-to-day business. Prototypes and ideas for products or services (not the end products themselves) are developed as if on an assembly line. Unrealized, their supposedly unique quality cannot be disproven. Because design thinking produced the ideas behind the products—as the story goes—they would have to be superior to other products and therefore more competitive.14 This is how Ulrich Weinberg, the head of the d.school in Potsdam, explains it at a presentation about their concept: Because we start here [with the users, T.S.] we can be sure that we don’t need some insanely clever marketing concept in order to sell a couple of people something no one needs. Instead, we know quite a few people who need our products. (Weinberg 2012: 2:34 min)

As the argument goes, because design thinking products are tailored to the user, it is unnecessary to convince anyone to buy them. The steps that would need to be taken to create the product itself are completely obscured, while the notion that the ideas as such are so good that the eventual products will be inevitably successful is telegraphed. Design thinking pulls back the bow string, so that the arrow needs only be released in order to fly through the air. Design thinkers seem to believe this, and future failures can always be explained away as a mistake in the implementation of their ideas. The promise of user-friendliness rings like a prophecy. The converts to design thinking are certain that their process will generate user-friendly and thereby excellent products. They believe in the prophecy and they trust in the superiority of their product ideas. But what about the people who are still not convinced? Like all missionaries, the design thinkers need to convince others that the yet unfulfilled prophecy will be fulfilled in the future (cf. Festinger 1956). Since the prophecy will not come to pass and thereby prove its truth, its prophets, at least, must

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

61

secure its authenticity. It must at least be shown that the ideas in development are the products of design thinking, because the prospect of market success will not be evidenced in actual market success. This is the conversion-­strategy that I confronted in the field: Nina: Design thinking is very much about conceptual work that you won’t see later in a final product, but you still know is somehow in there. You can charge a lot of money for something when you can also prove how much work went into it. (Notes 06/02/2015) Jan: Of course it is also possible to lie with design thinking. You could just come up with an idea on the fly and pretend that you actually went through the design thinking process. That’s why when we make a sale, we always give a presentation that shows our results and documents the process. (Ibid.) These statements show how the design thinkers justify their prices to their clients, not only evidencing their missionary zeal but the calculating manner of an accountant. Regardless of their intentions, Nina and Jan appear here to realize a fundamental problem: that a contradiction exists between how exceptional they think their products would be and the fact that whether a product derives from the design thinking process is ultimately invisible. As Nina mentions in the citation above, the concept is only somehow in the product, and only invisibly. They must verify a product’s genuineness with evidentiary documentation that literalizes the process retrospectively. This concretizes the steps that are taken—which production paths are tracked, and which feedback loops are circled—to arrive at the finished product. Documentation certifies authenticity. Like with proving that certain raw materials are not mined in conflict regions— human rights abuses are not, after all, encoded in a material’s molecules— product designs are necessary to show that a product is produced in the design thinker’s laboratory. Insecurity remains, though, a kind of doubt that might be suppressed by believing in the concept, but is still not completely overcome. This might be the reason why design thinking communities sometimes feel like sects. In conversations I had over the course of my field work, design thinkers often reflected on their time at the d.school and the field of design thinking in general. In these discussions, it was not unusual for people to refer to themselves as “a chosen people” (notes 05/05/2015) and their cohort at the d.school as having “a sectarian vibe” (notes 04/10/2015). Even Tim Brown avows himself to design

62 

T. SEITZ

thinking like a religion: “I have become a convert and an evangelist of design thinking” (Brown 2009: 7).15 If one needs to suppress their doubt with faith, skepticism about the product ideas design thinkers generate is impermissible. After numerous workshops, I noticed that people seemed almost euphoric when they talked about the product ideas that were just generated. They raved about the product ideas as absolutely original, even when it was obviously the case that these particular solutions already exist elsewhere. It was often the case that the workshops dealt with problems that were specific to the work atmosphere at the participants’ place of employment. One challenge in such a workshop was entitled “How to foster constructive feedback and supportive contribution?” (notes 06/16/2015). In the end, the idea was developed to host company events called “Fuck-Up Nights” in which managers especially would talk about personal failures in order to create a general atmosphere in the company that allowed for mistakes. In principle, though, “Fuck-Up Nights” are in no way new and have been a regular event at companies for a long time. They originated in Mexico in 2012 as part of a “global movement […] to destigmatize political, social and personal failure” (fuckups 2015). In general, these sorts of events are above all attended by people who in one way or another work in entrepreneurial fields, in order to cultivate an atmosphere that allows for failure. The agency staff members who I accompanied during my observations were clearly aware of “Fuck-Up Nights.” Nonetheless, the idea and it originality was celebrated in the workshop, and it is described in the template as a “totally awesome prototype!!” (Notes 06/16/2015). An agonistic perspective in which one is allowed to not have to believe can eliminate the problem posed by claims about originality that can never be proven, by solving for the “inside / outside” dichotomy (cf. Latour 1983: 153–156). “Most of the difficulties associated with science and technology come from the idea that there is a time when innovations are in laboratories, and another time when they are tried out in a new set of conditions which invalidate or verify the efficacy of these innovations.” (ibid.: 155) This is the origin of the problem alluded to earlier. Design thinking happens in a specific and clearly defined time and place; design thinkers separate a dichotomous inside and outside and also distinguish the time before and after their ideas are unleashed. The process has a clearly defined end point with the final presentation of the product idea, at which point the team surrenders responsibility for the eventual product. The design thinkers demand of themselves that they create doubtlessly user-­friendly prod-

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

63

ucts and that these can assert themselves on the market without assistance. The prophesized market success of these products should be inspired by the intrinsic qualities of the objects per se. As I have shown, however, design thinking is primary concerned with the construction of productand service-friendly users rather than generating product ideas. This explains why “the reality of it is more mundane and less mystical” (ibid.) than the design thinkers presume. In the course of the design process, idea-creators have things under control. In secured spaces and under laboratory conditions, everything seems to work: personae don’t talk back, they identify with the problem at hand and use the products made for them. When thinking about the product’s actualization, however, the question arises whether or not the product will indeed move people to take on the role of user. This presupposes that an individual might be convinced to have the problems that can be solved by the products so designed. “Facts don’t leave the laboratory without also disseminating laboratory techniques” (ibid.). Design thinking products cannot be successful without working to create new users outside of the development process. As one title suggests, “The Key to Success in Innovation” (Akrich et al. 2002) lies in the art of interessement. The goal is to encourage users to accept their role and function within the commercial process, as consumers (cf. Callon 1986: 206–211). “The outcome of a project depends on the alliances which it allows for and the interests which it mobilises” (Akrich et al. 2002: 205). In this way, there is no distinction between the realization of design thinking product ideas and the way in which other ideas and products are generated, and it is not mysterious why this is rarely thematized: the uniqueness of ideas (hypothetically endowed through the design thinking process) cannot be sustained in the course of their concretization. Throughout this chapter, I have focused on what design thinking produces. In evaluating the terms of user-friendliness, I have questioned design thinkers’ assertions that the products and services that will emerge from the design thinking process are tailored to potential users, in order to solve their specific problems. To validate design thinking as a force that transforms society means to design and render society in a particular way. But the prophesized uniqueness of future products seems unsubstantiated and design thinkers consistently encounter doubts in the field. In the first main chapter, I referred to two dimensions through which one can reflect on the concept: design thinking’s end product and the process itself. In considering the temporality of design thinking, I came to understand that the way in which design thinkers work together seems to be more integral than

64 

T. SEITZ

questions pertaining to a product’s content—even when content plays a larger role in design thinking’s self-descriptions. What can one learn about the process when one keeps the materiality of the concept within sight?

Method As Tool At the beginning of this chapter, I noted that before I began my work in the field, I expected to find a specific understanding of qualitative methodology that I in fact never encountered. I learned instead that it wasn’t methodological considerations that illuminate the process, but empathy. One student at the d.school explained to me that there was no methodological course work there that was equivalent to what she studied for her sociology degree (see Chap. 2, section “Empathy As Methodology”). Insofar as this is true, how might individuals learning design thinking come to know the tools of the trade? Design thinking does not take a detour through theory; it is instead acquired from day one through praxis. The Basic Track training program at the d.school starts out with a one-day project. The next project takes a week, and a three-week and six-week project respectively follow. Learning while doing is prioritized, and theorizing is consistently avoided. If space is made for theoretical reflection alongside project-based work, it is explicitly treated as an anomaly (see Chap. 2, section “Timeboxing and the Logic of Iteration”). Workshops also aim to directly execute their design thinking projects, and although reflection exercises are occasionally on the agenda, the bulk of any workshop is dedicated to working through iterative cycles. Design thinking is not understood as much as it is experienced, and through repeated experiences, trainees become design thinkers. In other words, the certification program is a praxis-based form of direct embodiment (cf. Wacquant 2004: 60) that allows a student to develop a mastery of foundational techniques. Introductory books about design thinking also stress how they (the textbooks) are only marginally useful in learning about design thinking: Change by Design is divided into two parts. The first is a journey through some of the important stages of design thinking. It is not intended as a ‘how-to’ guide, for ultimately these are skills best acquired through doing. (Brown 2009: 8) What’s the best way to orient first-time visitor to this new and unfamiliar terrain? Though there is no real substitute for actually doing it, I can impart a fair sense of the experience of design thinking. (Ibid.: 64)

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

65

I assume that the difficulty design thinkers face when asked to describe design thinking and their methods (see Chap. 2, section “Empathy As Methodology”) is predicated on them never having learned how to explain their craft. Nevertheless, when they do something, the question still arises how they know what to do. From the start of my field work, the way my informants talked about their methods was notable. They spent the bulk of their time at the agency preparing for workshops and acquiring clients, and throughout the day, one was constantly aware of a certain kind of conversational hum: We are probably going to work on jobs to be done. (Notes 07/14/2015) Now we are going to first make a customer experience map and then the user journey. (Notes 06/09/2015) I am going to show you an awesome tool with which we can map an organization’s environment. (Notes 06/01/2015)

These statements clearly indicate that design thinking methods are handled like objects. Methods are tools employed for a specific reason and chosen for a particular purpose (cf. ibid.; notes 06/09/2015). If a design thinker understands a method, it is sufficient just to name it, and everyone knows what is meant and what can be expected. In the last of the three citations, a method is mentioned that is unfamiliar to the other interlocutor. In this case, the person with experience introduces the new tool to his colleague insofar as he demonstrates its use. He doesn’t speak abstractly about how the method is used, but he simulates its use by doing a run-­ through with the help of a fictional example drawn on a flip chart (cf. notes 06/01/2015). One can consequently surmise that in design thinking, methods are not deployed scientifically in order to gain insight, reflect, or develop a methodology. Instead, methods are the means to an end. A practitioner has a practical problem that needs to be resolved, and to that end she uses a tool. In design thinking, methods exist fully formed, they are not subject to further reflection and will not be changed or developed throughout the process. In preparation for their workshops, design thinkers always create a schedule that primarily organizes which methods will be used at what time throughout the workshop. At the beginning of my field research and while I took part in such a preparation, an agency staff member said to me “We will explain what a user journey is to them [the participants, T.S.] and there isn’t much to explain about qualitative interviews” (notes 06/09/2015).

