Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism: Sociological Reflections on Innovation Culture

by Tim Seitz

Overview

An ethnographic study on Design Thinking, this book offers profound insights into the popular innovation method, centrally exploring how design thinking’s practice relates to the vast promises surrounding it. Through a close study of a Berlin-based innovation agency, Tim Seitz finds both mundane knowledge practices and promises of transformation. He unpacks the relationships between these discourses and practices and undertakes an exploratory movement that leads him from practice theory to pragmatism. In the course of this movement, Seitz makes design thinking understandable as a phenomenon of what Boltanski and Chiapello described as the “new spirit of capitalism”—that is, an ideological structure that incorporates criticism and therefore strengthens capitalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030317140
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	11/27/2019
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	107
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Tim Seitz is a doctoral researcher in the DFG research training group “Innovation Society Today” at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. His research interests include sociological theory, science and technology studies and ethnographic methods.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism
Chapter 2: The Temporality of Design Thinking
2.1 Time Pressure
2.2 Timeboxing and the logic of iteration
2.3 Time Shortage
2.4 Interim Reflections, Take One
2.5 Empathy as Methodology
Chapter 3: the Materiality of Design Thinking
3.1 Design Thinking as Laboratory Practice
3.2 Translating People into Paper
3.3 Design Thinking Creates Problems
3.4 Covering the Tracks
3.5 Design thinking as Pure Development Process
3.6 Method as Tool
3.7 Interim Reflections, Take Two
Chapter 4: Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism
4.1 User-friendliness as a promise of authenticity
4.1 Design Thinking as Emancipated Work
Conclusion.