08-07-2025
'Design thinking' is on its deathbed (and that's okay)
BY and Mark Wilson
Design thinking, the notion that anyone can solve problems like a designer with the right method and mindset, was a mainstay of corporate America from the 2000s into the 2010s. In recent years, though, the ideology's effectiveness has been called into question, and it has become one of the most divisive topics in the field.
Now it looks like corporations have started sidestepping the term completely.
When analyzing 176,000 design job listings for our annual report on Where the Design Jobs Are, we searched specifically for employers' use of the term 'design thinking.' We found that it dropped significantly year over year: by 9.1% in UX/UI design, 17.6% in product design, and a whopping 57.2% in graphic design.
We have been scrutinizing the idea of design thinking for years. It began humbly, with late design luminaries including Sara Little Turnbull and Bill Morridge trying to codify the field's human-first principles (work that would evolve at Stanford's But as the term grew popular in the early aughts—presented primarily by the design firm IDEO as part magic, part skill that anyone could learn (just pay IDEO to learn it!)—it became the de facto veneer for Fortune 500 corporations that wanted to chase some of that Apple magic. They, too, could attempt a design-forward viewpoint.
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