66 

T. SEITZ

I wondered about this. Why do qualitative interviews seem less worthy of explanation than a method called user journey? I asked him how he viewed the difference between the two methods and hoped to learn more about his methodological understanding. But I could not solicit him to explain the difference between the methods; instead, he referred me to the methods cards filed at the agency: Tell Paul that he should give you the method cards. All the relevant stuff should be there. (Ibid.)

I did find the information in the method cards that I felt was missing in the above verbal interaction. The cards didn’t just store information about the methods, they were the methods—the design thinkers did not distinguish between the one and the other. The agency’s method-resource set consists of 25 different methods that could be employed during specific design thinking phases. Each method was illustrated on two pages in way that one might compare with a recipe in a cookbook. On the first page, there was a short summary of the method, with rubrics entitled “Helpful for:” and “What one needs:” under which the scope of applicability, materials, and time allotment were listed, as well as a graphic illustration that would be sketched on a whiteboard. Earlier in this chapter, I described how a design thinker created an empathy map on the whiteboard by copying the graphic from the method cards. On the second page of the method description, each of the steps in the process is explained under two headings: “preparation” and “execution.” The directions are quite detailed and explain, for example, which line or rubric should be transferred to the whiteboard. Equipped with these instructions, a design thinker can immediately begin working, though her work really only consists of filling in the rubrics or structures described on the method card. Like with a cookbook, where prescribed amounts of ingredients are supposed to be combined in a prescribed way, the method cards provide a sequence that then needs to be actualized by combining ideas or insights. The cookbook analogy is apt in another way: one might say that a recipe is good, or tasty, even though one is obviously referring to the dish that has been prepared. Colloquially, in other words, recipe and dish are indistinguishable. In design thinking, methods (as illustrated on the cards), methods (as such) and the results of these (as final product) are not differentiated. An empathy map results from an empathy map, and if I would like more information about this, I might look at card that contains all the

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

67

relevant “stuff.” As time goes on, the files themselves lose their importance. Like with a recipe that one might learn by heart after making a dish over and over again, design thinkers also memorize the methods by using them repeatedly. Experienced design thinkers have internalized the instructions and no longer need to refer to the method cards. The method cards make design thinking possible. They direct design thinkers in the process and show how the sticky notes, the whiteboards, and the design thinkers themselves should be deployed. The methods can be used without understanding the details or what exactly is happening. This accounts for the absence of theoretical reflection that confused me in the beginning of my fieldwork. I had expected that a theoretical-­methodological knowledge existed in design thinkers’ minds, and that they would be willing to put it into words. I was looking for this knowledge in the wrong place though, since it existed in material form on the method cards themselves. By using the methods cards, design thinkers are freed from needing to know anything about the execution of the method. They can allow themselves to be led by the method, by abandoning themselves to the process and just doing. Here we can observe a phenomenon that Latour and Woolgar, borrowing from Bachelard (1953) describe as “reification” (Latour and Woolgar 1986: 66; 127; 238) in their study of laboratory science. The instruments and apparatuses of the laboratory are theories that have been objectified. An apparatus can be used without understanding the science behind the object. Luhmann (1972: 256) also points to this phenomenon, although he doubts that the same reifying process is possible in the social sciences: Technology is operative […] to the extent that it relieves the burden of knowingly considering other possibilities. The natural sciences can enact this transfer of responsibility almost perfectly: an apparatus that is built according to their [the natural sciences’] formula can be used without prior knowledge of its foundational theories […]. The social sciences are less technological and do not typically work in this way, since one cannot arrive at results without knowledge of theories that are being applied.

What Luhmann identifies in 1972 as atypical seems to condition design thinking as such: by using an apparatus—method cards, for example— design thinkers engage in a kind of qualitative social research while being released from knowing the theories upon which the practices are built. Above I suggested that experienced design thinkers seemed to no longer need the method cards after using them repeatedly. The structures that are transferred to the whiteboard are simple and straightforward; after a short time, design thinkers are able to execute the method without

68 

T. SEITZ

consulting the method cards. It is also not necessary to understand the methods as materialized only by the method cards––even when the method cards are no longer needed, the methods are material. Latour and Woolgar (1986: 66) warn against setting material and conceptual aspects of laboratory activity against one another. It is irrelevant whether or not the methods are printed on cards or are retrieved from the vaults of one’s memory. In either case, the methods can simply be used without demanding further reflection or decision making. In other words, the “reification” of theories has to do with theories becoming permanent. Fixed and unchangeable, design thinking tools are differentiated from the methodological imperatives of the social sciences. Lucy Kimbell, herself a docent for design thinking at the Said Business School in Oxford, offers a similar critique: “On the one hand, designers are positioned as key interpreters of what end users ‘need’. They are expected to do this by using ethnographically-inspired techniques that help them understand the user’s perspectives and situated actions. On the other hand, in practice this process shows little of the reflectivity of the social science traditions” (Kimbell 2011: 294). Using methods as tools, so Kimbell, diminishes reflexivity. Reflection is predicated on knowledge, which, when it takes material form in the methods, can no longer inspire further thinking. But what functions do methods perform if they only need to be used, thereby making knowledge-generating reflection, the key to qualitative methodology, obsolete? In the first main chapter, I explained how the temporal and social dimensions of meaning were prioritized above the factual dimension, and that content-questions were de-­ empathized or suppressed. I would also argue that methods are not used here primarily for the sake of generating knowledge. Instead, their primary contribution is to facilitate collective action among heterogeneous actors that is characteristic in design thinking. The methods provide clear instructions that need only to be followed by the team. In this way, everyone can participate fully in the process together, regardless of whether or not everyone has had disciplinary training. As design thinking exhausts its methods as they are used—for example, when pre-established categories or rubrics are filled up with sticky notes— it is difficult to say which jobs were performed by whom. Design thinking praxis is categorically collective; it is performed by human and non-human actors that Latour also calls actants. This symmetrical examination is one of Latour’s primary contributions, as it is so clearly the case that “[a]ction is simply not a property of humans but of an association of actants” (Latour 1994: 35).

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

69

Automated Workshops Out in the field, design thinkers consider their method cards to be extraordinarily agentive. While I was conducting my fieldwork, the agency expanded significantly, and during this time the design thinkers often discussed the agency’s developmental potential in visionary terms. A particularly ambitious idea for the future of the agency had to do with automating design thinking training and facilitation: Henning is talking about his vision: to program an online tool that future clients could use to generate their own workshops exactly as they wished. Clients would be able to choose whether they wanted more incremental or disruptive innovations at their companies, whereupon they would be offered the appropriate workshop for the kind of innovations they desired. The longterm goal would be to develop a workshop generator that, after a while, could improve itself on its own. “We are configuring this in such a way that it inspires people to come back, because they can book their own workshops with us. The program will keep improving because it will keep updating and modifying itself while it is being used.” This means that in the future, the agency should be able to offer even more perfect workshops that are directly tailored to the desires and needs of clients. The workshop generator will create the workshops and automatically supply the materials for any given workshop; the clients will only need to work through the appropriate method cards. With the provided materials, it should be clear which warm up activities should be used and which methods will be employed. Everyone is fascinated by the idea. Only I am irritated, because it doesn’t seem that anyone cares that the workshops in their current form are conducted by agency coaches. Henning: “Of course it would be great if the people at a firm would do an introductory workshop with us first in order to learn about the principles of design thinking. That should be enough though, and afterward we could just send them the materials.” (Notes 06/10/2015)

It is clear why this idea is attractive: were the design thinkers to develop a scalable business model, they could deliver design thinking methods to companies all over the world. But for me, it was astounding how highly they valued their methods’ inherent potential for action, marking themselves as even more orthodox Latourians than I could be in that moment. Regardless of whether or not such a project could be successful, it highlights an important point: as they seemed to understand it, in design thinking, the role of human beings seems to be limited to executing pre-­ established methods. Within the structure of design thinking, humans

70 

T. SEITZ

might supply the creative fuel to get the motor running. But without a motor, fuel is itself obsolete. It’s the non-human actors like the method cards and the stop watch that create the possibility for moving the process along. This successfully distributes the labor of design thinking between humans and non-humans. Non-humans provide a structure and take responsibility for all of the unpleasant tasks like keeping time, structuring content, and so on, while the humans can surrender themselves to their curiosity and their playful instincts and give free reign to their creativity and empathy. This creates a labor process for all participants that is marked by how little it feels like working—design thinking is also designed in such a way to feel unlike work. The design thinkers find themselves in the position of being able to develop themselves playfully and help people while also being able to earn money. Against this background, we can interpret the promise of user-friendliness as the source of motivation that allows participants to understand their creative work as contributing positively to societal change.

Interim Reflections, Take Two In the first interim reflections, I described the limits of Bourdieu’s approach when it came to adequately considering the self-descriptions of design thinkers. Have I done the self-descriptions justice in this chapter, where I described design thinking in light of its materiality, its technologies of inscription, and the methods it employs? Self-descriptions certainly played a role, although I tended to use these statements as a foil against which I have developed my own observations. I also revealed the contradictions embedded in design thinkers’ statements and explained which attitudes where primarily theological and which ones further mystified their praxis. In time, I came to an alternative explanation of the phenomenon in which design thinkers’ self-descriptions had no place. According to my thesis, design thinking does not actually infuse products with a potent form of user-friendliness, but it develops product ideas and users (and their problems) simultaneously. Additionally, I argued that design thinking methods do not generate new forms of knowledge; instead, they above all serve to make a specific form of collaboration possible. These conclusions are hard for design thinkers in the field to accept, since they undermine their own understanding of how competent they are at solving problems. In this way, I ended up with a competing account of the praxis that strongly— more so than in the first main chapter—opposes how design thinkers assess their own work.

