Tim Seitz, Design Thinking und der neue Geist des Kapitalismus. Soziologische Betrachtungen einer Innovationskultur, Transcript, 2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17419
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Paolo Volonté
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Tim Seitz, Design Thinking and the new spirit of capitalism. Sociological consideration on an innovation culture, Transcript, 2017
Text.Serial.Journal
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Book Reviews
2019-01-31
2023-06-25
2019-01-31
2023-08-31
198-201
TS
Paolo Volonté
2018
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17419
198
Politecnico di Milano
2038-3460
2
en
201
Tim Seitz, Design Thinking and the new spirit of capitalism. Sociological consideration on an innovation culture, Transcript, 2017
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17419/16272
9
198                                                          Tecnoscienza – 9 (2)

    Tim Seitz
Design Thinking und der neue Geist des Kapitalismus. Soziologische Be-
trachtungen einer Innovationskultur [Design Thinking and the new spirit of
capitalism. Sociological consideration on an innovation culture], Bielefeld,
Transcript, 2017, pp. 142

Paolo Volonté Politecnico di Milano

    Design thinking is one of the most renowned aspects of the current ex-
pansive trend of design, a shift from the design of mere artefacts to the
design of product systems, to the design of services and practices, to the
idea that innovation process as a whole can and should be design-driven.
The specificity of design thinking is to recognize (and exploit) the tacit ca-
pabilities of design possessed by human beings, in particular by the users
of possible innovations. It implements a kit of design tools to enable inno-
vators to make decisions based on “what future customers really want” –
according to the movement’s rhetoric – instead of relying purely on histor-
ical data or making risky bets based on the designer’s instinct. Design
thinking is originally based on a deep interest in developing an understand-
ing of the people for whom products or services are to be designed. It aims
at helping innovators both in the task of observing and developing empa-
thy with the target user, and in the process of questioning the problem, the
assumptions, and the implications it involves. Within such framework, the
professional designer is the one who, thanks to the mastery of the de-
signer’s toolkit, is considered able to identify, organize and make produc-
tive the vision skills of those who will actually use the new product or the
new service.
    More tangibly, design thinking is a method to foster creativity in the
process of industrial innovation involving envisaged potential users in the
process. Although the designerly way of thinking has been discussed by a
number of scholars in the second half of the last century (Bruce Archer,
Nigel Cross), the name “design thinking” is now linked with the method
developed by the IDEO design company and theorized by Tim Brown.
This is an iterative process, in which designers seek to understand better
the user of an envisaged innovation and to redefine problems. Ideas are
stressed in brainstorming sessions and the adoption of a hands-on ap-
proach in sketching, prototyping and testing. The method aims at identi-
fying alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly appar-
ent with the initial level of understanding of the problem. It is not only
used by IDEO offices and other design agencies, but also taught in some
schools and high schools, and translated into toolkits that can be bought.
    This particular feature of design thinking, which is both a method for
designing in the contemporary complex world and the symbolic mark of
an organization and a community of experts, makes the case particularly
Book Review                                                               199
interesting to be inquired into through the tools of Science and Technology
Studies (STS). With this in mind, Tim Seitz undertook an ethnographic
research on the world of design thinking seen through the Berlin viewpoint
represented by a school in Potsdam and a design agency in the German
capital. Attending the agency for two months (actually a rather short time
for an ethnographic work), the author has not only been able to observe
the life of the organization and collect dominant discourses, but above all
he could observe a number of workshops for the implementation of design
thinking by attending them. His goal was to study design thinking as a
practice, namely, as a set of interconnected actions performed by a com-
munity of people who recognize themselves in that practice and share ideas
on how it should be performed optimally. In his view, considering design
thinking as a practice allows us to avoid being trapped in the network of
discourses about it.
    The ambition of the book he published after the research, Design
Thinking und der neue Geist des Kapitalismus (“Design thinking and the
new spirit of capitalism”), is to “follow the design thinkers” (p. 15, English
in the original, thus winking at the famous motto by Bruno Latour), treat
design thinking as a practice (p. 18), and take the materiality of design
thinking processes seriously (p. 57). The expectation that it creates is,
therefore, to interpret design thinking through practice theory and actor-
network theory, and consequently to emphasize the collective aspects
(translations, assemblages, inertias) underlying the choices of actors and
the idealizations of official rhetoric. Consistently, Seitz claims to base his
research on the theory of practice that “directs its attention to aspects that
previously could hardly be perceived by culture theories that overlooked
practices: the temporality, corporeality and materiality of social practices”
(p. 18).
    Accordingly, chapter 1 is devoted to the temporality and chapter 2 to
the materiality of design-thinking workshops. The temporality is surpris-
ingly characterized by a strong subjection of the envisaged workshop ac-
tions to a pre-established pace that is functional to the quick and foreseea-
ble unfolding of the workshop rather than to a full exploitation of the cre-
ative resources deployed by participants. In this way, the theoretical model
of the process ends up prevailing over the situated practice and binding it
to needs that seem to be extrinsic to the expected outcomes. Materiality
acts through the objects envisaged by the design-thinking method, which
in Seitz's analysis end up incorporating and thus stabilizing the lively indi-
viduality of participants. In his book Change by Design, Tim Brown wrote:
“The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights
and insights into products and services” (2009, 49). Tim Seitz sees in Cal-
lon’s sociology of translation a conceptual tool to deconstruct those trans-
lations into what they really are. Although the ambition of design thinking
is to come closer to the real needs of users, the materiality of the method
that it uses separates the results from real people and relates them to the
200                                                           Tecnoscienza – 9 (2)

