Patrick Neeman, writing in UX Collective revisits the Double Diamond and design thinking. By going back into history, he argues why the Double Diamond is no longer relevant today.

The Design Council launched the Double Diamond model in 2004: two diamonds, problem then solution, both of equal size. Four years later IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown made the case in Harvard Business Review for Design Thinking as the process, putting designers and researchers at the start of innovation and at the start of the investment cycle, not the end.

Despite Fortune’s claim that IDEO invented human centered design — I even hesistate to link to it from here for obvious reasons—the movement started with Herbert Simon, whose 1969 The Sciences of the Artificial proposed the science of design thinking, and it was built out at Stanford, where Rolf Faste ran the design program before David Kelley took it to IDEO. The Design Council drew the shape for the other.

[…]

The lineage holds more names than Simon and Faste. Robert McKim published Experiences in Visual Thinking in 1972 while teaching at Stanford, Faste expanded that work into the 1990s, and Kelley founded IDEO in 1991. The first prominent book carrying the term was Peter Rowe’s Design Thinking in 1987, about architects and urban planners.

Notice what those people had in common:

• Simon wrote about engineering and administration
• Faste taught mechanical engineers
• Rowe was writing about buildings and urban planning
• None of them were building software

Every founding discipline made things that were slow, costly, and impossible to take back, and the method inherited their constraints along with their rigor.

That’s always been the crux: designers and designing is cheap; engineers and engineering is expensive. So spend more time on research and design before committing to coding the thing. But as Neeman writes, prototyping three things in an afternoon with AI is now trivial:

At that price [an afternoon] you stop debating which of three directions is right and build all three, because the debate costs more than the answer.

This gets at something I think a lot about from my time at Apple—creative selection, or exploring all the possibilities to discover the right solution. It’s now made a lot easier with AI.