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

71

In its early ethnographic phase, the sociology of translation positioned itself against then current modes of describing science. From the beginning, the sociology of translation was a project that claimed to deliver a better and more accurate depiction of scientific praxis by challenging the division of the social from the non-social that conditioned many explanations up to that point. In this way, Latour differentiates himself clearly from the extant methods of studying science that were committed to realism: “As we examine in detail the practices that produce information about a state of affairs, it should become clear how very unrealistic most of the philosophical discussions about realism have been” (Latour 1999a: 24). Latour’s intentions here are clear. In his turn to praxis, his empirical epistemology (cf. ibid.: 26) should replace “the old settlement” (ibid.: 79) in which science projects a copy of reality.16 He claims that this amounts to a “confusion between epistemology and the history of art” (ibid.: 78). Latour writes, “[W]e have taken science for realist painting, imagining that it made an exact copy of the world. The sciences do something else entirely—paintings too, for that matter. Through successive stages they link us to an aligned, transformed, constructed world” (Ibid.: 78–79). In Latour’s words, this describes a method assemblage; without question, we can see how critically he positions himself vis-à-vis scientific realism. Latour’s advantage here is that he can campaign against a theory of scientific realism because it is not primarily generated by practicing scientists (with whom he can still have unconditional solidarity). For example, he is not disputing the field descriptions of his “pedologist friends” (ibid.: 78), but disciplinary theories about science systems. However radical a shift at the time, he is also just taking discursive part in an academic epistemological dispute, and in this arena, criticizing an opposing position is unremarkable. I find myself in a different situation, insofar as my own account of design thinking praxis largely contrasts the self-­characterizations I encountered in my fieldwork and present here. Even in the event that the kinds of statements I have utilized throughout this project implicitly represent a specific epistemological position, it would be inappropriate to claim that we (my informants and I) were engaging in a debate about the epistemological basis of design thinking. “In design thinking you imagine yourselves to be creating products that reflect the world exactly, but I am telling you that this isn’t the case.” Were I to make this sort of gesture, I would be mimicking the behavior of Bourdieu’s sociological enlightener, compete with his “priggish attitude” (Luhmann 1991: 148).17

72 

T. SEITZ

My experience as a participant observer animates me to further analyze the conflict between self-descriptions and external descriptions of design thinking praxis. Specifically, in building a relationship with informants, I am compelled to not just tell them they are wrong and leave it at that. As I explained in Chap. 2, section “Empathy As Methodology”, empathy is a questionable epistemological tool, but it does help me to understand that I can’t charge back into the field with the insights I have gathered to tell the design thinkers the truth about what they are doing. The methodological canon discusses feelings of betrayal or violation in regard to informants (cf. Hirschauer 2006: 435–437). Bennet M. Berger, for example, discusses feelings of betrayal within ethnographic research. While working on an ethnographic study of American communards, about whose principles and worldview he felt thoroughly sympathetic, he asks how he should thematize the contradictions between his interlocutors’ daily behavior and how they talked about themselves: “[W]hen groups are caught in contradictions between the ideas they profess to believe and their day-to-day behavior, is their hurried ideological repair work best understood in an ironic, contemptuous, and cynical manner?” (Berger 2004: 168). In my view, the moral question that arises when betraying one’s informants becomes imminent depends on a specific understanding of theory and praxis. If one is supposed to be able to identify the contradictions between thinking and acting, one must first conceptualize thinking and acting— theory and practice—as completely separate spheres. Secondly, one must confront the demand that theory alone accords with praxis, whatever this accordance may be. Volbers (2015) sees this insistence on a fundamental difference between theory and praxis as a weakness of practice theory. He claims that it not only stresses a difference between “two practices, namely scientific praxis and the praxis that is being studied” (ibid.: 196; cf. also Bongaerts 2007), but that it also risks misunderstanding the difference too obsequiously as an “epistemological difference between theory and empiricism” (Volbers 2015: 196). Praxis is thus presumed to be an empirical object and an “epistemologically fundamental category” (ibid.: 196) that claims to objectively prescribe what theory—now only imaged as a “distortion or effigy” (ibid.: 206)—should do. Bourdieu’s student Boltanski criticizes his teacher’s understanding of praxis in a similar way. Boltanski claims that Bourdieu construes praxis primarily as opposed to scholasticism (cf. Boltanski 2011: 66). In my opinion, this misunderstanding relates to the problem I have had since the beginning of my study with incorporating self-descriptions. As practice-specific theories, they do not have a place in my framework, which centers practices. But they do not

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

73

disappear entirely, and it becomes tricky at the latest when they are juxtaposed with external descriptions. If the logic of practice is reconstructed in this way, it remains unclear how to deal with the self-descriptions, or this is at least the experience I have had throughout this praxeological experiment. The observation of practices (in practice theory) can be understood with Luhmann as the dual operation of distinguishing (between theory and praxis) and indicating one side of the two (cf. Luhmann 1990: 81–87). Theory and praxis are distinguished and one side of this difference—praxis—is described. In this moment, we lose sight of theory, even the theories of the informants about their own practices. If I want to adequately represent the self-descriptions of design thinkers, it would be recommended to use a theoretical approach that actually advocates for them, instead of insisting on the opposite approach that “doesn’t accept the separation between theory and praxis” (Volbers 2015: 195). Of course, the “relationship between thinking, speaking and acting” (Bogusz 2013: 312) is exactly what should be stressed here. In this light, it would be counterproductive to separate the praxis of design thinking and the self-­descriptions of design thinkers from one another as I have done. As I focused on practices, I primarily applied design thinkers’ selfdescriptions in order to supplement my own observations of the praxis. If I used them, it was only to reconstruct their implicit meanings, and I tended to lay them on the table in order to brush them aside. I implicitly treated design thinkers’ descriptions of their own praxis as deficient, without systematically asking what role they played for the informants. So, how can we understand self-descriptions, assuming that they are not incorrect descriptions of praxis? When people describe their actions, they generally aren’t attempting to depict exactly what they are doing; they feel compelled to describe their actions insofar as they feel they need to justify them. “How can a social science hope to succeed if it deliberately neglects a fundamental property of its object and ignores the fact that persons face an obligation to answer for their behavior, evidence in hand, to other persons with whom they interact?” (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 37). These questions strike a path for the last main chapter. Instead of playing self-­descriptions and practices off one another, they will be made visible as praxis-discursive formations with intrinsic contradictions. I understand the accounts that design thinkers give of themselves within a logic of justification, and this is also inscribed in their practices. Accordingly, self-­descriptions show how the informants justify and give meaning to their actions. Here I will be primarily building off the thesis Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello originally put forward in 1999 to analyze the new spirit of capitalism.

74 

T. SEITZ

Notes 1. The sociology of translation has become better known through the Actor-­ Network Theory (ANT). I will stick with the term sociology of translation, however, to focus more rigorously on the practice of translation instead of postulating an actor-network here from the get-go. Insofar as design thinking only develops ideas for products and services, how these are realized and whether they actually create an actor-network cannot be known (see section “Design Thinking As Pure Development Process”). 2. Latour (1999b: 275–276) distinguishes between two kinds of agnosticism: “[M]odernists and postmodernists, in all their efforts at critique, have left belief, the untouchable center of the courageous enterprises, untouched. They believe in belief. They believe that people naively believe. There are thus two forms of agnosticism. The first one, so dear to the critics’ hearts, consists of a selective refusal to believe in the content of belief–usually God; more generally fetishisms and such things as saligrams; more recently pop culture; and eventually scientific facts themselves. In this definition of agnosticism, the thing to be avoided at all costs is being taken in. Naivete is the capital crime. Salvation always comes from revealing the labor that hides behind the illusio of autonomy and independence, the strings that hold the puppets up. But I will define agnosticism, not as the doubting of values, powers, ideas, truths, distinctions, or constructions, but as the doubt exerted against this doubt itself, against the notion that belief could in any way be what holds any of these forms of life together. If we do away with belief (in beliefs) then we can explore other models of action and mastery.” It’s not hard to see here that Latour positions himself in opposition to Bourdieu, to whom Latour ascribes the first form of agnosticism. Latour’s doubt against doubt is supposed to reorient one’s view away from ideas and toward things; in a certain sense, it is a praxeological agnosticism. In this study, I remain agnostic in both senses. In the next section, I will focus on things, in order to show how things structure design thinking. Because of this, it will be impossible to avoid thematizing design thinkers’ beliefs (and doubts), which are showed themselves to be incredibly important in the field (see section “Design Thinking As Pure Development Process”). 3. Of course, there are other materials in design thinking, or science for that matter. I could also ask how people are transformed into PDF-Documents or power point presentations, but I will spare my reader such sophistry! 4. Within the last few years, so-called labs have proliferated. Whether they are named “Innovations Labs” (Magadley and Birdi 2009) or “Policy Labs” (Williamson 2014), the name specifies a place where new ideas are generated through interdisciplinary exchange. A study undertaken by the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Technology and Research defines

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

75

“labs” in the following way: “Departing from field observations and based on the evaluations of experts, the essential characteristic of an innovation lab or a creative lab is the interdisciplinary exchange of information, knowledge and ideas between disparate individuals. Experimentally-orientated exchange can occur in physical-material spaces as well in digital environments and can be temporary or long-term in duration.” 5. Luhmann distinguishes between temporal, social, and factual dimensions but does not identify a spatial one. It is picked up by Armin Nassehi (2006) who writes, “The horizontality of society is found not only in its factual dimension, in which unlike things are appropriately differentiated, not only in the social dimension, in the reciprocity of different social actors with their respective interests and affiliations, not only in the temporal dimension, in the invincibility of concrete present-moments, but also in the sensual dimension of space, in the presence and absence of other places” (Nassehi 2006: 433; cf. Nassehi 2004: 106–110; Stichweh 2000: 187). 6. The design thinking process is divided into six phases in the way that it is instructed at the d.school. After the phases named above (Understand, Observe, and Define) are three more phases: Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Observe and Define are the most interesting for investigating how user-­ friendliness is generated because it is during these phases that data is collected and evaluated. The sequence that will be described on this page and the next happens during phase three. 7. I will describe the method booklet and what it contains more fully in section “Method As Tool” of this chapter. 8. With this question, I find myself on thin ice and the pitfalls in my choice of theory become visible. If I assume that I already know the social location where design thinking takes place, I am, strictly speaking, importing knowledge about the object that would be impermissible from an ethnographic standpoint. Latour and Woolgar (1986: 279) understand the abdication of a priori knowledge as their method’s strength: “The main advantage is that unlike many kinds of sociology (especially Marxist), the anthropologist does not know the nature of society under study, nor where to draw the boundaries between the realms of technical, social, scientific, natural and so on.” Here we might perhaps identify the difference between sociological and anthropological ethnography (cf. Scheffer and Meyer 2011). I would identify my practice as belonging to sociological ethnography and consider myself someone who is influenced more by theories of functional differentiation than Marxism per se, since I apparently cannot neglect locating my object in a functional system. This will become clearer in section “Design Thinking Creates Problems”, as I will argue in the direction of a functions-­systems-­specific selection of all social realities (cf. also note 10). Having recourse to knowledge about society isn’t necessarily

