Jobs’s reframing marked the culmination of a decades-long cultural shift. By the end of the 20th century, design students were typically categorized into one of two buckets: industrial designers who made physical, mass-produced products, and graphic designers who communicated information with visuals. But following the rapid rise of the technology sector during the early 21st century, many design students gravitated toward careers in that industry, where they worked on intangible products such as interfaces and software systems. As Gram writes, designers need more than just craftsmanship skills; they should “be students of human culture.” Here, the field benefited from another kind of émigré: social scientists who, faced with a declining academic-job market, entered the tech industry instead.
One contributor was Lucy Suchman, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1984 with a Ph.D. in anthropology, then took a job at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center as a researcher. In an influential study, Suchman placed two successful computer scientists in a room to see whether they could, as Gram writes, use “a brand-new, feature-rich Xerox photocopier” without issues. They couldn’t. It turned out, as Gram observes dryly, that learning how to use an unfamiliar machine “is never as simple as technologists want it to be.” Other tech companies also hired social scientists, who became a new kind of design professional: user researchers. In theory, they were meant to instill a more “human-centered” approach to technology. In practice, however, they were pressured to solve problems quickly and prioritize profit over the ideal experience.
Eventually, some designers and design educators grew to feel that the “problems worth solving,” as Gram writes, were the “wicked problems” of society—a term coined by the design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973 to include issues such as crumbling public infrastructure, education inequality, and poverty. Teachers encouraged their students to apply design to things that really mattered—not just the creation of mass-produced consumer goods. And companies such as Ideo, a design consultancy founded in 1991 in Palo Alto, helped turn design from a specialist skill into a general-purpose one, selling the concept of “design thinking” to corporate America.
Design thinking, as Ideo’s CEO, Tim Brown, wrote in 2008, “uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible.” While Ideo employed design thinking to invent user-friendly insulin pens and an updated PalmPilot, the company also suggested that its approach to identifying issues and brainstorming solutions could be applied to all kinds of problems—including the “wicked” ones plaguing corporations, educational institutions, health care, and government. Corporate America fell in love with the idea, and Gram describes how design thinking became an almost “spiritual movement,” with Brown’s 2009 book, Change by Design, as its bible. Its influence extended around the world: In 2006, an advertising agency in Bogotá, Colombia, was asked by the government to research, prototype, and launch an ad campaign imploring a group of Marxist-Leninist guerrilla fighters to demobilize.