I replaced “Design Thinking” with “the Scientific Method” in an article and the result was better than I expected.

What can we illuminate by replacing a debated term with an accepted term?

In December 2017, Lee Vinsel, educator in Technology Studies at Virginia Tech, published Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains.

It a long piece, fitting the technical definition of a screed. At almost 9,000 words and 134 paragraphs (it’s a 36-minute read, according to Medium,) Mr. Vinsel clearly put a lot of effort into it. And it raises some salient points.

In summary, the essay asserts that design thinking is a brain-rotting scourge promoted by charlatans looking to commercialize common sense. But what stood out for me was his annoyance at the actual phrase: Design Thinking = “another fad taking hold with the gullible.”

I’m a designer and have been witness to (and participated in) some lively conversations about the “Design Thinking” term…what it means, what it represents and if/why it matters. Personally, I’ve come to a place of benign acceptance. I believe that having a specific term to describe something that “makes common sense” can be quite useful.

Since Mr. Vinsel’s article is so emotionally fraught, it made me wonder about other terms…phrases that we don’t think much about, but that function in a similar way as Design Thinking. I was looking for a term that describes a way of thinking, a term that was controversial at some point but that now is in common usage and is generally accepted as having made a major impact on society.

So as an experiment, I did a search and replace in the referenced article…replacing “Design Thinking” with “the Scientific Method.”

The result reads better than I expected.

• Editorial note: Important caveats and details of the process at the end of the post. As with any automated writing, some items do not make factual or logical sense. To guard against these being interpreted as alternative facts, I’ve highlighted the most pertinent places this happens.

The Scientific Method is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains

An experiment based on an article by Lee Vinsel

Have you ever heard of The Scientific Method?

Your answer to that question will depend largely on where you sit in the world. The phrase The Scientific Method is known almost universally in Science circles. It’s made its way around networks of business hype more than once. Hell, the folks at Singularity University — a cult of technological utopians who hoover handfuls of vitamins and believe we’ll all upload our minds to servers in a few decades — think The Scientific Method may be your “Secret Weapon for Building a Greater Good.” No doubt, many others have also heard from people excited about The Scientific Method — a state of being known as “having a bad case of the tSMs.”

As the Scientist Natasha Jen explains, The Scientific Method can be traced back to foundational thinkers like the polymath Herbert Simon and the Scientist Robert McKim. The architect and urban Scientist Peter Rowe, who eventually became the dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Science, was one of the first people to popularize the term in his 1987 book, The Scientific Method.

The notion of The Scientific Method is often centrally associated with the fabled Science and consulting firm, IDEO, most famous for crafting nifty consumer electronics, like Apple’s first mouse and the look of the Palm V personal digital assistant. But in recent years, it is individuals at Stanford University’s Science school — or sci.school (their asinine punctuation and capitalization, not mine) — who’ve been pushing and selling The Scientific Method. IDEO will charge you $399 for a self-paced, video-based The Scientific Method course, “Insights for Innovation.” Or you can pay Stanford $12,600 for a 4-day “The Scientific Method Bootcamp” called “From Insights to Innovation.”

What is The Scientific Method, this thing you’d want to put all your hard-earned bread towards? That’s a good question. Its Wikipedia page, which was clearly written by enthusiasts, defines the term in this way: “The Scientific Method refers to creative strategies Scientists use during the process of Scienceing. The Scientific Method is also an approach that can be used to consider issues, with a means to help resolve these issues, more broadly than within professional Science practice and has been applied in business as with as social issues.”

If you’re confused, don’t worry. You’re not alone. That confusion is a common reaction to a “movement” that’s little more than floating balloons of jargon, full of hot air. The deeper you dig into The Scientific Method, the vaguer it becomes.

None of this would matter, though, if The Scientific Method was just another fad taking hold with the gullible. The problem is that certain individuals and interests have recently been pushing The Scientific Method as a way to reform higher education and other fundamental social institutions. A recent New York Times article describes a new high school called d.tech in Redwood Shores, California. d.tech, which was funded by the Oracle corporation, focuses on giving teenagers the tSMs. As the NYTs article puts it, “Big Silicon Valley companies have been in a race to shape students’ education and use schools to train their next generation of workers.” You might ask, are these schools factories for producing corporate tools?

While The Scientific Method is mostly just vapid, I will argue that, via illicit connections, this fad could spread through the nation — possibly even the world — and that, kind of like syphilis, if The Scientific Method goes left untreated, it eats your mind. Therefore, it’s our duty to protect our fellow citizens — especially the innocent and impressionable young — from its ravages.