personas arising from the workshops’ job: “The persona should refer to
the interviewees out there in the real world. [However,] from now on it
will be designed for the persona and not for the interviewees. It no longer
needs to be thought of as the diffuse and unpredictable amount of different
people [out there]” (p. 68).
    Yet, the most interesting part of the book is the third chapter, bearing
the same title of the book (pp. 102-122). Here the author renounces to the
use of concepts that are common in STS, and turns to the sociological the-
ory of Boltanski and Chiapello (The New Spirit of Capitalism, 2005) to
argue that design thinking is a typical form of criticism of capitalism "be-
coming endogenous" (Endogenisierung). According to the French sociol-
ogists, the "new spirit" of capitalism consists precisely in internalizing the
classic critiques of capitalism (for example that of promoting useless,
wasteful and inauthentic consumerism) by using them as sources for more
acceptable – even if capitalistic in nature – forms of production that impose
themselves for their apparent "diversity" compared to traditional capital-
ism. Design thinking appears to embody such kind of strategy. Seitz high-
lights two ways in which it does so: through a "promise of authenticity",
and through a promise of work emancipation. Here the distinction be-
tween discourse and practice of design thinking, discussed in the previous
chapters, emerges as particularly useful.
    Consider first the promise of authenticity. While design-thinking dis-
courses share positions very close to the critical theory ("The torrent of
cheap goods that began to flow from their factories and workshops has fed
into a culture of excess consumption and prodigious waste" states Tim
Brown, 2009: 2), in design-thinking practice those discussions are resolved
into the design of more “authentic” products, which respond to the “real”
needs of users. "Design thinking is thus the result of criticism becoming
endogenous, which makes the addressing of true needs its task, but also
offers the prospect of gaining a competitive advantage over conventional
products. […] Products and services are created whose diversity is consid-
ered a selling point" (p. 109).
    Regarding the promise of work emancipation, a similar contradiction
occurs between discourses that present design thinking as an instrument
for the liberation of individual creativity and emancipation from the con-
straints of hierarchical work, and a practice structured by timing that is
functional to the efficiency of the process rather than to the expression of
participants' creativity, as described in chapter 2. “Instead of the demand
for limitless release of creativity, design thinking seems more likely to have
established a domestication of creativity within creativity reserves” (p. 114).
    To sum up, the interpretation proposed by Boltanski and Chiapello of
the new spirit of capitalism makes it possible to find a convincing explana-
tion of the apparent divergence between design-thinking discourse and the
operative modalities in which it is expressed, in the form of both applied
methods and goals pursued. The critical discourse has become little more
Book Review                                                                 201
than a particularly effective tool in the competition for gaining markets.
    However, although Seitz’s thesis is convincing, a sense of incomplete-
ness lingers at the end of the story. A sense of flaw that will particularly
affect STS scholars. Many of the ingredients of this story are familiar to
them: ethnography, the emphasis on the materiality of non-humans, the
use of practice theory, the sociology of translation. However, as you enter
the text, the feeling grows that a conceptual toolkit has been borrowed
from the STS without having read the user manual. Flaws start cropping
up when concepts should be aptly used to give accuracy to the interpreta-
tion of field data. It then becomes clear that the author is acquainted with
practice theory exclusively in Robert Schmidt’s account (Soziologie der
Praktiken, 2012). The contributions of Schatzki, Shove, Turner, Warde are
overlooked. The whole debate about the agency of objects is missing, alt-
hough it would markedly enrich the book’s understanding of materiality in
design-thinking activities. As a matter of fact, Latour is often referenced,
but the lack of a general understanding of the actor-network theory pro-
duces a series of blatant misunderstandings of his thinking, e.g. regarding
the concept of script or the relationship between researcher and social ac-
tors. Taking into account Reassembling the Social would have helped
avoiding part of those misunderstandings. Finally, the sociology of transla-
tion is summed up in isolation from the discussion that derived from its
elaboration.
    Some books produce dis-pleasure. I mean that you do not just dislike
them, e.g. because they are obscure, incomplete or badly argued. They ap-
pear to be lost opportunities. They miss the opportunity (and the urgency)
to fill an empty space in shared knowledge that they have been able to rec-
ognize. When a book fails to grasp this opportunity, when it does not keep
a promise that seemed exciting, it is not just disappointing, it actively pro-
duces a destruction of potential pleasure, it severs an anticipated fulfill-
ment. In fact, it produces dis-pleasure. It is with this feeling that I finished
reading Design Thinking und der neue Geist des Kapitalismus.



                                     ***

   Sarah Pink, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Roxana Morosanu,
Val Mitchell and Tracy Bhamra
Making Homes. Ethnography and Design, London, Bloomsbury, 2017,
pp. 176

Alvise Mattozzi Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
