# **Design Thinking is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo** Harvard Business Review - Design thinking preserves the designer above the people she serves, and in doing so limits participation in the design process. - Rational experimental problem-solving begins with the presumption that the search for a solution starts by relying on existing data about the problem. - Design Thinking, in a slight divergence from the original model, suggests instead that the designer herself should generate information about the problem by drawing on her experience of the people who will be affected by the design through the empathetic connection that she forges with them. - Both Design Thinking and the rational-experimental approach implicitly establish problem-solving as the remit of the powerful, especially when it comes to design for social ends. They turn the everyday ability to solve a problem into a rarified practice limited only to those who self-consciously follow a specialized methodology. - The solutions that win out are not necessarily the best—they are generally those that are favored by the powerful or at least by the majority. - When the designers acts as a gatekeeper for the meanings that are included in the design process, the potential for connections becomes limited not only to what the designer views as significant but also to the relationships she can imagine. - Interpretive engagement is a process of collaborative and wide-ranging interpretation where participants revisit the understandings they have about themselves and others as well as about the changing world they live in. It represents a commitment to a process with no clear beginning and end, with a goal that is often no more explicitly defined than imagines and articulating new ways to meet changes that are still murky and immeasurable.