76 

T. SEITZ

a bad habit; in my opinion, it can instead make a considerable contribution to understanding an object. 9. Obviously not every design thinking product must be purchased by consumers themselves. The roles of buyer and consumer are not necessarily taken up by the same person. 10. Referencing global problems can be interpreted as a form of responsivity. One describes structures and mechanisms that are cultivated within a system in order to reflect and attend to social problems (cf. Stichweh 2015). One wouldn’t advertise design thinking by arguing that developing certain products would be competitive on the market and increase profits. At most, it might be argued that this is a side effect when real problems are centered. I cite a passage here from Change by Design (Brown 2009) that can be read as a treatise on first- and second-order encodings of the economic system. “Though it is praiseworthy to contribute our talents to the eradication of preventable disease, disaster relief, and rural education, too often our instinct has been to think of these interventions as social acts that are ­different from and superior to the practical concerns of business. They are the domain of foundations, charities, volunteers, and NGOs, not of ‘soulless corporations,’ which attend only to the bottom line. Neither of these is any longer an acceptable model, however. Businesses that focus solely on bumping up their market share by a few tenths of a percentage point miss significant opportunities to change the rules of the game, and nonprofit organizations that go it alone may be denying themselves access to the human and technical resources necessary to create sustainable, systemic long-term change.” (Ibid. 206–207). 11. Michal Callon (1986) describes problem definition as problematization, which he calls the first of four phases of translation. The other three phases have to do with interessement, enrolment, and mobilization. Callon’s model is only applicable in certain situations, in so far as designing thinking in principle only undergoes half of the translation process (see section “Design Thinking As Pure Development Process”). 12. The briefs are formulated without even an implied subject. For example: “How to foster constructive feedback and supportive contribution?” (Notes 06/16/2015). The design thinkers as agents disappear completely and their perspective is ultimately objectified—a view from nowhere (cf. Haraway 1988; Nagel 1986). 13. I had quite a bit of trouble freeing myself from this form of argumentation. I was surprised how often I confronted this argument during my field work, while I was discussing design thinking with other people. It always came back to the question “But does it work?” Foucault’s diagnosis that within neoliberalism, the market appears ever more frequently to be the place where truth and lies are verified certainly remains applicable (cf. Foucault 2008: 30).

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

77

14. Obviously, not all products are successful. One example of a design thinking product idea that failed was the so-called Coaster Bikes from Shimano, which were prominently presented in Change by Design (Brown 2009: 13–15) as a design thinking success story, but which nonetheless were not able to come through on the market (cf. Roth 2010). 15. Ulrich Bröckling also involves the quasi-religious themes when discussing innovation: “[F]aith in the creative potential of the individual is the secular religion of the entrepreneurial self […] We can determine the conditions that favour the generation of novelty, analyse its emergence into ever smaller steps, describe the concurrent events in the brain, but there remains an inexplicable leap, or, to state it theologically, a miracle” (Bröckling 2016: 101). 16. Whether Latour belongs to praxis theory or pragmatism is not entirely clear. On the one hand his work is often esteemed for attending to the material aspects of social practices (cf. Reckwitz 2003; Schmidt 2012; Hillebrandt 2014), making him a praxis theorist, and the above citation that stresses practices suggests the same. On the other hand, he is often considered to be a representative of French Neo-pragmatism (cf. Bogusz 2012: 2; Schäfer 2012: 19). I think this lack of clarity is symptomatic and suggests that the field has not yet been fully mapped out between praxis theory and pragmatism (cf. Bogusz 2012; Schäfer 2012; Volbers 2015). 17. Latour clearly defects from this position, evidenced for example in how he treats the “crisis of the critical stance” in 1991 (cf. Latour 1993: 5–8), when he breaks from the idea that sociologists are privileged with a superior kind of knowledge that enables their critique (cf. Guggenheim and Potthast 2012: 169). In the earlier part of the work that I reference here, Latour contrasts this concept with his own understanding of critique as “constructivist description” (ibid.: 159). By overcoming the separation between the social and the non-social or “nature and culture” (Latour 1993: 30). Latour tries to avoid the pitfalls of naturalization, socialization, and deconstruction with a relativist approach that illuminates the contingent condition of the former which are nonetheless understood as true and obvious (cf. Guggenheim and Potthast 2012: 169). Twenty years later Latour looks back on this and comes to a new and sobering conclusion. In light of the fact that his arguments had been adopted by climate change skeptics, Latour asserts that criticism had “run out of steam” (Latour 2004) and subjects his own work to the same critique. Almost helplessly, he concedes that “dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives” (ibid.: 277). He determines that the weapons of criticism have fallen into the wrong hands. Is this merely an expression of nostalgia for a time in which critique was in the right (sociologist) hands? After this experience it seems like it is difficult for Latour to differentiate himself in his usually precise way from Bourdieu, who he names an “eminent” sociologist (ibid.: 228) in the course of the text.

78 

T. SEITZ

References Akrich, M., Callon, M., & Latour, B. (2002). The key to success in innovation Part I.  The art of interessement. International Journal of Innovation Management, 6, 187–206. Bachelard, G. (1953). Le matérialisme rationel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Belliger, A., & Krieger, D.  J. (2006). Einführung in die Akteur- Netzwerk-­ Theorie. In A.  Belliger & D.  Krieger (Eds.), ANThology: ein einführendes Handbuch zur Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie (pp. 13–50). Bielefeld: transcript. Berger, B. M. (2004). The survival of a counterculture. Ideological work and everyday life among rural communards. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Bogusz, T. (2012). Experiencing practical knowledge. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.765. Bogusz, T. (2013). Was heißt Pragmatismus? Boltanski Meets Dewey. Berlin Journal für Soziologie, 23, 311–328. Boltanski, L. (2011). On critique. A sociology of emancipation. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On justification: Economies of worth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bongaerts, G. (2007). Soziale Praxis und Verhalten. Überlegungen zum practice turn in social theory. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 36, 246–260. Bröckling, U. (2016). The entrepreneurial self. Fabricating a new type of subject. Los Angeles and London: Sage. Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York: Harper Business. Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief. A new sociology of knowledge? (pp. 196–233). London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Festinger, L. (1956). When prophecy fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1971). Orders of discourse. Social Science Information, 10(2), 7–30. Foucault, M. (1990). Nietzsche, Freud, Marx. In G. L. Ormiston & A. D. Schrift (Eds.), Transforming the hermeneutic context. From Nietzsche to Nancy (pp. 59–68). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. fuckups. (2015). Retrieved June 15, 2019, from http://www.fuckups.de. Guggenheim, M., & Potthast, J. (2012). Symmetrical twins. On the relationship between actor-network theory and the sociology of critical capacities. European Journal of Social Theory, 15, 157–178.

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

79

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges. The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14, 575–599. Hillebrandt, F. (2014). Soziologische Praxistheorien. Eine Einführung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Hirschauer, S. (2006). Puttings things into words. Ethnographic description and the silence of the social. Human Studies, 29(4), 413–441. HPI School of Design Thinking. (2019a). Mindset – Design thinking. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://hpi.de/en/school-of-design-thinking/designthinking/mindset.html. HPI School of Design Thinking. (2019b). Refresh cleaning. Design challenge: Redesign the vacuum cleaning experience. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://hpi.de/en/school-of-design-thinking/in-der-praxis/for-students.html. Kimbell, L. (2011). Rethinking design thinking: Part I. Design and Culture, 3, 285–306. Kneer, G. (2009). Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. In G. Kneer & M. Schroer (Eds.), Handbuch soziologische Theorien (pp.  19–39). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Knorr-Cetina, K. (1991). Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis. Zur Anthropologie von Wissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Latour, B. (1983). Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world. In K. D. Knorr-­ Cetina & M. Mulkay (Eds.), Science observed. Perspectives on the social study of science (pp. 141–170). London: Sage. Latour, B. (1986). Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands. In H. Kuklick & E. Long (Eds.), Knowledge and society: Studies in the sociology of culture past and present (Vol. 6, pp. 1–40). London: JAI Press Inc. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1994). On technical mediation  – Philosophy, sociology, genealogy. Common Knowledge, 3(2), 29–64. Latour, B. (1999a). Circulating reference. Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest. In Pandora’s hope. Essay on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (pp. 24–79). Latour, B. (1999b). The slight surprise of action. Facts, fetishes, factishes. In Pandora’s hope. Essay on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (pp. 266–292). Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30, 225–228. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life. The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ: University Press. Law, J. (1992). Notes on the theory of actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systems Practice, 5(4), 379–393.

80 

T. SEITZ

Law, J. (2004). After method. Mess in social science research. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Luhmann, N. (1972). Die Praxis der Theorie. In N. Luhmann (Ed.), Soziologische Aufklärung. Aufsätze zur Theorie sozialer Systeme (pp.  253–267). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Luhmann, N. (1990). Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, N. (1991). Am Ende der kritischen Soziologie. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 20, 147–152. Magadley, W., & Birdi, K. (2009). Innovation labs. An examination into the use of physical spaces to enhance organizational creativity. Creativity and Innovation Management, 18, 315–325. Marx, K. (1993). Grundrisse. Foundations of the critique of political economy (Martin Nicolaus, Trans., 1973). London: Penguin Books Ltd. Nagel, T. (1986): The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Nassehi, A. (2004). Die Theorie funktionaler Differenzierung im Horizont ihrer Kritik. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 33, 98–118. Nassehi, A. (2006). Der soziologische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Nussbaum, B. (2010). Is humanitarian design the new imperialism? Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://www.fastcompany.com/1661859/is-humanitariandesign-the-new-imperialism. Reckwitz, A. (2003). Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken: Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 32(4), 282–301. Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4, 155–169. Roth, Y. (2010). What caused Shimano’s Coasting program to fail? Retrieved June 15, 2019, from http://yannigroth.com/2010/05/12/what-caused-shimanoscoasting-program-fail/. Schäfer, H. (2012). Kreativität und Gewohnheit. Ein Vergleich zwischen Praxistheorie und Pragmatismus. In U. Göttlich & R. Kurt (Eds.), Kreativität und Improvisation. Soziologische Positionen (pp. 17–43). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Scheffer, T., & Meyer, C. (2011). Tagungsbericht: Tagung: Soziologische vs. ethnologische Ethnographie  – Zur Belastbarkeit und Perspektive einer Unterscheidung. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung 11 (2), Nr. 25. Schmidt, R. (2012). Soziologie der Praktiken. Konzeptionelle Studien und empirische Analysen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Stichweh, R. (2000). Die Weltgesellschaft. Soziologische Analysen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Thienen, J. von, & Meinel, C. (2014). A design thinking process to tackle individual life problems (created for use in behaviour psychotherapy). In Electronic colloquium on design thinking research, http://ecdtr.hpi-web.de/report/2014/002.

