Design Thinking, Rhetoric, and Materiality
Christine Harold, University of Washington
For my reflective essay, I turn to a discipline also working at the intersection between communication and materiality: specifically, industrial design. For the sake of time, I hope it will suffice to say without citing extensive evidence, that design is a major theme within contemporary culture. As consumers we are constantly and increasingly being told that we should care about it, understand its vocabularies, admire its rising stars. Our sneakers, our cell phones, our vegetable peelers, and our trashcans are all possible venues for the discerning consumer to demonstrate good taste. Businesses are increasingly turning to design not only to differentiate their goods and services from competitors, but also to innovate and adapt in changing markets. But is all this talk of design just hype? Well, yes and no. The existence of hype doesn’t preclude the existence of something significant. And, as I want to suggest, this current intensification of design is a trend that can offer us important insights into our own capacities as rhetoricians to respond to the current moment, a moment in which things seem to mean as much as words.
So what is this thing called design? Ted Koppel of all people, in his introduction to a Nightline piece on the innovation firm IDEO I will discuss in a moment describes it by way of a comparison between design and invention: “Whoever came up with the idea for dental floss,” he explained, “was an inventor. But the man or woman who would put it inside that clever little plastic box that lets you tear off just the right length? That was a designer.” Koppel’s is as good a description as any of the common understanding of design. If inventors or engineers, for example, apply scientific or mathematical knowledge to practical problems, designers address more specifically the problem of how actual users will interact with material objects; be they bridges, buildings, cell phones, or staplers. In short, designers, like rhetoricians, are concerned with questions of interface.
As such, design practitioners and scholars have grappled with many of the same tensions over the scope and content of their discipline as have rhetoricians. Many professional designers, for example, are careful to distinguish themselves from mere
“stylists” or “decorators.” They ardently resist the conflation of their craft with those who merely add the stylistic flourish that aesthetically distinguishes one product from another without actually producing anything useful of their own. This resonates, of course, with rhetoric’s longstanding attempt to redeem itself from the tendency of some to diminish the art as that which merely makes more pleasing the intellectual products of others, namely philosophers or scientists. Other designers celebrate style as central to their art’s contribution. These design advocates argue that rather than a mere post-hoc additive to objects, style is itself functional. The nature of the interface matters.
Northwestern cognitive scientist and design scholar Donald Norman suggests, for example that “Beautiful things work better,” which is to say that we work better when we are in a state of positive affect; we are more creative, open-minded, and able to negotiate potential problems posed by our interaction with a particular object. Most famously, the
Bauhaus designers of the early 20 th
Century popularized the notion that “form follows function,” or that good aesthetics are not just decorative, they are elemental.

These debates over form and substance in design studies that so mirror those in the rhetorical tradition give rise to perhaps a more fundamental question over the domain of design. Many designers argue that their mission far exceeds matters of style, be they superfluous or functional. They argue that to be a designer is to be an inventor in the traditional sense of the word—it is to know intimately the chemical properties of materials, the ergonomic spectrum of the human form, and the anthropological habits of a culture, for example. Designers are increasingly being elevated as the overseers of the entire production process, from extraction, to design, to manufacturing, to marketing. As
Tim Brown, president of the premier “design and innovation” firm IDEO puts it, he sees design as “not a link in a chain but as the hub of a wheel.” For these “design thinkers,” like for some rhetoricians, everything is design.
But Brown and his colleagues at IDEO are on something of a crusade to expand the domain of design further still to include not just the creation of objects, but the art of problem-solving itself. That is, design increasingly claims as its subject invention in the broadest sense. It is here that design no longer just parallels rhetoric, but increasingly incorporates it. “The importance of design…cannot be understated” write Charlotte and
Peter Fiell in Designing the 21 st
Century
, “for not only has design come to encompass an extraordinary range of functions, techniques, attitudes, ideas and values, all of them influencing our experience and perception of the world around us, but the choices we make today about the future direction of design will have a significant and possibly enduring effect on the quality of our lives and the environment in the years to come.”
Designer Jack Schulze thinks broadening design to the art of problem solving is still too narrow, arguing "obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention." Other designers believe, along with Dominic Muren that
“objects now carry the influence that speech once did” and that “making is comparable to oration, or pamphlet printing.”
And designer Paola Antonelli boldly claims the 2009 documentary Objectified that designers are the intellectuals of the future and adds with a chuckle that while the French archaically still turn to philosophers, it is designers policymakers should be turning to when they want deep thoughts about contemporary culture.
This ratcheting up of the role of design in organizations throughout the world has been largely influenced by a particular innovation model made famous by IDEO. They call it
“design thinking” and it is on this I will spend the remainder of my time.
As everyday objects increasingly bear the mark of what one writer derisively calls
“designy-ness,” and as industrial designers become household names, perhaps it should come as no surprise that “design thinking” has emerged as the hot new model for doing business in the 21 st
Century, with companies such as GE, Proctor & Gamble, Maytag,
Steelcase, Target, Red Hat, and Volkswagen enthusiastically embracing the practice.
Design thinking, in essence, sells design as a process rather than a product. As process, design thinking can presumably be translated to address human needs ad infinitum. As
IDEO’s Paul Bennett explains: “The process through which a designer solves problems is equally applicable to the design of an object as it is to the design of a service, to the design of an experience, and to the design of a system.” Tim Brown made the case for design thinking in a TED talk this summer urging designers to start thinking big again like the great engineers of the early Industrial Revolution saying: “Somehow we went from systems thinkers who were reinventing the world to a priesthood of folks in black turtlenecks and designer glasses working on small things….If we take a different view of