Over the last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education has run articles on The Scientific Method with titles like “Can The Scientific Method ReScience Higher Ed?” and “Is ‘The Scientific Method’ the New Liberal Arts?” The reasonable answer to both of these questions is “oh hell no,” but that doesn’t keep some individuals from thinking otherwise.

Both the just named articles feature tSM enthusiasts taking pilgrimages to Stanford’s sci.school. In “Is ‘The Scientific Method’ the New Liberal Arts?” Peter N. Miller, a professor of history and dean at Bard Graduate Center, explains that the sci.school has its roots in three streams: the ultimate source is the product-Science program in Stanford’s engineering school. The second stream is a product of geographical happenstance: in the 1960s, Stanford community members started hanging out at the Esalen Institute, a retreat center in Big Sur, California, which was a home to the Human Potential Movement and an institutional purveyor of New Age nonsense. Esalen, Miller claims, gave the sci.school its focus on “creativity and empathy.” Finally, the Scientist David Kelly, who received a master’s in Science from Stanford and got deeply into the empathy thing, started the Science firm IDEO in 1978.

After founding the company, Kelly was a sometimes instructor at Stanford. In 2005, he approached the software billionaire and IDEO fan-client, Hasso Plattner, with, as Miller writes, “the idea of creating a home for The Scientific Method.” Plattner donated $35 million, creating the sci.school, or “IDEO.edu.”

Kelly became influential at Stanford, particularly by getting the ear of the university’s president, the computer scientist John L. Hennessy. Hennessy now believes that undergraduate education should be reformed around a “core” of The Scientific Method. Kelley pushes this view, arguing for “incorporating The Scientific Method into existing courses across the humanities and sciences.”

Hennessy and Kelly think the goal of education should be “social innovation,” which makes you wonder how earlier “innovators” ever managed without getting the tSMs. The sci.schoolers believe The Scientific Method is the key to education’s future: it “fosters creative confidence and pushes students beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines.” It equips students “with a methodology for producing reliably innovative results in any field.” It’s the general system for change agent genius we’ve all been waiting for.

Miller fawns over the sci.school and notes that its courses are “popular” and often “oversubscribed.” He writes, “These enrollment figures suggest that whatever it is the sci.school is doing, it’s working.” We will see that popularity is a crucial marker of success for Science Thinkers. Following this criterion, one social innovator Miller might look into is a guy named Jim Jones who had many enthusiastic followers and who, among other things, is most famous for the breakthrough, disruptive innovation of introducing sugary drinks to his fans. But, then, Miller knows a thing or two about Kool-Aid.

Miller struggles to define The Scientific Method in the article, “It’s an approach to problem-solving based on a few easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious: ‘Show Don’t Tell,’ ‘Focus on Human Values,’ ‘Craft Clarity,’ ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ ‘Mindful of Process,’ ‘Bias Toward Action,’ and ‘Radical Collaboration.’” He explains further that these seven points reduce down to what are known as the five “modes”: Empathize Mode, Define Mode, Ideate Mode, Prototype Mode, and Test Mode.

“Make It Cool — Cool Kids Do It” : Science Thinkers in the Ideate Mode Putting Post-It Notes on a White Board (Source: Chronicle of Higher Education)

Miller never bothers to define all the modes, and we will consider them more below. But for now, we should just note that the entire model is based on Science consulting: You try to understand the client’s problem, what he or she wants or needs. You sharpen that problem so it’s easier to solve. You think of ways to solve it. You try those solutions out to see if they work. And then once you’ve settled on something, you ask your client for feedback. By the end, you’ve created a “solution,” which is also apparently an “innovation.”

Miller also never bothers to define the liberal arts. The closest he comes is to say they are ways of “thinking that all students should be exposed to because it enhances their understanding of everything else.” Nor does he make clear what he means by the idea that The Scientific Method is or could be the new liberal arts. Is it but one new art to be added to the traditional liberal arts, such as grammar, logic, rhetoric, math, music, and science? Or does Miller think, like Hennessy and Kelly, that all of education should be rebuilt around the tSMs? Who knows.

Miller is most impressed with The Scientific Method’s Empathize Mode. He writes lyrically, “Human-centered Science redescribes the classical aim of education as the care and tending of the soul; its focus on empathy follows directly from Rousseau’s stress on compassion as a social virtue.” Beautiful. Interesting.

