The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’ - The Atlantic
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A new book charts how the discipline transcended humble origins and turned into something more ambitious, and more conflicted.
On the first day of a required class for freshman design majors at Carnegie Mellon, my professor stood in front of a lecture hall of earnest, nervous undergraduates and asked, “Who here thinks that design can change the world?” Several hands shot up, including mine. After a few seconds of silence, he advanced to the next slide of his presentation: a poster by the designer Frank Chimero that read, Design won’t save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck. My professor wasn’t the first person to deliver such discouraging news. In 1971, the design educator Victor Papanek b
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