Design thinking should be substituted for "food thinking" to enable humans to create properly holistic systems that no longer cause ecological chaos, writes Sophie Lovell.

Design has become unfit for purpose. Humanity shares one small planet with a large number of other lifeforms and catastrophes happen to everything and everyone on it. From the destruction of ecosystems and climate to the chronic effects of the exploitation of people and resources, design has been complicit in creating the state the world now finds itself in.
The majority of what passes for design doesn't so much solve problems as cause a whole load of new ones. Can it be that the universal model of design thinking, so embraced by capitalism, is not the right approach at this watershed moment in the planet's history" What if there was another, more relational way of approaching the design process"
Taking a problem-solving approach, as designers are mostly taught to do, implies something is "wrong" and that the designer's job is to fix or improve it. The difficulty with looking at the world like this is it puts the designer and the user on a closed-loop binary seesaw. It is not contextually aware.
A human-centred, iterative approach like design thinking heavily echoes the traditional Western science model: empirical observation, systematic experimentation and the formulation of hypotheses and theories based on evidence. It's all about conquering a "problem" through ...