design and focus less on the object and more on design thinking as an approach we might actually see the result in a bigger impact” addressing such issues as “global warming, education, health care, security, [or] clean water.”
With such lofty ambitions, it may be no surprise that IDEO executives have become something akin to corporate rock stars. Brown details the transformative potential of design thinking in his just-released book Change by Design , and IDEO cofounder Tom Kelley promotes the practice in two hugely influential books, The Ten
Faces of Innovation and The Art of Innovation . Business Week was so excited about design thinking that they included Harvard Business School to its list of top design schools after Harvard offered just one course in design thinking. Stanford University, in collaboration with IDEO founders David Kelley and Bill Mooridge, has launched the first ever graduate program in design thinking, claiming as their mission: “We believe great innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers.”
In short, design thinking is a process for achieving innovation that consists of what Brown calls three overlapping spaces: inspiration (the motivating problem), ideation
(free-form collaborative brainstorming), and implementation. These spaces are characterized by a number of attributes and mantras: “fail often to succeed early”; “all of us is smarter than any of us”; “Encourage wild ideas”; “Defer judgment”; “Build on the ideas of others”; “Serious playfulness”; and “build to think,” to name a few. Design thinking works by creating a culture of playful experimentation that produces as many ideas as possible in order to pick the best ones. As Brown puts it, “to experience design thinking is to engage in a dance” between convergent thinking (making choices) and divergent thinking (creating choices), between synthesis and analysis. This approach has captured the imagination of some of the world’s biggest organizations, and IDEO’s dance card is increasingly filled not just by corporations but non-profits like the Gates
Foundation and the government of Iceland.
While there is neither time nor space to rehearse the critical work that informs what follows, I nonetheless want to highlight certain conclusions. First, and foremost, there is no reason why most of the tenets of design thinking have anything essential to do with design. Many of them could just have easily been subsumed by other disciplines and given different names: rhetorical thinking, critical thinking, sociological thinking, anthropological thinking, creative thinking, and so on. Collaborating to generate new ideas, expanding on past ones, considering the cultural specificities of one’s audience, and so on—these are all aspects of what we in this room would call rhetorical invention.
But Brown and design thinkers rarely use the term “invention,” preferring instead the word “innovation.” Invention evolves from venire
, or “to come,” and is thus an event, a happening. Innovation by contrast, stems from innovare , meaning to renew or alter, and thus presupposes an extant object or condition that will be made new again. It is in this distinction that we see the one component of design thinking that is intrinsically design: their practice of early and frequent prototyping, the actual manipulation of an object, of matter, and all those processes that such a materiality implies.
As rhetoricians, I think we can learn at least three things from the apotheosis of design thinking. We would do well to see the hype surrounding design thinking not as an illusion, but rather as a sign of where we are as a cultural and political economy. We should understand that the ability to speak to and through the world of objects is increasingly considered not only the sine qua non of business success, it is also

increasingly understood as the predicate skill set for solving the majority of global social problems. Whether this belief is accurate is somewhat beside the point; the existence of the belief is in and of itself symptomatic of a shift in the cultural logic of aesthetic capitalism, the fulfillment of Jean Baudrillard’s often derided proclamation that the subject has given way to the object. As such, rhetoricians ignore the world of everyday objects as meaning-machines at our own heuristic detriment.
Second, and at the same time, what remains under-thought in Brown’s discussion is the very thing in which rhetoric scholars have historically been most interested: the ability to see ( theoria ) the available means of persuasion and meaning-making. The advocates of design thinking spend an exceptional amount of time assuring their audience that anyone can, with proper training, learn to think like a designer—that these skills are learned rather than innate. And yet, the process by which such education obtains, as well as the ways in which these skills actually empower wild ideas, remains frustratingly opaque. Indeed, in all those moments in which Brown and others talk out the process of ideation, what remains esoteric and mysterious is the process by which ideas manifest at all, even the bad ones. In some ways, the celebration of the vague secret sauce of collaboration and positivity can be seen as a sort of conceptual end-run around this question. But the frequent attempts to explain why people need to be taught to be creative thinkers in order to facilitate design thinking hints at the difficulty in accepting the collective solution in and of itself. As such, invention, in the broader, rhetorical sense, offers a productive site for rhetoric and design to engage and enhance each other.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, design thinking’s necessary preoccupation with the object limits its potential to be as revolutionary as its advocates would have us believe it to be. Brown likes to hype the potential for design thinking to reshape the social agenda on issues like climate and poverty, but the examples he gives always revolve around specific goods or services, and the ways they can be tailored to produce better outcomes. Designers are correct to believe that rethinking objects is necessary if we are to address these larger questions, but it hardly exhausts the work to be done. The questions of publicity, identity, power, ideology, and social formation—questions that have long animated rhetorical scholarship—have no similar intellectual history in design studies, and understandable so, as many of these questions revolve around relations between people, institutions, and norms that cannot be reduced or mediated through objects. Design cannot be the hub of the wheel on these issues without risking some serious misalignment.
This is not to say that rhetoric should be the center of our endeavors as we begin our own efforts to think anew, to innovate and invent in the face of old and new sociocultural problems. Neither rhetoric nor design offers the definitive ground for thinking; we have long since passed the time when some new “center” can rescue our models of the social world. And yet, rhetorical theorists risk marginalization and irrelevancy if we continue to conduct analysis without attention to the material reality of everyday objects—not just the special ones, the films or monuments that are identifiable as texts, but the mundane and the banal too—the objects we use and that use us without our considering the nature of the interaction. At the same time, design thinking needs the sort of insights and intellectual discussions that have long animated rhetorical scholarship if design is ever to transcend the world of consumer goods and become something more profound.