3  THE MATERIALITY OF DESIGN THINKING 

81

Volbers, J. (2015). Theorie und Praxis im Pragmatismus und in der Praxistheorie. In T. Alkemeyer, V. Schürmann, & J. Volbers (Eds.), Praxis denken. Konzepte und Kritik (pp. 192–214). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Wacquant, L. (2004). Body & soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weinberg, U. (2012). Design thinking. Entrepreneurship summit 2012 in Berlin. Freie Universität Berlin. Retrieved June 15, 2019. from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=WDCZ8u6YZ6I. Williamson, B. (2014). New governing experts in education: Self-learning software, policy labs and transactional pedagogies. In T. Fenwick, E. Mangez, & J.  Ozga (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2014. Governing knowledge: Comparison, knowledge-based technologies and expertise in the regulation of education (pp. 218–231). Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

CHAPTER 4

Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism

Abstract  In this chapter, the practices and promises of design thinking are discussed in the light of Boltanski/Chiapello’s “new spirit of capitalism.” I show how specific forms of criticism directed at a loss of authenticity and autonomy resonate in the self-descriptions and practices of design thinking. Consequently, the success and popularity of design thinking becomes understandable through its affinity to contemporary ideologies instead of an assumed conceptual superiority. Keywords  Capitalism • Critique • Ideology • Incorporation From the beginning of my inquiry into design thinking, I was puzzled by passages that read like this: The sooty clouds of smoke that once darkened the skies over Manchester and Birmingham have changed the climate of the planet. The torrent of cheap goods that began to flow from their factories and workshops has fed into a culture of excess consumption and prodigious waste. The industrialization of agriculture has left us vulnerable to natural and man-made catastrophes. The innovative breakthroughs of the past have become the routine procedures of today as businesses in Shenzhen and Bangalore tap into the same management theories as those in Silicon Valley and Detroit and face the same downward spiral of commoditization. (Brown 2009: 2)

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Seitz, Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31715-7_4

83

84 

T. SEITZ

Although it might seem so, the warning above is not quoted from a work of critical theory or the writings of an environmental activist. The critique of industrialization, environmental degradation, consumerism, commodification, and, ultimately, capitalism, reverberating in these lines, was published neither in the 1960s nor the 1980s. Instead, these lines herald from Tim Brown’s (2009) Change by Design, introducing design thinking as an antidote to the social and environmental ills wrought by capitalism. What we need are new choices—new products that balance the needs of individuals and of society as a whole; new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education; new strategies that result in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone affected by them. […] What we need is an approach to innovation that is powerful, effective, and broadly accessible, that can be integrated into all aspects of business and society, and that individuals and teams can use to generate breakthrough ideas that are implemented and that therefore have an impact. Design Thinking […] offers just such an approach. (Brown 2009: 2–3)

Does design thinking contend to offer a solution to capitalism? At root, it is self-descriptions such as these that piqued my interest in this topic and inspired this study. They also moved me to choose a practice-theoretical approach, so that I might witness in the flesh what actually happens in design thinking. I assumed that the only way I could understand the phenomenon would need to combine observation alongside accounts like those given by Tim Brown. The first two main chapters do however reveal the limits of a practice-theoretical approach, insofar as it tends to neglect self-descriptions. If one were able to ask though how or why such statements are formed in the first place instead of questioning their plausibility, one might arrive at a better understanding of design thinking as a contemporary phenomenon. That an anti-capitalist critique inspired in protest culture can be subsumed within a business-economics framework is the central theme of Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s (2018) work The New Spirit of Capitalism. With the endogenization, the internalization, or incorporation of anti-­ capitalist critique, the passages from Change by Design quoted above confirm the malleability and self-justifying structure of capitalism. Boltanski and Chiapello depart from the assumption that capitalism needs external (non-economic) forms of legitimation that justify capitalist engagement and make it seem desirable. As an “amoral” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018: 35) and “in many respects […] an absurd system” (ibid.: 7), ­unlimited

4  DESIGN THINKING AND THE NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 

85

capitalist accumulation requires an “ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism” (ibid.: XX, italics original). For those participating in capitalist systems, such an ideology is necessary to endow their actions with value and meaning that transcends capitalism’s principle motive, profit (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2012: 240–242). In reference and debt to Max Weber (1930), the authors name this ideology the spirit of capitalism. The spirit of capitalism engages legitimating arguments that derive from economic theory and foreground progress, efficiency, and individual and political freedom within capitalism (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2012: 243). However, such arguments, according to the authors, are themselves too static and general “to engage ordinary people in the concrete circumstances of life, especially working life, or to equip them with the resources in terms of arguments that allow them to face the condemnation or criticism which might be personally addressed to them on the spot” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018: 14). Other justifications are needed that concretize the spirit of capitalism, and three of these should be noted. The first is the stimulating dimension that inspires enthusiasm for that which capitalism can offer beyond profit maximization; the second, security, which guarantees especially material protection; and the third, fairness, which shows “how capitalism is coherent with a sense of justice, and how it contributes to the common good” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2012: 244). The spirit of capitalism simultaneously animates and constrains capitalist dynamics. It animates capitalism in so far as makes it more potent and justifies engagement on capitalism’s behalf, and it constrains capitalism by delimiting a realm within which accumulation is proscribed, where “not all profit would be legitimate, nor all enrichment fair, nor all accumulation (however significant and rapid) legal” (ibid.: 243). Clearly, these terms can change, and the spirit of capitalism has undergone historical fluctuations. These are induced by technological shifts and changes in modes of production, and historical transformations are also driven by critique itself, leveled against capitalism and consequently incorporated, changing its normative condition (cf. ibid.: 246). As we see in Change by Design, the aspects of capitalism that draw criticism—environmental destruction, commodification, and so on—are absorbed into the spirit of capitalism. Ironically, capitalism in fact needs critique and relies on opposition to continue to justify itself. As Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, capitalism “needs its enemies, people whom it outrages and who are opposed to it, to find the moral supports it lacks and to incorporate mechanisms of justice whose relevance it would otherwise have no reason to acknowledge” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018: 27).

86 

T. SEITZ

A New Spirit Boltanski and Chiapello argue that a new spirit of capitalism arose between the 1960s and the 1980s. The 1968 protest movement articulated anti-­ capitalist criticisms that were subsequently incorporated, and in the following decades, one could note substantial changes in labor organization and management structures. Boltanski and Chiapello construct a model of normative historical transformation that helps them describe the justificatory order that arises. It is not possible for me to survey processes of historical change within the scope of this study. To approach the design thinking phenomenon by way of participant observation prevents comparative-­ historical analysis. Nonetheless, I interpret design thinking as an expression of the new spirit of capitalism and will describe this in two ways. I will show how the design thinking’s subjective accounts incorporate forms of anticapitalist critique and also how critique is inscribed certain practices. Boltanski and Chiapello stress that the changes in systems of legitimation can be detected at the micro- and macro-levels (cf. ibid.: 32). It can be seen in concrete situations, especially moments of conflict or test, how social actors refer to specific regimes of justification in order to legitimate their own position (cf. Bogusz 2010: 47–48). This helps us to understand the relationship between praxis and theory, and specifically between practices and self-descriptions, to see these as interconnected rather than oppositional. In the case of design thinking, we might thus examine how both practices and self-descriptions of design thinkers relate to an overarching justificatory order.

User-Friendliness As a Promise of Authenticity One of the criticisms leveled against capitalism in the 1960s was that it promoted inauthenticity, evidenced in the rise of uniformity and mass culture, and the eradication of difference between people and between objects. Objects created through mass production resembled each other in every way because each object, “in order to function, has to be used in precisely the same way” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018: 439) and this increasingly leads to standardizing users as well. Critical theory, exemplified in the late works of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, condemns massification and standardization and the loss of authenticity in mass culture. Herbert Marcuse’s (1964) study The One-Dimensional Man epitomizes this form of critique, describing massification as a “economic-technical

4  DESIGN THINKING AND THE NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 

87

coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests” (ibid.: 3). Marcuse contends that individuals of late-industrial civilization are dulled by convenience and mass consumerism and are no longer conscious of their own desires. Differentiating between true needs and those that are manipulated and thereby, false (cf. Marcuse 1964: 4), Marcuse claims that the latter constitute a form of subjugation. He writes that “[t]he most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence” (ibid.: 4). The massification of humans coupled with the massification of objects, the differentiation between true and false needs—the degree to which these motifs crop up in design thinking literature is striking. Design thinking tracts lament “[t]he oppressive uniformity of so many products on the market today” (Brown 2009: 20) as well as the passive role of the consumer: “[W]e are no longer content to be passive consumers at the far end of the industrial economy” (ibid.: 177). These diagnoses set the stage for a tale of epochal change in which design thinking heroically sweeps in to address consumer’s true needs. [T]here is a dawning recognition among manufactures, consumers, and everyone in between that we are entering an era of limits; the cycle of mass production and mindless consumption that defined the industrial age is no longer sustainable. (Ibid.: 178) [T]he emphasis on fundamental human needs—as distinct from fleeting or artificially manipulated desires—is what drives design thinking to depart from the status quo. (Ibid.: 19)

By way of such statements, one can easily see how important user-­ friendliness is in the logic of design thinking and why Marcuse’s distinction between true and false needs is apt. Creating user-friendly products and services—“unique and meaningful products” (ibid.: 6)—satisfies the true needs of a user and overcomes the excesses of mass production. The practices that create user-friendliness are can only be understood in the context of Marcuse’s distinction. As described in Chap. 3, section “Translating People into Paper”, the construction of the persona Heike would be unintelligible without an a priori ideological framework that legitimates pursuits like “addressing real needs.” In this way, design thinking can be understood as capitalism’s answer to the charge that it abolishes authenticity. From critical theory, one learns about other consequences of

88 

T. SEITZ

critiquing capitalism. “[H]earing the demand expressed by the critique, entrepreneurs seek to create products and services which will satisfy it, and which they will be able to sell” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018: 441–442). The endogenization of critique thus results in design thinking, which assumes the responsibility of addressing users’ true needs while also maintaining that this gives their (hypothetical) products a competitive edge against conventional products. Responding to the “intense demand for differentiation and demassification” (ibid.: 441) design thinking exploits a “commodification of difference” (ibid.). The argument for purchasing or contracting products and services that derive from design thinking is exactly because they are different. Design thinking itself is such a service that, independent of any end product, meets the demands of this critique (see section “Design Thinking as Emancipated Work”). By 1999, Boltanski and Chiapello had already determined that capitalism’s ambition to (mass) produce authenticity “was doomed to failure” (ibid.: 443). With the emergence of an entrepreneurial pretense to produce authentic goods, they identify an inextricable paradox. In order to justify their value and price, commodities in circulation must “present themselves in ways that refer to an earlier state of market relations: a state where the purchaser was face to face with an artisan, at once manufacturer and tradesman, in a marketplace” (ibid.: 446). Though it might have been easy to distinguish between a mass-produced commodity and an artisanal one, it is more difficult to know whether or not an object emerges as an “expression of the spontaneity of existence, or the result of a premeditated process aimed at transforming an ‘authentic’ good into a commodity” (ibid.). With this in mind, it appears that the authenticity that design thinking claims to produce is chimerical, “since characterization as authentic refers to the uncalculated, the unintentional, the non-commodified” (ibid.: 447). Design thinking contends with the paradox engendered by claims of not only serial singularity (cf. Bröckling 2016: 114), but also calculated authenticity. As I described in Chap. 3, section “Design Thinking As Pure Development Process”, design thinkers also struggle with these paradoxes in the field and attempt to overcome them by trying to adopt a dogmatic attitude about design thinking praxis. Just as critiques of capitalism that decry inauthenticity resound in works like Change by Design, leading to unsolvable contradictions, these arguments also show up in the self-descriptions of design thinkers in the field that conflict with their own entrepreneurial actions.

