Design Thinking (and more broadly, human-centered design) is a pragmatic framework for doing product design in an effective and productive manner. Systems Thinking is a massively more general superset. I'm not really sure how you'd operationalize that on a design project, except by following first principles, which would essentially get you to DT / HCD.

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gond 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That is exactly the point.

Taking a theory (Systems Thinking), a mental model which has the primary goal of holistically identifying, describing, and understanding wholes and reducing it down to a set of methods/framework out of ease of use (the pragmatism) is exactly the wrong approach in my opinion.

Systems Thinking and all of its applications scenarios are based on epistemology. To turn it into a recipe is a wrongdoing. The whole notion is that one size does not fit all.

The operationalization of Systems Theory for a given case at hand is the responsibility and the transfer function of the operator whose approach this is. The process itself yields understanding and should not be abbreviated.

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jjk166 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So your argument is don't use an off the shelf tool that gets the job done, build your own tool every time which likely doesn't offer any advantage over the standard tool?

If you think using Design Thinking goes against Systems Thinking, I don't think you really get either.

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turnsout 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I practiced Design Thinking at IDEO for 10 years, and I can assure you it's not "one size fits all." And you can onboard an intern or a client CEO in days, without requiring them to internalize a very abstract system for decomposing problems.

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gond 4 hours ago | parent [-]

>I practiced Design Thinking at IDEO for 10 years

That may possibly explain your motivation but even ten years do not make it right, nor the speed of teaching.

You are saying it yourself: internalising the very abstract system for decomposing and adapting it has a value of its own you cannot replicate by pre-solving it. The spinning-off of Design Thinking only accomplished further segmentation of a space which was already too fractured and was a disservice to the field.

I don’t think we will approach a consensus here, and that’s fine.

	▲	turnsout 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's always valuable to have a generalizable skill. But design is fundamentally a craft; an applied art. It's problem-solving. And like any craft, there are tools and techniques that are tried and true. You could approach woodworking with a ground-up Systems Thinking approach, but would you turn down the advice of a carpenter with 30 years of experience? Technically all you need to understand woodworking is a physics textbook and maybe an organic chemistry textbook. My guess is you're a software developer (as I am), and in my opinion the fatal flaw of our group is the incorrect belief that we could do anything or solve any problem by simply decomposing it into smaller and smaller components. The thing is, for a big enough problem, there are an almost infinite number of ways to break it down and then build it back up. In optimization terms, complex projects are highly nonlinear problems, so you may be able to understand what the inputs are, but it sometimes takes wisdom and experience to tune the parameters.