“Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies

tags

Design Thinking Outsourcing

Notes

“design thinking” articulates a racialized understanding of labor, judgment, and the subject, emerging as a defense of North American design in the face of global competition from Asia.

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what counts as “technological” creativity – both in cultural practice and in STS analytics – is shaped by histories of race, colonialism, and gender

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contests over what counts as properly technological or inventive has also been a contest to rearticulate and defend racialized hierarchies.

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black invention a product of accident or laziness rather than intention and intelligence

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The social category “technology” excluded the creative practices deprioritized by industrial-era capitalists and European colonial powers; machines took priority

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IDEO

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critique of rationalistic, impersonal, and quantitative forms of corporate knowing

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tell stories about the lives of potential customers and imagine different futures for them.

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emphasize an approach to design as market strategy over the craft skills of model making, typography, and mechanism design.

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cheerfully organizing Post-it notes with ideas written on them, mining the communicational unconscious

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emergence was as much about global production and labor flows as it was about epistemology.

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machine shop staff shrank from twenty-six people to only six.

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Chinese manufacturers began to offer design services for the products they were going to make. “IDEO started to feel the pressure

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IDEO’s shift from specifying manufacturable things ─ designs ─ to consulting with executive-level decision makers.

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What John described as IDEO’s shift to the “mystical” was IDEO’s shift to “design thinking” as an expanded approach to the specification of market opportunities more than things.

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US policymakers had pointed to in-person service work and “symbolic analyst” work as where Americans could still outcompete other, globally dispersed workers

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“Asia” meant a massive, skilled labor pool that could take on “routine” left-brain, logical work

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oversupply of consumer products, fueled by global factories usually located in Asia

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“automation” would eventually replace routine, left brain work ─ the kind of work Asian workers now took on in the global economy ─ with machines

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Enlightenment philosophers understood themselves as those who could stand apart and understand the mechanical principles of nature, bodies, and society. Workers and artisans, in their philosophy, were like machines ─ devoid of sentiment or formal reason ─ to be understood and be managed

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“insight” as the capacity to find solutions not through trial and error, nor mechanical process, but as a perceptual shift

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Chinese players as “goldfarmers” indistinguishable from automated bots

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programmer subcultures orient toward and wish for distance from the labor of those they find inconvenient.

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generate value through culture, spirituality, and beauty.

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The “conceptual age” glossed the ways that intellectual property regimes regulated the difference between good and bad creativity, and good and bad creators.

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Lawrence Lessig cast Asians as criminal pirates who “do nothing but take other people’s copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it”

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cast Asians as mathematical, unaesthetic, rule-oriented producers. Anxious North American publics recast these not as properties of jobs produced by labor processes and IP restrictions, but as properties of racialized people.

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The declaration that “math is easy” naturalizes mathematical skill at precisely the moment when Indian and Chinese workers become available as a labor pool to perform that kind of work in globally networked capitalism.

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Instead of asking why capitalist dynamics attempt to make even skilled labor as cheap as possible, the Stanford journal declares design as the valuable form of expertise.

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Design, they concluded, was too “creative” to outsource. Only those living on the edge of the future ─ a temporalization as old as colonial enlightenment and later modernization ─ could combine emotion, cultural cosmopolitanism, and technology to make good designs

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Economic nationalism depends on hierarchies of race and economic practice to mobilize people in the name of whiteness and economy. Bannon shows the iron hand of this logic and IDEO the velvet glove.

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China produced the larger numbers of industrial designers with which IDEO had to compete. Rather than competing, IDEO protected North American difference.

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The how of whiteness here is through the production of new categories of expertise.

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On its face, design thinking appears as a form of engineering that integrates feminized rationalities of storytelling and empathy. Yet to treat design thinking as a feminist practice ignores the global divisions of labor and distributions of value that make this sensibility of touching, feeling, and making valuable and effective.

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