4  DESIGN THINKING AND THE NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 

89

I am just arriving at the agency when Jan greets me happily and asks if I would not like to maybe go with to the Melt-Festival. The festival organizers have offered that the agency could rent a shipping container that they could plaster with their advertising. The agency would just need to cover the cost of renting the container and then staff members from the agency would get free tickets and backstage passes. I hesitate. I had just spoken with a friend about the festival yesterday, and we agreed that the line-up this year wasn’t that interesting. I am about to give a reason why I am not that interested in the festival when Jan interrupted: “Yeah, the festival really isn’t that hot, it’s so commercial and everything. But hey, a container that advertises our brand would be pretty cool!” (Notes 07/09/2015)

Here, in one breath, Jan criticizes the commercialization of a festival and happily anticipates the opportunity to take part in that commercialization. This introduces an unresolvable contradiction that is symptomatic of what I encountered in the field. There, specific forms of critique have been internalized as knowledge—in this case about the commercialization of a festival—that then allows for rather unconflicted enthusiasm about a marketing opportunity at the same festival. When Boltanski and Chiapello theorize the endogenization of criticism within capitalism, they refer to an abstract process that is concretized in the above sequence. I believe that employing critique in this way can be understood as another form of reification, like in the application of other methods in design thinking that I have already described. In the same way that other methods are applied and thereby no longer subject to reflection, the commodification of critique is strangely uncoupled and freed from its discursive origin as protest. Jan complains about the festival’s commercialization seemingly in order to strike the right conversational note. It is otherwise not a serious criticism that would necessarily inform action. Foucault (1994: 261–262) once said within the context of nineteenth century thought that Marxism was “like a fish in water” but outside of that context could not breathe. The relics of critical theory that become legible here seem to me to suffer a similar fate: they exist only in fossilized form on the beach of the present.1

Design Thinking As Emancipated Work In addition to critiquing mass production, mass consumption and above all the dearth of authenticity, the protest movement of the 1960s also targeted the organization of and operations at corporations (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2018: 170). The protest movement issued especially stri-

90 

T. SEITZ

dent critiques against “‘hierarchical power’, paternalism, authoritarianism, compulsory work schedules, prescribed tasks, the Taylorite separation between design and execution, and, more generally, the division of labor” (ibid.). Their criticism focused as well on the lack of autonomy, creativity, and development opportunities, demanding in contrast “autonomy and self-management, and the promise of an unbounded liberation of human creativity” (ibid.). Boltanski and Chiapello contend that in the second half of the twentieth century, such demands started to win serious consideration in economic circles, and at the turn of the twenty-first century, the spirit of capitalism offers “both a way of achieving self-fulfillment by engaging in capitalism, and as a path of liberation from capitalism itself, from what was oppressive about its earlier creations” (ibid.: 425). Self-­ realization and liberation are both concessions of the spirit of capitalism and they also squarely belong in the critical repertoire of design thinking. It is not only a method for innovation, but also very much presents itself as the very condition of work, as a mindset: Design Thinking has become more than just a creative process. What was originally intended as an innovation method for products and services in Stanford, has advanced to a completely new way of seeing people in relation to work, of imagining the concept of work and of posing questions about how we want to live, learn, and work in the 21st century. The appeal of Design Thinking lies in its ability to inspire new and surprising forms of creative teamwork. “We-intelligence” is the new catchword and collaboration the foundation for a new work awareness. (HPI School of Design Thinking 2019)

The HPI School of Design Thinking website presents a new mode of relating to work in collaboration with others, which is also observable in design thinking practices themselves. The endogenization of critique is in this case no only unfolds discursively, as one might read in the management treatises that Boltanski and Chiapello study. It is also visible in practices that mollify critique in a specific way. In observing the temporality and materiality of design thinking, it reveals itself as process with a twofold structuring effect, when seen in relationship to the organization of work. First, the process activates participation and second, it conditions an ideally frictionless form of collaboration. The temporality of design thinking is characterized by alternating work phases of activity and rest that respectively end when the time they are allotted runs down. It is not up to the participants themselves whether or not an activity is finished according to objective criteria; a stopwatch determines when each phase starts and ends. High-intensity activities

4  DESIGN THINKING AND THE NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 

91

demand participants’ full attention and participation; these are channeled and directed by methods constructed so as to ensure the creation of new ideas and to consistently avoid delays and snags. This is even more obvious when the materiality of design thinking praxis is taken into consideration. A predetermined method provides a scaffolding that a design thinking team need only fill in with sticky notes. This establishes a division of labor between human and non-human actors. Non-human actors are tasked with structuring content, which seems at first to make good on what the new spirit of capitalism promises: to facilitate the “unbounded liberation of human creativity” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018: 170). Design thinking participants are addressed as creative subjects and as such are constrained by the process to focus exclusively on the creation of new ideas and unleashing creative potential. Uncovering potential and the coming to understand oneself as a creative subject is a central goal of the design thinking training program at the d.school: So what they [the students, T.S.] gain here after twelve weeks is creative confidence. They gain creative confidence in their personality. They know that, even if they are studying business or law, they are creative people. (HPI School of Design Thinking 2013: 4:45 min)

This should be understood prescriptively rather than descriptively, since design thinking students are meant to see themselves only as creators. There is no place in design thinking for individuals who mull things over, stall, or judge. In any event, the ideas they create are not tested to determine whether or not they could be realized—“Defer Judgement!”—and they are made under time pressure with the direction to just generate as many provisional ideas as possible—“Go for Quantity!” Individuals are offered the opportunity to develop their creative potential in a prescribed way while they are otherwise trapped in a rigid structure. This is exemplified first by the stopwatch, which dictates exactly the moments in which creative potential might unfold. Creative action is not presented as an opportunity or a right, but it is demanded from a design thinker at a specific time. Secondly, the space within which ideas may be developed is governed by the methods and by prioritizing the generation of products and services. “On the one hand, creativity is meant to be mobilized and set loose; on the other hand, it is meant to be regulated and bridled, directed at specific problems and kept away from others” (Bröckling 2016: 102). Instead of “unbounded liberation,” designing thinking seems to

92 

T. SEITZ

domesticate creativity by stipulating when and how creativity might be applied. The process activates individuals but encourages them to actualize themselves only according to a particular schematic. Design thinking’s call for liberation is also ambivalent. Without being subject to formal hierarchies, design thinkers have freedoms that would be unthinkable in traditional workplace contexts. I can recall numerous workshops that I observed where staff members from the agency and workers from large companies talked about differences in their work places, specifically thematizing dress codes. While staff members from an insurance agency complained during lunch about always having to wear a tie, a staff member from the agency remarked that he preferred working “in shorts and bare feet” (notes 06/18/2015). An old and new spirit of capitalism came into dialogue in situations like these. Especially at the d.school, I would often encounter students exploring the freedom design thinking allotted them. A scene from one afternoon can be read especially well against the liberatory promise of these practices: I am sitting near the edge of the action on a beanbag while finishing up my notes. It is afternoon and the work day is drawing to a close. Some groups are still immersed in their work while others have stopped for the day. The noise level in the room is pretty muted and the most audible conversations from groups that are still working give me the impression that they are really trying to concentrate. Suddenly a student comes out from the hallway and steps into the room. He is wearing a white lab coat and heads towards one of the teams that is obscured from the knees up by a partition. The guy wearing the lab coat situates himself about one meter away from the others, but I don’t notice that they change their focus at all once he joins them. No one in the group moves and as far as I can tell they continue their conversation uninterrupted for another ten seconds or so until the guy in the lab coat starts dancing. There is no music playing in the room, but he is moving his legs as if he were doing an Irish folkdance; he’s up on the balls of his feet and alternating ­kicking his right and left feet to the side. He performs this dance for 10 seconds at multiple intervals briefly separated by a break where he just stands there. At some point one of the team members turns to him, and two more dance sequences follow before the dancer leaves the group and goes to stand in front of me at one of the two open standing tables. There is a laptop sitting there that he pops open, and plugging the headphones in, sticks one of the earbuds in his left ear. With both hands now on the keyboard and his head sunk to the left a bit he starts to bob up in time with the music no one else can hear as if he were a DJ.

4  DESIGN THINKING AND THE NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 

93

After a short time, another student joins him. The second student is wearing shorts and a t-shirt and is also barefoot like many others in the room. The two standing tables are about a half meter apart from one another, and the student who just arrived positions himself between them with a hand on each table. He pushes himself up so that he is holding himself up between the tables and starts to swing his legs up onto one table and then onto the other one. Like the dancer, he also pauses briefly at intervals. During these breaks, while his legs are resting on one of the tables, he stares at one of the groups on my right, focusing on the individuals in the group. While he does it seems as if he is making his mouth look as if he is making monkey noises although he doesn’t make a sound, much like a pantomime. He swings his legs and fixes his gaze on individuals at intervals for a few more times before jumping down and walking away from the tables. (Notes 06/04/2015)

The two students in this sequence take advantage of the liberty that design thinking creates. Dressing up, dancing, listening to music, or jumping on tables are behaviors that one can’t easily imagine in other employment or educational settings. Design thinking happens, however, in spaces that do not recognize formal hierarchies and are not under surveillance by authority figures. It creates conditions for students to take their first non-­ conforming steps and try out forms of self-expression. Standing in the middle of the room, both students are only being watched by their peers, and they make certain of that during the short breaks in their performances. Those who are still concentrating on their work and those who are already at play establish eye contact, though only briefly, since the students who are working turn their attention to the drama for just a moment but remain otherwise oblivious to the activity around them. The two performers are likewise mindful of the students who are working, insofar as both do their thing silently and manage to express themselves without bothering anyone. These kinds of courageous non-conforming displays happen daily at the d.school and are a permanent feature of design thinking. In fact, it is exactly such non-conformity that design thinking methods encourage. During ice breaker activities one might for example see employees from traditional companies positioned face to face to play a clapping game where they have to quickly and rhythmically alternate slapping hands together, which is supposed to demolish formal hierarchical structures (cf. notes 06/16/2015) and prepare them for participating in a design thinking workshop.

