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Introduction
Science Studies scholars have shown how what counts as “technological” creativity – both in cultural practice and in STS analytics – is shaped by histories of race, colonialism, and gender (Fouché 2006; Philip 2006; Oldenziel 1999). These scholars show how contests over what counts as properly technological or inventive has also been a contest to rearticulate and defend racialized hierarchies. Fouché (2006), for example, shows how patent officials deemed black invention a product of accident or laziness rather than intention and intelligence (p. 647). Oldenziel (1999) shows how North American and European anxieties about white racial superiority shaped what counts as “technology” – bridges and machines, but not textiles, pottery, and mud architecture. The social category “technology” excluded the creative practices deprioritized by industrial-era capitalists and European colonial powers; machines took priority as marks of modernity over both North American agriculturalists' work and the work of weavers in the colonies. I draw on historical and ethnographic research to track the racialized dynamics of labor competition and expertise performance that generated “design thinking” beyond public view. The data and interviews informing this paper are drawn from ethnographic research I conducted at design firms in India but spanning Silicon Valley and European cities for fourteen months between 2009 and 2014.
“Design Thinking” As Expertise
I want to start with the claim that “design thinking” is a form of expertise. Though design and planning theorists had used the term “design thinking” for decades (Dorst 2011), pedagogical programs in design thinking have exploded in the last decade. Students can take courses in “design thinking” ─ a mix of brainstorming, prototyping, cultural observation, and teamwork skills – at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, University of Virginia, and countless other institutions. Notably, it is not only engineering schools that have developed courses in design thinking, but also business schools.
“Design thinking” is a term popularized in Palo Alto by the design firm IDEO and Stanford University through forums like TED, BusinessWeek, and Harvard Business Review. In those forums, it stands for a critique of rationalistic, impersonal, and quantitative forms of corporate knowing (see, for example, Euchner 2012). In place of design’s emphasis on specifying product form and mechanism, design thinking teaches corporate workers to tell stories about the lives...