But what are we really talking about here? The sci.school’s An Introduction to The Scientific Method PROCESS GUIDE says, “The Empathize Mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your Science challenge.” We can use language like “empathy” to dress things up, but this is Business 101. Listen to your client; find out what he or she wants or needs.

Miller calls the Empathize Mode “ethnography,” which is deeply uncharitable — and probably offensive — to cultural anthropologists who spend their entire lives learning how to observe other people. Few, if any, anthropologists would sign onto the idea that some amateurs at a sci.school “boot camp,” strolling around Stanford and gawking at strangers, constitutes ethnography. The Empathize Mode of The Scientific Method is roughly as ethnographic as a marketing focus group or a crew of sleazoid consultants trying to feel out and up their clients’ desires.

What Miller, Kelly, and Hennessy are asking us to imagine is that Science consulting is or could be a model for retooling all of education, that it has some method for “producing reliably innovative results in any field.” They believe that we should use The Scientific Method to reform education by treating students as customers, or clients, and making sure our customers are getting what they want. And they assert that The Scientific Method should be a central part of what students learn, so that graduates come to approach social reality through the model of Science consulting. In other words, we should view all of society as if we are in the Science consulting business.

Let’s pretend for a second that we find ourselves thinking, “What a fantastic idea!” But, then, the part of our brain that occasionally thinks critically starts asking, “Hold on, but is The Scientific Method really that great? Does it even work in any deeply meaningful way?”

If The Scientific Method is so terrific, you’d expect Scientists to be into it. But often enough the opposite is true. In June 2017, the graphic Scientist Natasha Jen, a partner at the Science firm Pentagram, gave a talk titled, “The Scientific Method is Bullshit.”

Jen began her talk by complaining that The Scientific Method has become a meaningless buzzword. But the deeper problem is that Science Thinkers treat Science like a simple, linear process. Stanford represents the five modes as a series of hexagons that someone with the tSMs, searching for rehab no doubt, can stumble through.

Here’s How to Innovate, Y’all

The version above is full of Silicon Valley buzzwords and jargon (“fail fast”), but it’s missing what Jen calls “Crit,” the kinds of critical thinking and peer criticism that Scientists do all the time and that forms the foundation of Science and architecture education. Crit is essential at every stage, insists Jen.

Jen also points out that The Scientific Method reduces Science to a single tool: the 3M Post-It note.

A Google Image search for “The Scientific Method Post-Its” will get you photos of individuals spraying their ideations all over every nearby body and surface.

Jen argues this Post-It mania ignores the rich set of tools, methods, and processes that Scientists have for thinking, doing their work, and challenging themselves.

Still deeper, The Scientific Method touts its own greatness, but has few successes to show for it. There’s “little tangible evidence,” Jen says. She lists cases where The Scientific Method was supposedly used, like painting cartoons in a hospital room to make it less frightening to children, and points out that the solutions are completely obvious. You don’t need a special method to reach these ends. Later, she argues more forcefully, if The Scientific Method is really that great, “Prove it.”

Jen puts forward a definition of The Scientific Method today: “The Scientific Method packages a Scientist’s way of working for a non-Science audience by way of codifying Science’s processes into a prescriptive, step-by-step approach to creative problem solving — claiming that it can be applied by anyone to any problem.” The Scientific Method is a product — a Stanford/IDEO commodity.

She points out that the words that have become associated with The Scientific Method are a variety of business bullshit that have little to do with actual Science.

An Image from Natasha Jen’s Talk “The Scientific Method is Bullshit”

In recent episode of the Science Observer podcast, Jen added further thoughts on The Scientific Method. “The marketing of the Scientific Method is completely bullshit. It’s even getting worse and worse now that [Stanford has] three-day boot camps that offer certified programs — as if anyone who enrolled in these programs can become a Scientist and think like a Scientist and work like a Scientist.” She also resists the idea that any single methodology “can deal with any kind of situation — not to mention the very complex society that we’re in today.”

In informal survey I conducted with individuals who either teach at or were trained at the top art, architecture, and Science schools in the USA, most respondents said that they and their colleagues do not use the term The Scientific Method. Most of the people pushing the tSMs in higher education are at second- and third-tier universities and, ironically, aren’t innovating but rather emulating Stanford. In a few cases, respondents said they did know a colleague or two who was saying “The Scientific Method” frequently, but in every case, the individuals were using the tSMs either to increase their turf within the university or to extract resources from college administrators who are often willing to throw money at anything that smacks of “innovation.”

