SOCJOLOGIA WOBEC DESIGN THINKING
SOCIOLOGY AND DESIGN THINKING

Summary/Abstract: Design thinking (DT) is emerging today in many contexts – from business to education to social innovation – as an attractive method for solving a broad range of problems. However, despite its popularity and the fact that the approach utilises concepts and research methods borrowed from sociology and other social sciences, it has received surprisingly little attention within sociological reflection. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap by discussing the main assumptions of the design thinking approach, and first and foremost by making a sociological critique of it and presenting possible options for how sociology as a discipline might react to its popularity. The article is discussion-based and inspired by research in science and technology studies (STS), the critical approach in sociology, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the institutional field. The results of the analysis presented here show in what sense design thinking can be attractive to sociology as a discipline - not just as a certain set of tools, but as a different and at the same time inspiring cognitive perspective (accepting provisionality and pragmatism), pursuing to some extent the agenda of synthetic sociology. At the same time, the article shows that the approach is susceptible to criticism for operating with simplistic assumptions, for being solutionist, and for its entanglement in socio-economic dependencies.

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