In the mid 1990s, the problem was that business people were not particularly good at doing what many of their company’s founding fathers were skilled in – innovation. There weren’t a lot of Fords, Edisons, Carnegies or Rockefellers lying about. To make leaders of industry and their employees more open to innovation, the solution was to be a codified, staged process where a convenient corporate ideal of input–output could be realized. Enter design thinking.

While it was not officially design thinking because the process had yet to be formalized, the creation of the Macintosh mouse in the early 1980s was design thinking in spirit as it was the framework’s prototype. The story goes something like this: Steve Jobs was visiting Xerox PARC in 1979 when he was concerned that the first mouse, at $300, was too expensive for mass use. He hired a design firm (later to become IDEO) to redesign it. Through observation of people interacting with ‘pointing’ devices, 100+ rapid prototypes of foam core, cardboard and repurposed mechanical parts to test everything from size to ‘clicking’ feel, a reframe of the engineering problem to create something ‘pleasurable’ and collaborating with Apple techs, the Mac mouse was born and the foundations of design thinking were laid.

The real build on those foundations came with the publication of scholar Richard Buchanan’s article “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” (1992) where he proposed four orders of design—signs, things, actions, and systems – and reframed design as a liberal art. This very much imagined design beyond its product-centric role. It also lit a fuse under mouse maker David Kelley and his early IDEO team in 1991. That fuse continued to burn brightly through Tom Kelley’s’ The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm (2001), Tim Brown, IDEO CEO and author of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (2009), IDEO brothers David & Tom Kelley’s Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All (2013), the Stanford d. School as the global epicentre of design, the launch of IDEO U as an online learning platform in 2015, and Roger Martin from Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and his book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage (2009).

Today, IDEOs design thinking process of Empathize + Define + Ideate + Prototype + Test + Iterate is the defining model of design thinking. Still run by IDEO and copied to varying degrees of success by other consultancies, it is the most popular innovation framework. Those who subscribe to it – and there are those who have loved it too – attribute its greatness to a number of factors: it reduces the cost of failure by making mistakes early; it prioritizes the perspectives of users; it helps solve problems with no clear solution; it supports cross-disciplinary creativity; and it skips the tech-first approach for the human experience approach.

Then, there are those who hate design thinking. Some of them have even joined the angry mob in almost violently announcing the death of design thinking for reasons such as: it oversimplifies design into a set of generic steps represented by a Post-It note aesthetic; it is shallow and fails to confront truly ‘wicked’ systems-level issues of sustainability, climate change and inequality; it oversold its impact on innovation; and it has become a corporate Band-Aid for innovation challenges.

In response, the founders rose to its defence. Tim Brown claimed that design thinking is not dead but has simply matured and that critics attack ‘shallow, misapplied’ versions of it, not the actual methodology. David Kelley said that the core of empathy, iterative prototyping and multidisciplinary collaboration could never be reduced to Post It notes. Framing it as an epistemological discipline, not a fad, Roger Martin believed that business still needed abductive reasoning, integrative thinking, and the ability to navigate ambiguity. And Richard Buchanan defended design thinking as a deeper intellectual tradition than its corporate manifestation.

I was first introduced to design thinking in 2007, the discipline’s major publishing decade and a time when almost no clients, at least our early ones in Canada, had ever heard the term before. I believe I first heard of it in my job interview with our CEO when I asked him, “So, how will we do this innovation thing?” His reply was a 30-minute brief on design thinking. For an anthropologist already steeped in theory and method it was – like PowerPoint, I had to admit – completely new. For him, I could tell it was probably one of his Top 5 discussion topics. With a glimmer in both eyes, he took me through the major stages of the process and some of the activities in those stages. Then he explained how I fit into what would become our firm’s central method for every kind of project. It turns out, I was to be the Empathize guy.

As our firm’s sole social scientist, it was to fall on me to understand and communicate the lived experiences, needs, values, lives, frustrations, fears and constraints of the people we were designing for. I would do this by conducting ethnography, including observation, interviews, discussions, shadowing and the collection of relevant artifacts. According to its proponents, the Stanford d.school (design school) built this first stage of the five-stage process by drawing directly from anthropology and ethnomethodology to turn their fieldwork methods into a teachable format. This was my only clash with design thinking.

Having spent countless PhD hours in lectures and engaged in discussion, debate, even argument over the meaning, purpose, process and styles of fieldwork with some very excellent and experienced anthropologists, it put me off that the d.school would have designers teaching the subject.

Whether an anthropologist (studying big picture culture or society) or an ethnomethodologist (studying how people produce social order through talk, interaction, knowledge and reasoning), you have a PhD in your discipline. That’s who the world’s leading universities hire to teach those disciplines, not people who are curious, can conduct participant observation, are comfortable with ambiguity or who are empathetic, but scholars of various types with a degree. For various reasons – including the fact that I agree with IDEO’s non-academic criteria for the best personalities for the job – I also hired people with Master’s degrees.

Whether or not you are a student of ritual process scholars Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, a graduate degree means you have crossed perilous thresholds, endured the true ambiguity of liminality and come out the other side of a major rite of passage that, if properly completed, partially confirms your knowledge. This was not IDEO’s perspective and, as such, was my one major hesitation with design thinking.

The Van Gennep and Turner test was my hiring litmus test. It was also the litmus test of our CEO. Yes, he liked the pedigree but he also wanted the proof in the pudding. This is because he was designing something different from IDEO and its strict devotees.

In the six stage process, in between Empathize and Define, he inserted Foresight. Preparing for potential futures, he argued, was a critical component of future innovations because all innovations, considering the typical length of the corporate decision and development cycle, would not come to market until, at the very least, a near future. And if clients could be enticed into considering further futures, innovation could be exposed to much bigger what ifs.

Certainly, he introduced all of us to Foresight. But more importantly, he introduced us to each other and, from there, the founders of Human Futures began to develop our own original synthesis of foresight and anthropology, including ethnography.

As for the remaining five stages of the design thinking process, I found great value in them and much of the time utilized them in my insights-and-beyond projects. In particular, I very much appreciated the sense-making phase right after Empathize and just before Define with the task of debriefing the team, clustering observations and identifying themes. I was also a fan of Rapid Prototyping because, like sense-making, it resisted egos within the team dominating the proceedings by ensuring everyone had a voice and some skill to be recognized.

I think many if not all of our team felt the same way about design thinking. We were a curious bunch of people into learning a new way of working. Which is what design thinking is – a new way of working for those who have never applied it before. Perhaps that is the reason for the angry mob’s claim of its death, that the wrong people among dodgey consultants and corporate employees were the wrong people to safeguard Richard Buchanan’s intellectual tradition.

That doesn’t make it dead. My first firm is gone now, but others have followed design thinking in its wake. That makes it still alive. Like disco, hardcore or raving, none are dead. Gone? For period, but they all came back in new ways. Death is simply a short form for invisibility due to mainstreaming. So even with its flaws, design thinking lives on and with a little tweaking will continue solving problems, wicked or not.