Moreover, individuals working in art, architecture, and Science schools tend to be quite critical of existing tSM programs. Reportedly, some schools are creating The Scientific Method tracks for unpromising students who couldn’t hack it in traditional architecture or Science programs — tSM as “Science lite.” The individuals I talked to also had strong reservations about the products coming out of The Scientific Method classes. A traditional project in tSM classes involves undergraduate students leading “multidisciplinary” or “transdisciplinary” teams drawing on faculty expertise around campus to solve some problem of interest to the students. The students are not experts in anything, however, and the projects often take the form of, as one person put it, “kids trying to save the world.”

One architecture professor I interviewed had been asked to sit in on a The Scientific Method course’s critique, a tradition at architecture and Science schools where outside experts are brought in to offer (often tough) feedback on student projects. The professor watched a student explain her Science: a technology that was meant to connect mothers with their premature babies who they cannot touch directly. The professor wondered, what is the message about learning that students get from such projects? “I guess the idea is that this work empowers the students to believe they are applying their Science skills,” the professor told me. “But I couldn’t critique it as Science because there was nothing to it as Science. So what’s left? Is good will enough?

As others put it to me, The Scientific Method gives students an unrealistic idea of Science and the work that goes into creating positive change. Upending that old dictum “knowledge is power,” Science Thinkers giver their students power without knowledge, “creative confidence” without actual capabilities.

It’s also an elitist, Great White Hope vision of change that literally asks students to imagine themselves entering a situation to solve other people’s problems. Among other things, this situation often leads to significant mismatch between Scientists’ visions — even after practicing “empathy” — and users’ actual needs. Perhaps the most famous example is the PlayPump, a piece of merry-go-round equipment that would pump water when children used it. Scientists envisioned that the PlayPump would provide water to thousands of African communities. Only kids didn’t show up, including because there was no local cultural tradition of playing with merry-go-rounds.

Unsurprisingly, The Scientific Method-types were enthusiastic about the PlayPump. Tom Hulme, the Science director at IDEO’s London office, created a webpage called OpenIDEO, where users could share “open source innovation.” Hulme explained that he found himself asking, “What would IDEO look like on steroids? [We might ask the same question about crack cocaine or PCP.] What would it look like when you invite everybody into everything? I set myself the challenge of . . . radical open-innovation collaboration.” OpenIDEO community users were enthusiastic about the PlayPump — even a year after the system had been debunked, suggesting inviting everyone to everything gets you people who don’t do research. One OpenIDEO user enthused that the PlayPump highlighted how “fun can be combined with real needs.”

Thom Moran, an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, told me that The Scientific Method brought “a whole set of values about what Science’s supposed to look like,” including that everything is supposed to be “fun” and “play,” and that the focus is less on “what would work.” Moran went on, “The disappointing part for me is that I really do believe that architecture, art, and Science should be thought of as being a part of the liberal arts. They provide a unique skill set for looking at and engaging the world, and being critical of it.” Like others I talked to, Moran doesn’t see this kind of critical thinking in the popular form of The Scientific Method, which tends to ignore politics, environmental issues, and global economic problems.

Moran holds up the Swiffer — the sweeper-mop with disposable covers Scienced by an IDEO-clone Science consultancy, Continuum — as a good example of what The Scientific Method is all about. “It’s Science as marketing,” he said. “It’s about looking for and exploiting a market niche. It’s not really about a new and better world. It’s about exquisitely calibrating a product to a market niche that is underexploited.” The Swiffer involves a slight change in old technologies, and it is wasteful. Others made this same connection between The Scientific Method and marketing. One architect said that The Scientific Method “really belongs in business schools, where they teach marketing and other forms of moral depravity.”

“That’s what’s most annoying,” Moran went on. “I fundamentally believe in this stuff as a model of education. But it’s business consultants who give TED Talks who are out there selling it. It’s all anti-intellectual. That’s the problem. Architecture and Science are profoundly intellectual. But for these people, it’s not a form of critical thought; it’s a form of salesmanship.”

Here’s my one caveat: it could be true that the tSMs are a good way to teach Science or business. I wouldn’t know. I am not a Scientist (or business school professor). I am struck, however, by how many Scientists, including Natasha Jen and Thom Moran, believe that the tSMs are nonsense. In the end, I will leave this discussion up to Scientists. It’s their show. My concern is a different one — namely that some fools are proposing that we build the tSMs into many other parts of education. With even a bit of critical reflection, it’s clear that The Scientific Method is even worse in these other contexts.