94 

T. SEITZ

Indeed, hierarchies between people are not formally intended in such settings, since design thinking is a collaborative effort equally shared by teammates. “‘We-intelligence’ is the new catchword and collaboration the foundation for a new work awareness” (HPI School of Design Thinking 2019). Individuals are synchronized in a work rhythm, punctuated by activity and rest through which they become a living organism, a we. Thoughts are formulated by individuals, but only together can these thoughts develop into ideas for products and services. Their movements and actions are coordinated by methods that determine who does what when. We can see this principle at work in a brainstorming method described in the agency’s method booklet: With the 6-5-3 method, every member of a group draws a graph on a piece of paper with three columns and the same number of lines that there are people in the group. The first round starts and every team member writes down three ideas formulated as a brainstorming question on the first line of their sheet of paper. After five minutes the timer goes off and everybody passes their sheet to the right. This time around everyone writes down three now ideas that were inspired by the ideas from the first round on the second line. This activity ends after four additional rounds and after every team member has gotten their original piece of paper back, on which every line is filled with three ideas. (Notes 06/16/2015)

This method is constructed so as to encourage frictionless interaction between social actors. Actions are synchronized and subordinated by the imperative to produce three ideas per round. If any individual member cannot fulfill their task, the whole operation falls apart, since the next teammate is not going to be able to build on the ideas of the last. The design thinking maxim “Build on the ideas of others” is ensured in this method’s architecture. The individuals insert themselves into the exercise’s framework by filling in their required boxes. This method reliably dissolves hierarchies, since there is no authority figure to oversee the ­completion of the activity. One person’s refusal would (partially) result in the collapse of the entire activity, which would be unfair to the other members of the group who would, as a team, sanction that kind of behavior. In other words, the absence of a formal hierarchical structure doesn’t lead to each of the individual team members acting autonomously or anarchically. It instead demands transparency from each individual and well as self-­control, in principle resulting in a more comprehensive form of surveillance (cf. Foucault 1995: 195–230). If all team members fill in the required fields on

4  DESIGN THINKING AND THE NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 

95

their pieces of paper, then the method works to generate collectively authored content, rather than just collecting individual thoughts together on one piece of paper. Insofar as the paper is repeatedly passed on and new ideas are built upon the last triplet of notes, individual authorship is erased. In this way, the participants work collaboratively according to a pre-established method and experience “we-intelligence.” At the d-school, learning how to be a good team player is just as important as developing one’s creative potential: When our students arrive here, they are generally not prepared to work in teams. They are usually 24 or 25 years old and one would think that in the course of their educations they would have already learned all the things they will need to succeed in the world. But in that case, it would seem like the world is just made up of egomaniacs, since what they learn is how to succeed by sabotaging someone else with a smile on their face. They are simply never taught how to work together. We think this is a mistake. It’s like we’re preparing kids to be part of an iSociety. We are all running around with iPhones and iPads and we all use iTunes and then we are at some point just i-solated. An illusion is created that this is the right way to be […]. We exist in a world now that we think is totally connected. And in some ways, it is—our machines are all connected, and they chatter with each other. But somewhere along the way we have lost the ability to be connected as human beings. (Weinberg 2012: 8:37)

Weinberg emphasizes the importance of teamwork and human connection, although, somewhat ironically in light of Weinberg’s lament about mechanized connectivity, since it is the non-human actors that make teamwork possible in design thinking. This irony also reflects a central paradox: liberation might be actualized by doing away with explicit hierarchies through teamwork, but only by demanding self-control from each individual and endowing non-human actor with a control function that regulates and synchronizes the behavior of individuals. By activating subjects to become their best selves and framing collective work as emancipatory, design thinking gives the impression that it ameliorates some of the ills plaguing our “egomaniacal” world. These sorts of self-justifying claims help us understand design thinking as the progeny of the new spirit of capitalism. They resonate with the type of critique described by Boltanski and Chiapello that emerged in the 1960s, and there are also corresponding constraints. Design thinking’s promise of self-actualization and emancipation are only realizable under certain

96 

T. SEITZ

conditions. Individuals are granted the opportunity to unleash their creative potential just within strictly demarcated spaces. They have more as well as fewer opportunities for creative expression: all ideas, however absurd, are allowed, but only within predetermined space and time frame. The (material, non-human) framework demands creativity in terms of content but suppresses creativity in terms of form, insofar as the process structure is prescribed and judgement (of self or others) is foreclosed. Liberation is guaranteed insofar as people are offered certain kinds of freedoms in exchange for different forms of subjugation. Design thinking frees individuals from formal hierarchies but subjects them to intensified forms of horizontal and self-control. They are also inscribed into a temporal structure that rigidly dictates behavior, much like Taylorism in the first half of the twentieth century. In Taylorism, bodies conformed to the rhythm of machines and thereby became, in part, mechanic. Each task was to be completed in individual stages that could be explained in such detail so as to determine the exact amount of time a task might take and how best to explain the “one best way” (Kanigel 1997) to do it. Management took on the responsibility of organizing the physical movements of the workers, who alone performed the physical tasks. “There is almost an equal division of work and responsibility between the management and the workmen. The management take over all work for which they are better fitted than the workmen, while in the past almost all of the work and the greater part of the responsibility were thrown upon the men” (Taylor 1911: 37). Design thinking takes this principle of managing physical work and extends it into the realm of thought. The thought processes of individuals are disassembled into sticky notes, which are themselves more manageable. They can be more easily classified and can conform to the rhythm of an event. Throughout the process, individuals’ thoughts are synchronized and people become like machines who are controlled not by disciplining their bodies but because their empathy and creativity are kept in check. Because unions protested against Taylorism, the stopwatch, which symbolized the practices of control, was banned from factories between 1912 and 1948 (cf. Merkle 1980: 29). A century later, the stopwatch is back, symbolizing now a form of work that promises liberation and emancipation. Boltanski and Chiapello discuss the new claims of freedoms with the attending emergence of novel forms of subjugation in terms of the capitalist spirit’s cyclical dynamic:

4  DESIGN THINKING AND THE NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 

97

Capitalism attracts actors, who realize that they have hitherto been oppressed, by offering them a certain form of liberation that masks new types of oppression. It may then be said that capitalism ‘recuperates’ the autonomy it extends, by implementing new modes of control. (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018: 425)

Texts like Change by Design evidence this clearly: There is an important lesson here about the challenges of shifting from a culture of hierarchy and efficiency to one of risk taking and exploration. Those who navigate this transition successfully are likely to become more deeply engaged, more highly motivated, and more wildly productive than they have ever been before. They will show up early and stay late because of the enormous satisfaction they get from giving form to new ideas and putting them out into the world. Once they have experienced this feeling, few people will be willing to give it up. (Brown 2009: 30)

This does not conceptualize liberation as a release from bondage. Liberation appears as the freedom to exploit oneself. One is not liberated from work, but design thinking brings liberation at work within reach. Individuals will work more and more efficiently—and they will freely choose to do so.

Note 1. I am borrowing this formulation from Philipp Felsch’s (2015: 140) Der Lange Sommer der Theorie.

References Bogusz, T. (2010). Zur Aktualität von Luc Boltanski. Einleitung in sein Werk. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, È. (2012). The role of criticism in the dynamics of capitalism: Social criticism in the dynamics of capitalism. In M. Miller (Ed.), Worlds of capitalism: Institutions, economic performance and governance in the era of globalization (pp. 252–283). Routledge. Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, È. (2018). The new spirit of capitalism. London and New York: Verso. Bröckling, U. (2016). The entrepreneurial self. Fabricating a new type of subject. Los Angeles and London: Sage.

98 

T. SEITZ

Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York: Harper Business. Felsch, P. (2015). Der lange Sommer der Theorie. Geschichte einer Revolte; 1960–1990. München: Beck. Foucault, M. (1994). The order of things. An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison. Second Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage Books. HPI School of Design Thinking. (2013). Final presentations of the HPI D-School Basic Track. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://vimeo.com/67580719. HPI School of Design Thinking. (2019). Design thinking. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://hpi.de/en/school-of-design-thinking/design-thinking.html. Kanigel, R. (1997). The one best way. Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of efficiency. New York: Viking. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man. Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston: Beacon Press. Merkle, J. (1980). Management and ideology. The legacy of the international scientific management movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers. Weber, M. (1930). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin. Weinberg, U. (2012). Design thinking. Entrepreneurship summit 2012 in Berlin. Freie Universität Berlin. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=WDCZ8u6YZ6I.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

Abstract  This chapter brings together the arguments of the preceding main chapters. I showed that design thinking privileges the temporal and social over the factual dimension of meaning and creates/narrates problems in a way that solutions come into reach. Throughout the book, it became increasingly clear that design thinking is more about introducing a new work culture than about creating superior products and services. One can only understand the success of the concept by taking into consideration its affinity to current ideologies. Design thinking becomes apprehensible as a contemporary phenomenon and a child of the “new spirit of capitalism.” Keywords  Design thinking • New spirit of capitalism • Sociological observation In general, the basic incongruency between design thinkers’ self-­ descriptions and their practices motivated this study. Accounts like those captured in Tim Brown’s Change by Design caught my eye and my mistrust of such statements led me in turn to think about practices, and ultimately, about the relationship between the self-descriptive statements and praxis. By praxeologizing the phenomenon of design thinking, I primarily sought to test the validity of self-descriptions. Implicitly, this presupposed that selfdescriptions must be true and at some level correspond with design thinking practices (cf. Volbers 2015: 206). Per convention, I proceeded to play © The Author(s) 2020 T. Seitz, Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31715-7_5

99

100 

T. SEITZ

discourse and praxis off one another (cf. Reckwitz 2008). As it turned out, in the first two main chapters, I was able to generate important insights about the concept by examining the temporality and the materiality of design thinking, although my treatment of practices and self-descriptions remained asymmetrical. Design thinking’s self-­descriptions were always lingering and unwieldy, and I didn’t know what to do with them except to contradict them. But was that really my goal? In the following chapter, though, I moved away from the theoretical imperative to think about discourses and practices separately and approached them together, pragmatically. I was then able to contextualize the practical and discursive elements of design thinking as an expression of the new spirit of capitalism. As such, I no longer sought to test whether self-descriptions proved to be congruent with practices, which I admittedly thought to be the more real of the two. Instead, I asked how we can understand the context in which both self-descriptions of praxis and the practices themselves arise. To answer the question “what does design thinking do,” I illustrated the concept in three steps to more seriously consider that which guides action and creates subjects rather than that which merely results in epistemic clarity. With design thinking, process is clearly more important than production. As I described, it leads to the normalization of a particular culture of work rather than the production of exceptionally user-friendly products and services. Userfriendliness as a concept answers the demand for authenticity and autonomy and seamlessly conforms to the ideological structure of the new spirit of capitalism. This is the secret to market success and not the superiority of the products and services that are supposed to result from the design thinking process. But how do I arrive that this assessment? Judging from what design thinkers say about their work, the design thinking process should yield user-friendly products and services. Design thinking is supposed to generate ideas for products that distinguish themselves because they are developed according to the needs and desires of users. By using methods derived from empirical social research, the perspective of users is incorporated into the process from the very beginning, to ensure that user and end product fit together. Examining the temporality of design thinking shows that content is less important than the working environment that time limits create. It is more crucial to stay within the time frame that structures activities and maintain a group dynamic than clear up questions related to content. In other words, the factual dimension of meaning is neglected, and the temporal dimension is privileged (see Chap. 2, section “Time Pressure”). References to user-­friendliness suggest

