[albertsun]

All the training in needfinding, and exploring the problem and solution sound very similar to how business school classes work to me.

And I would guess that those skills are all very valuable, but aren't enough on their own. Lots of the hardest and most important problems and needs to solve in our world are in fields that require deep domain knowledge.

It feels like because so many startup founders don't have the patience to go into a field and acquire that domain knowledge everyone is focused on problems that yuppies have that can be solved by looking at a screen.

[jessep]

Business schools have some of this, for sure. But they also have a lot of high level technical analysis (market size, cost structure) and a ton of things unrelated (finance, management, etc.)

What I was taught as the "design process" is actually much closer to what people study in anthropology and ethnography than business school.

Some of the core requirements involved going to unfamiliar places and just observing, asking questions, embedding yourself in an effort to understand domains and cultures that you aren't familiar with. That was a big part of the point, forcing people into doing that kind of stuff.

Another issue that leads to all this is that "design" is an overloaded word, with many valid uses that are only tangentially related. Product design, interaction design, graphic design, etc., some of these put form over function, by definition, others put function over form, as is their purpose.

I'd say that the main point of the article is that function/purpose/problem/need first design is the revolutionary thing, and there was an opening for the word "design" to resources behind it. Into that opening poured a stream of by great designers from form focused design domain, and the result was disappointing.