Still Thinking About Design Thinking

I’ve been grappling with design thinking for nearly a decade now.

It started during my graduate studies around 2016, when I was deep in dissertation research exploring how maker pedagogy could transform technical communication education. Design thinking kept surfacing in my work, this methodology that promised to democratize innovation and center human needs. I was intrigued, but also skeptical.

Fast forward to today: my chapter with Mason Pellegrini just came out in The Routledge Handbook of Social Justice in Technical and Professional Communication (edited by the fabulous quartet: Natasha Jones, Laura Gonzales, Angela Haas, and Miriam Williams), and after years of research and teaching, I’m convinced we’re missing something crucial in how we talk about design thinking.

Here’s the thing: design thinking has incredible potential for social change. Just look at OpenIDEO. They’ve crowdsourced nearly 19,000 ideas from innovators in over 200 countries, all focused on solving humanity’s biggest challenges. From reimagining food systems to making charitable giving more accessible, the platform proves that design thinking can be a force for good.

But we need to talk about design thinking’s assumptions.

The Uncomfortable Truth About “Neutral” Design

Design thinking didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Its roots trace back to early 20th-century scientific management (hello, Taylorism), which was all about efficiency and productivity. While today’s design thinking has evolved way beyond factory optimization, it still carries some of that efficiency-first DNA.

This isn’t just academic nitpicking. As Natasha Jones points out, UX designers and technical communicators “can perpetuate systemic and structural oppression or enhance the agency of users” depending on their methods. The difference comes down to intention… and awareness.

Jerry Diethelm takes this further, arguing that design thinking as typically taught reflects Eurocentric and masculine ideologies while overlooking feminist and transcultural perspectives. When we treat design thinking as culturally neutral, we’re actually defaulting to the worldview of its predominantly white, Western, male creators.

Yikes.

What Justice-Oriented Design Actually Looks Like

Well, we don’t need to throw design thinking out the window. We just need to be more intentional about how we use it.

Take the classic Stanford model: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. It’s a solid framework, but it can be so much better when we add critical awareness. Instead of those quick user interviews that often pass for “empathy,” we need genuine community engagement. Talk to people throughout an organization’s hierarchy, not just the C-suite. Actively seek out marginalized voices instead of defaulting to the usual suspects.

And here’s a radical idea: what if communities helped define their own problems instead of having designers swoop in with solutions? Co-creation beats consultation every time.

When we’re testing our prototypes, we should ask not just “does this work?” but “does this challenge existing inequities, or does it accidentally make them worse?”

Seeing It in Action

This isn’t pie-in-the-sky thinking. Policymakers in Australia and New Zealand are using design thinking to completely rethink citizen engagement. Universities like Tulane and Stanford have created curricula that teach students to “notice opportunities, ask better questions, identify various stakeholders, try new ideas, and dare to imagine a different world.” In healthcare, design thinking sprints have generated solutions for medical access inequities. Legal scholars have used the methodology to improve marginalized communities’ access to legal advice.

The pattern is clear: when we apply design thinking with social consciousness, it becomes incredibly powerful for tackling complex social challenges.

The Teaching Moment

As educators, we have a unique opportunity here. Instead of just teaching the Stanford model as gospel, we can integrate what Liz Lane calls “interstitial design“—combining design thinking with frameworks that examine power, privilege, and positionality.

Practically, this means:

• Partnering students with nonprofits and advocacy groups, not just traditional corporate clients
• Deliberately creating diverse teams
• Building in reflection on bias and positionality

The goal isn’t to eliminate design thinking’s practical focus—it’s to ensure those practical skills serve justice.

Why This Matters Now

Here’s what I’ve realized working on this chapter: design thinking needs a social justice lens to fulfill its own stated goals of human-centered innovation. And social justice work needs design thinking’s systematic approach to tackling wicked problems.

The methodology’s promise isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of critical awareness about how power, privilege, and cultural assumptions shape every step of the process.

If you’re a practitioner, start asking harder questions: Who’s defining the problem? Whose voices are centered? What power dynamics might our solutions reinforce?

In the classroom, we need to prepare students not just to follow design processes, but to examine and improve them. And as researchers, we have an opportunity to use design thinking as a powerful tool for community-engaged scholarship, provided we approach it with appropriate critical awareness.

Design thinking can help solve humanity’s most pressing challenges. But only if we’re willing to examine our assumptions, center marginalized voices, and design not just for users, but for justice.

The stakes are too high (and the potential too great) for anything less.

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I invite you to dive deeper. Check out “Design Thinking as an Avenue for Social Change in Technical and Professional Communication” in The Routledge Handbook of Social Justice in Technical and Professional Communication, where Mason Pellegrini and I explore these ideas in much more detail.

(I will add a PDF copy of our chapter to the Publications page… once I get to a scanner.)