"I would argue that design thinking is a product of digital culture. It shares the values of innovation and entrepreneurship bound up in the digital world and follows the same open-necked babyboom commune to boardroom trajectory. It’s also a product of how digital culture shows us the world: of networks and accumulations of big data. It's a product, in part perhaps, of the converging digital tools we use across disciplinary boundaries. But more than this, it's a product of the the fact that the digital is both where we design and what we design, both subject and object of contemporary design activity.
Design thinking annexes the perceived power of design and folds it into the development of systems rather than things. It's a design ideology that is now pervasive, seeping into the design of government and legislation (for example, the UK Government’s Nudge Unit which works on behavioral design) and the interfaces of democracy (see the Design of the Year award-winning .gov.uk). If these are examples of ways in which design can help develop an open-access, digital democracy, Prism is its inverted image. The black mirror of democratic design, the dark side of design thinking. Whether legal or not, Prism is a design-thinking solution to national security."
Ah hm! An interesting article about NSA and Design Thinking. Thanks to Rob Walker for the link!
