Some of the most important design decisions in your life were made by people you'll never meet, in rooms you'll never see, before you were ever a customer. The question is whether those people were paying attention.
About ten years ago, when I was thirty-three and most things were not working out, I rode my mountain bike around the trails on Sharp's Ridge.
If you don't know Knoxville, Sharp's Ridge is the high spine of rock on the north side of town with an overlook that gives you the whole city laid out below you. The Tennessee River. The Henley Bridge. Downtown, the university, Fort Sanders, the warehouses out by the railroad. From up there it looks like a model.
I was poor. I was working in bars and restaurants. My son was in North Carolina and I was here, and the distance felt like more than it was. I had spent most of my adult life so far in construction in one form or another, bricklaying mostly, and I was good at it, but I could not see a way out of being downstream of everything. Downstream of decisions other people made. Downstream of designs other people drew. Downstream of plans I had no say in.
Sitting up there on the ridge that day, looking out, something landed for me. Every square inch of what I was seeing had been surveyed, planned, designed, architected, engineered, constructed, and then maintained, before being demolished and started over again. Every road, every building, every utility line, every parking lot. Somebody upstream had drawn it. Somebody downstream was keeping it running. I had been keeping it running my whole life and I had never once thought about the upstream as a place I could go.
That ride home was the start of a different question for me. Not "what am I going to do for work tomorrow," but "how do I get upstream of the design itself, where the impact actually lives?"
This piece is about what I have learned since then about who actually does that upstream work, what they call it, and why so much of it goes wrong.
The Trained Eye Sees What Other People Walk Past
Before I get to the design critique, I want to talk about how bricklayers see the world. Because it matters for what comes next.
When you set a perfect mortar joint, you are looking at six things at once. The top front edge of the brick. The face being planar to the faces of the bricks around it. The horizontal spacing. The head joints lining up with the courses above and below. The ends not sticking out. And the roll of the brick, which is the slight tilt forward or back that you correct by feel more than sight.
You also have to cut the mortar away from the face of the brick by touching the top corner of your trowel lightly to the top edge of the course below you. That motion, that single small drag of the trowel, is one of the things they have not figured out how to teach a robot to do yet.
Now, the thing about all this is that a person who does not lay brick will walk past a beautifully laid wall and notice nothing. They will not see the joints. They will not see the rhythm of the courses. They will not see the way the wall reads from twenty feet back versus six inches away. They will see, more or less, a wall. The work is invisible to them, which is the highest compliment a craftsman can be paid.
I went on from bricklaying to other kinds of work, including a stretch as a tech in an arcade and go-kart entertainment center. That world taught me a different version of the same lesson. Arcade games are designed with the end of life already in mind. The cabinet stays the same, the decals come off, a new USB card goes in, and Street Fighter 4 becomes Street Fighter 5. The go-karts are deliberately tough enough to absorb abuse because the industry makes more money on parts than on whole karts. The buildings themselves are designed around the way drunk teenagers and tired parents will actually move through them: where the bathrooms are, where the lines form, where the POS sits, where the food smells reach.
None of this is accidental. Somebody upstream thought about it. Most of the customers walking through never noticed any of it, which again is the point. Good design disappears.
This is the part of my worldview that I think Roman Mars's 99% Invisible podcast has been arguing for since 2010. The title says it all. Most of design is invisible most of the time. You only notice it when it breaks.
And as a maintenance technician, I used to say to people, if I am doing a good job here, you will not realize I am here.
The Idea That Tried to Make This Visible
So now we come to the upstream world, where designs get made.
In the second half of the twentieth century, a movement of designers, engineers, and researchers tried to put a name on what the best craftsmen had always done by instinct. The name they landed on was human-centered design. The core idea was straightforward: if you want to build a thing for people, start by understanding the people. Watch them. Sit with their problems. Define what the problem actually is, not what you assumed it was. Try something cheap. Watch it fail. Try again.
You can hear, in that description, what every good bricklayer, mechanic, cook, and tailor has always done. There is nothing new about it. What was new was the attempt to teach it.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a design consultancy called IDEO took those principles, gave them a name that businesses could pronounce, and built a company around teaching them. The name was Design Thinking, and the methodology came in five hexagons: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. Stanford's d.school taught it. Harvard Business Review put it on the cover. Tim Brown wrote Change by Design in 2009, and the floodgates opened.
For a decade and a half, Design Thinking was the talk of the town. Companies invested hundreds of millions of dollars training their staff in it. City governments adopted it. Hospitals adopted it. Schools adopted it. There was, for a stretch, an argument that any problem could be solved if you put enough people in a room with enough sticky notes.
I want to be honest about something here. The original idea was right. It is still right. Understanding the humans you are designing for is not optional, and the people who codified it were doing real work. The trouble is what happened to the methodology after it left their hands.
The Hexagons Started to Eat the Work
Maggie Gram wrote a sharp piece for n+1 in 2019, called simply "On Design Thinking," that traced how the methodology went sideways. She followed the trail to Gainesville, Florida, where IDEO had been hired to make the city "the most citizen-centered city in the world." The recommendations included a new logo, a "Department of Doing," and replacing City Commission subcommittees with design-thinking workshops. The City Commission embraced it. The press celebrated it. The project's director became city manager and got profiled as a "Revolutionary-In-Chief."
