El auge del pensamiento de diseño suscita también fuertes rechazos. Por una parte, algunos piensan que no es más que un contenedor atractivo que o bien encierra contenidos de escaso interés o bien renombra prácticas y estrategias que no son ni mucho menos innovadoras. Pero por otra parte, algunos diseñadores, y esto parece especialmente acusado en los diseñadores gráficos, se sienten damnificados cuando personas ajenas al mundo del diseño (en sentido estricto) parecen querer apropiarse de ese término.
Uno de esos críticos es el diseñador gráfico Rick Poynor que ha publicado en la revista I.D. (International Design Magazine) el artículo Down with Innovation. Poynor añora los tiempos en que en que la razón de ser del diseño era el atractivo visual del objeto diseñado. A pesar de las críticas a la frivolidad de la apariencia, Poynor considera que la estética está íntimamente asociada a la función y defiende que esta aproximación genera buenos resultados a las marcas (“good design is good business”). En la década de 1990, el éxito de la “estrategia visual” del diseño sería la razón inicial para los intentos de apropiación de la disciplina por otros profesionales.
Design is now so important, it seems, that designers can no longer be trusted with it, and to make it absolutely clear that control has moved into someone else’s hands, design needs to be given a fancy new name. Call it design thinking. Call it innovation. “Everyone loves design but no one wants to call it design,” BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum informed the readers of Design Observer last year. “Top CEOs and managers want to call design something else—innovation. Innovation: that they are comfortable with. Design, well, it’s a little too wild and crazy for them.” Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, offers this prescription: “Businesspeople don’t just need to understand designers better—they need to become designers.”
Poynor siente que los abogados del pensamiento de diseño critican a los diseñadores tradicionales por que no comprenden (o aplican) las implicaciones más profundas del diseño, y en esta línea ataca directamente a algunos de los principales evangelistas del pensamiento de diseño. Al lado de los ya citados Bruce Nussbaum y Roger Martin, critica a Peter Merholz o Adam Greenfield.
Having written off designers as mere stylists with insufferable egos, whose sole aim is to impose their impractical excesses on long-suffering consumers whom they never trouble to consult, the way is clear for a new breed of intermediary to step up and take business’s hand. They might once have called themselves design consultants—the rhetoric is not so different—but today they are known as design thinkers and innovation experts. For these design-ovators, everything is subordinate to strategy. Design is one small cog in an elaborate analytical machine intended to dazzle prospective clients into believing that they are dealing with rigorous professionals who work with precise methodologies and defined, quantifiable outcomes…
Design thinkers are masterly at weaving a dense web of plausible-sounding words around their analysis—just read their blogs—and this is where they win out against designers, who generally speak most eloquently through their work…
El artículo realiza una apasionada defensa de las cualidades visuales del diseño que, según el autor, los defensores del pensamiento de diseño ponen en entredicho. Pero, en realidad no encuentro estas referencias negativas en las que se apoya Poynor, mientras que su defensa de los objetos como cultura recuerda poderosamente a los métodos de brainstorming y prototipado así como la estrategia de construir para pensar propios del pensamiento de diseño:
… I used the word culture, a notoriously awkward concept. According to the critic Raymond Williams writing in Keywords, his classic lexicon, culture is used in two crucial senses. In cultural anthropology—now there’s a word the innovators love to bat around—it refers primarily to material production, while in history and cultural studies it refers primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. Combining these usages, we might conclude that culture is about things (which have a look) and meanings (conveyed by how they look). Whichever way you look at them—so long as you do actually look—these products of our culture tell us who we are. There is bound to be a relationship between impoverished ways of (design) thinking and impoverished visual form.
Finalmente, para Poynor el valor estético del diseño va más allá de su valor comercial y es lo que lo diferencia del pensamiento de diseño (que tendría en su opinión un objetivo únicamente comercial):
… I asked him whether design has a cultural value beyond its business uses and functional purposes. “The business use—the specific goal that motivated the client or sponsor to initially fund the work—often fades away, sometimes quickly,” he says. “In some ways, you might argue that aesthetic value—for an enduring design, at least—is the only lasting value, since over time functional needs can change and business moves on to the next goal.” Approaching heresy at a time when aesthetic quality is the last thing we are supposed to consider, Bierut goes so far as to modestly propose that “just making something look nicer” or “replacing something ugly with something not so ugly” is an admirable goal for designers.
En resumen, una forma de defender la necesidad de diseñadores (en su sentido convencional):
Give me something tangible, something brilliant and extraordinary that illuminates our perception of what human life can be. For that, we still need designers.
El artículo ha generado algunas respuestas de aquellos citados y criticados por Poynor. Así, Bruce Nussbaum considera el artículo de Poynor como parte del proceso cíclico (y casi inevitable) por lo que cada cierto tiempo se abre el debate entre diseñadores gráficos y business people:
… Rick Poynor, who is a writer and critic based in London specializing in visual culture. This is important, the visual culture part, because the the source of complaint about loss of control in design is coming out of the graphic design community, not the industrial design folks. This is important, I believe, because industrial design has always had a powerful user-centric focus ("human factors" being a core competency taught in most ID programs). This design begins with a method of understanding people--consumers, patients, whatever. And it is this methodology--this anthropological/sociological base--that is being deconstructed and reassembled as a general tool box for all organizations, beginning with corporations but fast spreading to health care and education.
Adam Greenfield acusa a Poynor de deshonestidad intelectual por sesgar sus argumentos para acusar a muchos “design thinkers” (él incluido) de algo que nunca han defendido:
By taking this one quote, very much out of context, he’s making it seem as if I’m somehow arguing against the very thing I’ve spent much of my career trying to support, which is the central role of the trained designer in improving user experience. He also seems to believe I would somehow underwrite the essential vacuity of the consultant class, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Y posiblemente este punto sea el motivo de la mayor crítica que se puede hacer a Poynor. Es dicutible si la estética va necesariamente asociada a la función o si el diseño es una especie de arte, pero nada de esto hace que el diseño (y en particular el diseño gráfico) sea incompatible con el pensamiento de diseño o la innovación, ni que éstos necesiten la crítica del primero para justificar su existencia. De hecho, los design thinkers no niegan la importancia, y herencia, del diseño (por algo utilizan este nombre). Por el contrario, el ataque de Poynor parece parte de una lucha por la defensa corporativa de una marca (el término “diseño”).
El próximo 