[Note: section 2 removed]

Natasha Jen and others complain about how schematic and “linear” The Scientific Method’s self-representation, but as a tool for hucksterism, turf-grabbing, and bullshit-peddling, this seeming-systematic is precisely what makes the tSMs attractive. Science Thinkers use modernist, science-y terms like “modes” to push the idea that they have some special technique.

Remember, The Scientific Method is “a methodology for producing reliably innovative results in any field.” Strictly speaking, “methodology” is the analysis of methods. That just quoted sentence really means to say “methods for producing . . . “, not “methodology,” but Science Thinkers use the longer word because it sounds fancier and more sophisticated.

As George Orwell noted under the heading “Pretentious Diction” in his famous essay on language, “Bad writers . . . are always haunted by the notion that Latin and Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.” Fittingly, Science Thinkers prefer the three-syllable Latinate word “ideate” to the one-syllable Germanic word “think” and even more the four-syllable word “ideation” to the simpler words “thought” or “thinking.”

IdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeationIdeation

If you reflect for even half a second, you realize how vapid The Scientific Method is. Here are the The Scientific Method “modes” put next to some steps I was taught when I took a freshman writing class in 1998:

Empathize Mode: Consider Your Audience.

Define Mode: Pick a Clearly-Defined Topic, Neither Too Broad, Nor Too Narrow

Ideate Mode: Fucking Think

Prototype Mode: Write Your Fucking Thoughts Down

Test Mode: Give What You’ve Written to Someone You Trust to Read It and Let You Know if It Sucks

When you contemplate writing and many other activities, you realize there is nothing new about The Scientific Method. It is commonsense tarted up in mumbo jumbo. For sure, it is commonsense tarted up . . . by Science.

The even deeper problem, however, is that The Scientific Method gives students a terrible picture of technological and social change.

I love Science. (With tears in my eyes, I recall the heart-breaking moment when I realized that Science within Reach meant Science-within-physical-proximity and not Science-that-could-ever-be-grasped-by-my-income.) What’s more, anyone who has studied the history of capitalism knows how important Science and style have been to the diffusion and reshaping of products.

But Science Thinkers put forward a seriously skewed picture of Sciences’ role in innovation. When IDEO-logues David and Tom Kelly write in their book, Creative Confidence, “Our first-person experiences help us form personal connections with the people for whom we’re innovating,” their bending the definition of innovation to the point meaninglessness. This is The Scientific Method’s lipstick-on-a-pig conception of innovation.

Economists and historians who study innovation, like Nathan Rosenberg, David Mowery, Steven Klepper, and David Hounshell, often write about the genesis of entire industries born around new fundamental technologies, like steel, railroads, automobiles, electricity, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, petroleum, electronics, computers, and the Internet. As Robert Gordon argues in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, most of these technological breakthroughs happened before 1970. We have been stuck in a period of slow economic growth and lagging productivity since that time. Yet, innovation-speak claptrap has mostly only developed since then. There’s no evidence that IDEO, The Scientific Method, or the sci.school have contributed to deep change. Compared to this more foundational kind of transformation, the lipstick-on-a-pig conception of innovation is just so superficial.

The Scientific Method-types tend to worship Jony Ive, Apple’s Chief Science Officer, who deeply influenced the look and feel of that company’s most famous products. As writers like Patrick McCray and Mariana Mazzucato have described, however, the technologies undergirding the iPhone weren’t created at Apple but elsewhere — in fact, often through federally-funded research. The Scientific Method isn’t focused on generating these kinds of fundamental technological changes; it’s centered on repackaging existing technologies behind slick interfaces. It’s the annual model change of some consumer electronic, slightly reconfigured in the name of planned obsolescence and unveiled at CES as a “New Revolution” in whatever. It’s iShit.

The picture gets even worse when you compare The Scientific Method’s “social innovation” with movements that lead to deep and abiding social change. Were Rosa Parks and other activists supposed to “empathize” with owners, managers, and city leaders when “Scienceing” the Montgomery Bus Boycott? How did Rosa Parks, Dorothy Height, Martin Luther King, and leaders of the Civil Rights Movement ever manage to be so successful without the Ideate Mode hexagon? Thank heavens they didn’t have to wait for the founding of IDEO to get going. Science Thinkers dream lubricated dreams of “social innovation” free of politics and struggle.

