A smattering of corporate employees huddles excitedly around standing tables. If everything goes according to plan, ideas will start coming to them at any moment — guaranteed. After all, they’re participating in a “design thinking” workshop, and that’s what happens at these events.

As an organizational method and management technique, design thinking focuses on bringing people together in small groups to brainstorm solutions to problems. At the same time, it sees all kinds of problems as resulting from a lack of creativity and innovation — rather than any sort of, say, underlying social structures. Ultimately, design thinking reduces the horizon of social possibility to fit the objectives of corporate product development and marketing.

Design thinking first emerged as an innovation method or problem-solving concept around the global consulting firm “IDEO.” Since 2005, supplementary courses in design thinking have been offered to recent graduates by so-called “d.schools” hosted at Stanford University, the University of Potsdam in Germany since 2007, and the University of Cape Town, South Africa since 2016. Courses teach participants to “think creatively,” graduating from the schools as so-called “innovation consultants” and carrying with them into the world a mindset that thinks not in terms of problems but rather in terms of challenges and speedy solutions.