5 CONCLUSION 

101

that content is indeed important, although the praxis suggests otherwise. Additionally, by examining the materiality of design thinking we can see how design thinking actually creates the problems it means to solve (see Chap. 3, section “Design Thinking Creates Problems”). A specific reality is constructed within which design thinking’s promise might be realized, because a persona’s problems can be solved by products and services. After this initial work—that is, constructing personae—design thinkers begin to generate ideas for products and services that by the end of the process still only exist abstractly as ideas and prototypes—in other words, as paper. The superiority of the products and services that result from the design thinking process is supposed to be manifest in the ideas but is never tested on the market. The claims that a hypothetical product or service is superior are however rhetorically justified because the specifically constructed problem and the conceptualized solution are necessarily complementary. Little is said, though, about the chance that implementation will lead to success. The design thinkers themselves don’t even know whether or not the products are actually user-friendly, since user-friendliness is not an intrinsic feature of said products but simply asserted (see Chap. 3, section “Design Thinking As Pure Development Process”). User-friendliness is manufactured in the process of generating narratives to convince and mobilize social actors rather than in a process that endows products and services with particular attributes. This attribution should be understood as a response to critiques of consumerism and the inauthenticity that capitalism breeds. In this context, design thinking appears to be engendered by the new spirit of capitalism (see Chap. 4, section “User-Friendliness As a Promise of Authenticity”). If one redirects their attention to the process itself rather than what should result from it, it becomes clear that user-friendliness is a concept that mobilizes participants to do the work of design thinking. The methods endow their respective actions with meaning—specifically, that they are making the world a better place, by responding to the real needs of users. The process also is so structured in order to provide design thinkers with a specific kind of experience. Ideally, elevating the temporal and social above the factual dimensions of meaning secures a form of teamwork in which tasks are completed dynamically, transparently, and without hesitation or frustration. Concretely, this is secured insofar as individuals work within a rigid structure, wherein they are addressed as creative subjects and are only responsible for bringing forth ideas (see Chap. 2, section “Timeboxing and the Logic of Iteration” and Chap. 3, section “Method

102 

T. SEITZ

As Tool”). Protected by the process’ structures, they can and should exhaust their creative potential. Within these structures, non-human actors take on responsibilities originally held by managers. The methods’ architectures supply thematic guidelines, and the work phases end when the stop watch beeps. Design thinking seems like egalitarian collaboration without formal hierarchies. With the new spirit of capitalism in mind, we can interpret the concept of design thinking as a reaction to calls for liberation, insofar as it creates new forms of freedom while also creating new systems of subjugation. It is no longer a struggle to create spaces to express one’s creative potential, but spaces are created in which one has no choice but to comply (see Chap. 4, section “Design Thinking As Emancipated Work”). Whereas on the one hand, concessions are made to the individual’s desire for freedom from constraint, the design thinking process also makes use of newer and more subtle forms of coercion. In short, design thinking is primarily a concept that mainstreams a particular culture of work, but through evangelism rather than exorcism: the old spirit of capitalism is driven out, and design thinkers herald a new one, but either way, capitalism persists.

So What Now? With this diagnosis of design thinking, I have arrived at the conclusion that the concept’s success is predicated on how it fits together with the ideological structure of the new spirit of capitalism. Because design thinking makes claims about autonomy and authenticity and justifies its process and production accordingly, it is in a position to mobilize people. In light of what is thinkable or desirable today, it is no wonder that design thinking attracts devotees. It strikes me as more coherent to understand design thinking’s success sociologically rather than dependent on whether or not the concept—a new label for existing technologies of production and of generating ideas combined with a form of social research—is inherently superior. To extend the scope of this project to reflect on the social and historical context of design thinking changes my position as the author. On the one hand, it stretches my vision beyond what is possible for the design thinkers to see, but on the other hand, this does not de facto make me, as an observer, responsible for the solutions design thinking fails to provide. In other words, from my standpoint as a sociologist-observer, it becomes clear that design thinking cannot make good on its promise to produce an

5 CONCLUSION 

103

authentic world full of user-friendly products, and that instead of freeing people from bondage, it subjects people to different mechanisms of control. It does beg the question, though, if possibilities exist for true authenticity and real liberation, hinted at but not made explicit. It would be too much for this observer to attempt to give an answer to that here. The distinctive quality of sociological observation is that its distance “can offer more knowledge and less knowledge simultaneously” (Kieserling 2004: II). It is more knowledge in the sense that an outsider perspective can contextualize design thinking, attenuating its more extreme expectations, and less knowledge in the sense that it doesn’t formulate any alternatives, but satisfies itself with subtlety alluding to the possibility that alternatives might exist. It is above all important to keep the opportunities and limitations that this kind of observation promises in mind, so as not to succumb to the seductive feeling that at the end, one has arrived at an immutable truth.

References Kieserling, A. (2004). Selbstbeschreibung und Fremdbeschreibung. In Beiträge zur Soziologie soziologischen Wissens. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Reckwitz, A. (2008). Praktiken und Diskurse. Eine sozialtheoretische und methodologische Relation. In Kalthoff (Ed.), Theoretische Empirie (pp. 188–209). Volbers, J. (2015). Theorie und Praxis im Pragmatismus und in der Praxistheorie. In T. Alkemeyer, V. Schürmann, & J. Volbers (Eds.), Praxis denken. Konzepte und Kritik (pp. 192–214). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

Index1

A Activation, 28–30 Agile methods, 40n1 Authenticity, 61, 86–89, 100, 102, 103 Authority, 6, 93, 94 Autonomy, 74n2, 90, 97, 100, 102

C Capitalism, vi, 12, 83–97, 101, 102 Chiapello, Ève, 12, 73, 84–86, 88–91, 95–97 Creativity, vi, 22, 70, 90–92, 96 Critique, 12, 40, 68, 74n2, 77n17, 84–86, 88–90, 95, 101

B Betrayal, 72 Boltanski, Luc, 12, 72, 73, 84–86, 88–91, 95–97 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 12, 17, 18, 31–36, 41n7, 70–72, 74n2, 77n17 Bröckling, Ulrich, 21, 60, 77n15, 88, 91 Brown, Tim, 4, 5, 36, 37, 39, 40, 47–49, 51, 54–57, 61, 62, 64, 76n10, 77n14, 83, 84, 87, 97, 99

D Design research, 6 D.school, 2, 4–6, 8, 9, 22, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40n3, 47, 48, 60, 61, 64, 75n6, 91–93 E Empathy, 33, 35, 37–40, 45, 64, 70, 72, 96 Ethnography, 11, 12, 38, 46, 75n8 Expression, vi, 86, 88, 96, 100

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Seitz, Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31715-7

105

106 

INDEX

F Field access, 7 Foucault, Michel, 53, 54, 76n13, 89, 94 Freedom, 21, 22, 85, 92, 96, 97, 102 H Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (HPI), 4 Helping, 57 Hierarchy, 92–97, 102 I IDEO, 4 Ideology, 85 Incorporation, 84 Iteration, 3, 7, 23–28 L Laboratory, 12, 46–49, 53, 58, 61–63, 67, 68 Latour, Bruno, vii, 10, 12, 36, 46–48, 51, 52, 56, 58, 62, 67, 68, 71, 74n2, 75n8, 77n16, 77n17 Luhmann, Niklas, 7, 13n4, 20, 23, 28, 29, 67, 71, 73, 75n5 M Marcuse, Herbert, 86, 87 Market, 4, 21, 22, 25, 54, 59, 61, 63, 76n10, 76n13, 77n14, 87, 88, 100, 101 Materiality, 9, 11, 12, 33, 35, 36, 45–73, 90, 91, 100, 101 Methods, v, 2–7, 9–11, 21, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36–38, 41n8, 47, 50, 51, 53, 64–71, 75n7, 75n8, 89–91, 93–95, 100–102

N Needs, v, 3, 6, 9, 18, 21–24, 26, 28, 29, 32–34, 39, 40, 41n6, 46–55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 65–69, 73, 84, 87–89, 91, 95, 100, 101 Notes, 8, 19, 21, 24–31, 37, 39, 46, 48–53, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 65, 67–69, 76n12, 89, 92–96 O Observer, 13n4, 22, 32, 38, 72, 102, 103 One best way, 96 P Participant observation, 1, 3, 8, 86 Paternalism, 57, 90 Persona, 18, 19, 21, 23, 50–53, 58, 59, 87, 101 Practice theory, 9–12, 41–42n8, 46, 72, 73 Problem, v–vii, 3–5, 11, 19, 23, 27, 32–34, 49–57, 59–63, 65, 70, 72, 76n10, 76n11, 91, 101 Product, vi, vii, 3, 7–9, 18, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33, 47, 49, 51, 54–64, 66, 70, 74n1, 76n9, 76n10, 77n14, 84, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 100, 101, 103 Promise, vi, 2–4, 7, 8, 60, 70, 86–92, 95, 96, 101–103 Q Quantitative research, 27 R Religion, 62, 77n15

 INDEX 

S Scholasticism, 72 Self-description, 7, 11, 12, 13n4, 34–36, 38, 47, 56, 64, 70, 72, 73, 84, 86, 88, 99, 100 Self-expression, 93 Solution, v–vii, 3, 9, 19, 29, 47, 54–56, 59, 62, 84, 101, 102 Spirit of capitalism, 73, 83–97, 100–102 Sticky Notes, 7, 11, 19, 22, 28, 31, 32, 36, 46, 48–51, 91 Stopwatch, 22, 28, 90, 91, 96 Synchronization, 28–30 T Taylorism, 96 Temporality, 9–12, 17–40, 63, 90, 100 Testing, 3, 20, 23, 31 Time pressure, 18, 20–23, 29, 30, 32, 41n5, 91, 100

107

Time shortage, 30–33, 41n5 Time Timer, 22, 48 Translation, v, viii, 36, 47, 51–53, 59, 71, 74n1, 76n11 Trust, 29, 30, 60 U User, 3, 18, 26, 27, 30, 36, 39, 49, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58–60, 63, 68, 70, 86–88, 100, 101 W Weinberg, Ulrich, 5, 40n3, 60, 95 Whiteboard, 18, 19, 24, 28, 46–48, 50–53, 58, 66, 67 Wicked problems, 55 Workshop, vi, 8, 9, 18, 20–23, 29–31, 47–50, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 65, 69–70, 83, 92, 93