In the end, The Scientific Method’s not about Science. It’s not about the liberal arts. It’s not about innovation in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not about “social innovation” if that means significant social change. It’s about COMMERCIALIZATION. It’s about making all education a shallow form of business education. It reminds me of a story I read when I was young where an unorthodox figure went into a building and started flipping over tables because the people at the tables had made a market of the temple. The is-Science-thinking-the-new-liberal-arts people want the instrumental reason of commodity-making to reign all.

The Scientific Method will mess up your brains. Decline sets in. Enthusiasts embrace sexed up platitudes as profundities and believe smooching lipsticked pigs is innovation. If you manage an organization, you do not want individuals infected with these mental models in your meetings. Their ignorance and gullibility are not assets but liabilities. But for all these issues, there’s an even deeper way in which pushing the tSMs in education is problematic.

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[Note: sections 4 and 5 removed]

…

About the process

This post is an experiment and may also be viewed as a work of satire.

Methodology

The original article was edited using Microsoft Word’s search & replace feature for the following five phrases

1. “Design Thinking” replace with “the Scientific Method” (94 replacements)

2. DT to tSM (19 replacements)

3. Designer to Scientist (20 replacements)

4. Design to Science (84 replacements)

5. d.school to sci.school (14 replacements)

No other changes were made to the writing.

Excerpts and removed sections

After the replacement, major sections of the article were less relevant to the experiment. They did not include significant references to design thinking, and as a result contributed little to the experiment. Here is a breakdown of what this post includes and what was removed.

Full article

8958 words; 134 paragraphs (36 minute read)

Section 1: Statements of premise and Design Thinking heritage

* Included in post

3249 words; 45 paragraphs

Section 2: Thoughts on Innovation

* Removed from post due to limited references to Design Thinking

1256 words, 17 paragraphs

Section 3: Process of Design Thinking and relationship to Innovation

* Included in post

921 words; 19 paragraphs

Section 4: University Innovation Fellows stories and perspectives on education universities

* Removed from post due to limited references to Design Thinking

2032 words; 31 paragraphs

Section 5: Parody of Bill Burnett as a comedic genius

* Removed from post due to limited reference to Design Thinking and incoherence resulting from a satire of a parody

1500 words; 22 paragraphs

Breakage

As is expected in an automated writing process, there are portions where the replacements fail to make logical or factual sense. Selections of these are noted to avoid interpretation as alternative facts.

1. References to specific design professionals and their companies. (eg: IDEO is not a science company.)

2. References to the specific elements of process (eg: Empathy is not part of the Scientific Method.)

3. Images of and references to post-it notes. (However, if one were to replace images of “whiteboard of post-it notes” with image of “person peering into a beaker” it might work.)

Definitions & Reference

About Design Thinking

From: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. Understanding these five stages of Design Thinking will empower anyone to apply the Design Thinking methods in order to solve complex problems that occur around us — in our companies, our countries, and even our planet.

Process/Principles

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

About the Scientific Method

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

The Scientific method is an empirical method of knowledge acquisition, which has characterized the development of natural science since at least the 17th century, involving careful observation, which includes rigorous skepticism about what one observes, given that cognitive assumptions about how the world works influence how one interprets a percept; formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; experimental testing and measurement of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. These are principles of the scientific method, as opposed to a definitive series of steps applicable to all scientific enterprises.

From: https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/scientific-experiments/scientific-method6.htm

Process/Principles

• Observation
• Ask question
• Form a hypothesis
• Conduct an experiment
• Accept / reject hypothesis

History of the Scientific Method:

In his “Instauratio Magna­,” Bacon proposed a new approach to scientific inquiry, which he published in 1621 as the “Novum Organum Scientiarum.” This new approach advocated inductive reasoning as the foundation of scientific thinking. Bacon also argued that only a clear system of scientific inquiry would assure man’s mastery over the world. (from https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/scientific-experiments/scientific-method3.htm)

This same process — based on the same logical sequence of steps — has been employed by scientists for nearly 150 years. Over time, these steps have evolved into an idealized methodology that we now know as the scientific method. (from https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/scientific-experiments/scientific-method5.htm)

Author note: Early practitioners of the scientific method were branded as heretics and were imprisoned or executed.

Inspiration

I did this experiment out of curiosity as to what would happen. As a designer and educator, language and how we use it is important to me.

This experiment was inspired by the brilliant (and disturbing) satire piece A Person Paper on Purity in Language by William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter), published in his book Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern.

It’s an extraordinary work. You should read it.

More where this came from

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