Gadi Amit, the founder of NewDealDesign known for his work on the Fitbit, has long been a critic of “design thinking.” On Thursday, the technology designer told Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference in Macau that he was “proud” of being one of design thinking’s first critics—and that the rest of the industry was now coming around.
Design thinking is an approach that breaks down design into a step-by-step process to solve problems and create new products and services. For example, someone using design thinking to create a new backpack would follow a step-by-step process to first determine what people need, perhaps via brainstorming and user interviews, then generate ideas that might meet those needs, followed by prototyping and iteration.
Companies rushed to embrace design thinking as a way to get non-designers involved in the design process. But some designers—including Amit—were skeptical. “A six-week course at Stanford won’t make you a designer,” Amit said during Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference in 2018.
At the most recent edition of Fortune’s Brainstorm Design on Thursday in Macau, Amit explained that more organizations now recognize the limits of design thinking.
Traditionally, people in the industry downplayed the importance of design talent and exaggerated the importance of linear processes, he noted. But “designers are exceptionally talented in nonlinear thinking, multichannel thinking, and creating ideas of products and systems that are beyond specific processes,” Amit said. “I think nowadays there’s a greater recognition of this lack [of design talent] on the design thinking side.”
Amit called on designers to “raise their heads” and challenge the “money and tech folks” to design products and services that were good for both business and society at the same time.
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“Designers, to some degree, need to take the role of no bullshit, commonsense people that are somewhat contrarian,” Amit said, though noted that designers still needed to challenge others with civility and thoughtfulness.
“Don’t lose this edge. Keep being sharp, keep being contrarian, and don’t fear countering commonplace thinking,” he said.
Designing for emotions
On Thursday, Amit described the rationale behind some of NewDealDesign’s recent projects, including its work with Serve Robotics, a company that provides delivery through small autonomous delivery vehicles. Serve Robotics was launched as a division of food delivery service Postmates, and became an independent company in 2021, backed by Uber and Nvidia.
Autonomous delivery robots often value function over form, looking boxy and impersonal. In contrast, on Thursday, Gadi explained that his team’s approach wasn’t just to design these robots for function but rather to “design it for emotions.”
Serve’s autonomous delivery vehicles have “eyes” in front; models often have names, making them more appealing to human bystanders. “Now that we have intelligent things running around us, we need to create designs that are a lot more interactive, emotive, and approachable to humans,” Amit said. “We started using this formula of EQ over IQ rather than the traditional business thinking of functionality or even usability.”
