Leslie Harris, Senior Product Designer @ PayPal

Design Thinking is a reactive framework. It focuses on symptoms rather than causes and thus lacks the capability to understand structures. This blindness is not an error of the framework but rather a feature that was intentionally constructed. By manufacturing Design Thinking in this way, it can more easily position itself as a universal tool for solving any type of problem because it can ignore the larger and more systemic nature of issues by focusing on a smaller facet of the problem. Design Thinking masks itself as a state-of-the-art schema because of its purported efficiency, however, its sole purpose is to generate innovation in the commercial sphere. (Seitz, 2020, p. vi)