You can probably guess how it ended. A city is not a product. A city is what the design theorist Horst Rittel called a wicked problem, layered with politics and history and poverty and zoning and a thousand competing interests. You do not fix any of that by gathering people around a whiteboard and asking them to ideate.
In 2017, the Pentagram designer Natasha Jen gave a talk titled "Design Thinking is Bullshit." Her argument, distilled, was that the methodology had stripped out the one thing that made design work in the first place: critique. The five hexagons made the process look linear and teachable and replicable, which it is not. And the more it spread, the more it produced the appearance of human-centered work without the substance.
She caught hell for the title, and the title was clickbait, but underneath the clickbait was a real point. You can teach somebody a five-step process in two days and they can run that process for the rest of their career and never actually understand a single user. The post-it notes were doing the work that the trained eye was supposed to do.
By 2023, the bill came due. IDEO, the company that had built the whole edifice, was collapsing. Revenue had fallen from three hundred million dollars in 2019 to under one hundred million in 2023. They laid off a third of their workforce in a single year. Fast Company titled their piece "Design giant IDEO cuts a third of staff and closes offices as the era of design thinking ends." A typical IDEO engagement, it turned out, had been six to twelve weeks of work that produced "research insights, design principles, corporate workshops, prototypes, and product roadmaps." Which is to say, deliverables. Documents. Decks. Nothing that anybody actually had to live with at three in the morning when the system went down.
The Part That Cannot Be Shortcutted
The reason Design Thinking went sideways, I think, is that it tried to teach a shortcut around the part that cannot be shortcutted.
The empathy step is not a step. It is a habit of attention that you build over years, in proximity to the people you serve. The bricklayer learns the mortar joint by laying ten thousand of them under a foreman who walks behind him pointing out everything he is missing. The arcade tech learns how customers actually move through a space by watching a thousand Friday nights from the back of the room. The mechanic learns how engines really fail by pulling apart a hundred of them. You do not get to that kind of seeing in a two-day workshop, and the hexagons cannot give it to you.
This is the part where I want to be careful about myself, too. I am not standing outside the building throwing rocks. DhyanaTech is in this same upstream world now, building software, and the same trap is open under my feet. The hexagons are seductive because they let you feel like you are doing the work without actually doing it. I have caught myself reaching for that feeling more than once.
What we have tried to do, deliberately, is keep the methodology honest by keeping ourselves close to the work. Dionne ran small businesses for years. I came up through construction and manufacturing. The first edition of DhyanaERP, our Precast Edition, exists because I spent a stretch as a manufacturing estimator at a precast concrete plant trying to run an operation on CSV files and macro-stitched spreadsheets that nobody could trust. The pain was not abstract. I lived it. When I designed the product, I designed it for the person I had been, sitting in that office, trying to give somebody a real answer with no real system.
The design test we still run on everything is simple. We call it the Would my dad use this? test. If the thing requires somebody to be "tech-savvy" or "ERP-trained" to be effective, it has failed. My dad is a perfectly intelligent man who has built things with his hands for sixty years. If the software does not respect him, the software is the problem.
What Comes After the Workshop Industry
The good news, if there is any, is that the collapse of the Design Thinking industry does not take human-centered design with it. The original idea is still right. Start with the people. Define the real problem. Try something cheap. Watch it fail. Try again. That has always worked and it always will.
What the collapse takes with it, I hope, is the fantasy that this work can be done at scale by consultants who fly in for a two-day workshop and fly out. That fantasy was profitable for a while, and now it is not, and the world is a little better for it.
What replaces it, if we are serious, looks different. It looks like a builder sitting with one user for an afternoon. It looks like a founder reading every support ticket personally instead of having somebody summarize them. It looks like the deliberate refusal to build software that competes for attention or sells engagement back to advertisers. At DhyanaTech we have a name for the version of this that applies to software specifically. We call it Artificial Mindfulness, which is our synthesis of Mark Weiser's Calm Technology and Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's Contemplative Computing. It rests on the same trained-eye principle the bricklayer uses: if I do my job well, you will not notice me here.
We have also stood up DhyanaResearch, a translational research program meant to keep us learning from the actual users in the actual world, not from a workshop room. The whole point is to make sure that the gap between what our software says about humans and what it does to them stays as small as we can make it.
Sharp's Ridge is still up there. The city below it is still being designed, built, maintained, and torn down by people most of us will never meet. I have spent my whole adult life downstream of those people, and now I am trying to do part of the work from upstream, with the same eye I learned laying brick and fixing arcade cabinets and watching how regular folks actually use the things designers gave them.
The hexagons are not coming back. The trained eye never went anywhere. And if you are building anything for anybody, that eye is the only thing that has ever actually worked.
Further Reading
- Maggie Gram, "On Design Thinking," n+1 Issue 35 (Spring 2019) — nplusonemag.com
- Mark Wilson, "Design giant IDEO cuts a third of staff and closes offices as the era of design thinking ends," Fast Company (November 2023) — fastcompany.com
- Natasha Jen, "Design Thinking is Bullshit," 99U Conference (2017) — talk overview at Core77
- Roman Mars, 99% Invisible podcast — 99percentinvisible.org
- Horst Rittel & Melvin Webber, "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" (1973) — the original "wicked problems" paper
What hidden design decisions do you notice in your own work or daily life? I'd love to hear from anyone who has worked downstream of bad design, or upstream of good design, and learned something from the view.
Steve Dickens, DhyanaTech Inc.