alt Hacker NewsDesign Thinking is the Data Science of UX: an attempt to gain influence in fields that you don't have expertise in.
Even though there might be universal design principle that can be applied in many fields, the Design Thinking people think that they can just come in and design user interfaces, etc. without really having an expertise in the particular field.
Design Thinking works for selling consulting and not much else. Nobody wants another Agile(TM) process imposed on software developers (in my particular case) that attempts to turn developers into factory line workers.
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Isn't design thinking just... thinking? There may be different design methodologies you apply in different domains (e.g. civil, aeronautics, automotive, electronics, software), but once you abstract that away, what you get is thinking. I once attended a design thinking workshop many years ago, and no one there was able to adequately explain what design thinking was, except by means of jargon, metaphor, or example. My understanding of the subject has not advanced much further in the intervening years.
> "I like your design thinking, I do not like your design thinking people. Your design thinking people are so unlike your design thinking."
- Gandhi
Can you give an analogous example for data science? I confess ignorance here, and always took the term at face value. Is the issue that "data science" tries to be agnostic about the source of the data? (I'm not claiming that that is true, just guessing)
> people think that they can just come in and ...
SOC2 is like this: a collection of security ideas thought up by a group of CPAs, so they can partake in software engineering. It's beyond bizarre.
Design thinking, at least in its formal STS approach, is essentially applied sociology; it's about using various toolkits to build a sufficient understanding of a domain from the "inside out" (using desk and field research) so that you can design valuable experiences that build upon the expertise of those actually inside the domain. In this, it's a bridge between UX/product and users/stakeholders (technical stakeholders are admittedly too often an afterthought, but that's a process problem). If anyone comes in and attempts to blindly shove workshops at you without first conducting in-depth research, interviews, and field studies in your domain, then they are (without resorting to the One True Scotsman) not doing design thinking, they're doing cargo-cult brainstorming. (It's also a process orthogonal to agile development, since by definition it's a linear process that needs to be conducted prior to developing the actual product features and requirements.)
The books and papers the OP cites are solid (Rittel and Webber, Buchanan, etc., though TRIZ, I think, is rather oversold), but in my experience the problem with most design thinking practitioners is that they aren't qualified sociologists and ethnographers, so a lot of design thinking is basically a reinvention of the last century of sociological middle-range theory and ethnographic principles, without being strongly informed by either, likely due to the field's foundation in early software requirements studies.
when Idea Guys™ never get told to buzz off
Uhh… What does Design Thinking have to do with UX? Sure, it could be used to come up with novel ideas for user interfaces but DT (nowadays) is an approach that's several orders of magnitude more general.
Not sure what your definition of 'Design Thinking' is.
Design Thinking isn't about people thinking "that they can just come in and design user interfaces, etc. without really having an expertise in the particular field."
It's a problem solving approach using UCD methods amongst others and working with experts in the field to come up with solutions and ideas to a given problem space.
Key thing is you work with the people who are experts in the field, for example working with medical experts to design a new health related application etc.