Design thinking: don’t call it a “process”

As an undergrad, Barry Katz never gave design a second thought. He was situated squarely in the humanities, studying history and philosophy, politics and economics, wrapping the whole of it up at the end with an interdisciplinary humanities PhD. He landed neatly at Stanford, teaching history of technology courses to engineering students. But over time, his focus shifted from the history of the objects themselves to the way that people and objects interact. And that was design.

Screens are everywhere, always within reach. Their very ubiquity has helped fuel the meteoric rise of social media personalities, but it’s the nature of the content itself that fans the flames. Direct, personal, seemingly unscripted, this is content that offers viewers a window into the lives of real people, people (for so viewers feel) “just like us.” And that, for the primary audiences of much of this content — the teens and tweens — is what it’s all about: connection. It’s not so much that there’s a screen always within reach, it’s that there’s a close friend always within reach. . .