There is a peculiar irony at the heart of contemporary design culture. The very qualities that made design attractive to business – its creativity, its capacity to reframe problems, its tolerance for ambiguity – are being systematically stripped out of the discipline as it is absorbed into corporate workflows. What remains is increasingly a procedural shell: process-heavy, risk-averse, and curiously unimaginative.
This tension has been building for some time. Over the past two decades or so, design has undergone a quiet but significant reconceptualisation – what might usefully be called Neodesign. Neodesign is not a movement in the traditional sense. It has no manifesto, no founding conference. Rather, it is an ethos: a normalised disposition that privileges structured methods, repeatable frameworks, and business-legible outputs over the messier, more intuitive practices that once defined the discipline. It is design repackaged for non-designers, sandboxed and made safe.
The roots of this shift are tangled with broader cultural forces. The rise of neoliberalism, with its emphasis on innovation-as-commercialisation and creativity-as-economic-engine, created fertile ground for design to be repositioned as a strategic business tool. Silicon Valley demonstrated that design could sell technology, and corporations took notice. Design was no longer just about making things – it was about thinking about making things. And if that thinking could be codified into a transferable method, so much the better.
The result, as previously discussed on this blog, has been a proliferation of process diagrams, toolkits, and workshop formats that borrow the language of design while dispensing with its substance. Design Thinking, in its dominant corporate form, is perhaps the most visible symptom. It promises creativity and innovation through structured empathy exercises and ideation sprints – yet, as Natasha Jen and others have argued, it often omits the very thing that makes design work: critique.
What gets lost in this translation is not trivial. Imagination – the engine of creativity – requires a tolerance for disorder, for wandering into territory that has not yet been mapped by a corporatised framework. It operates in the space between structure and chaos, between what is known and what might be possible. Indeed, much design scholarship has tended to focus on the synthetic, convergent dimension of creativity whilst neglecting the chaotic, exploratory impulse that pushes thinking beyond the constraints of existing models. Yet it is precisely this dispersive imagination that generates novelty. Without it, design risks becoming a checklist of requirements through prescribed stages.
The original art school model of design education, for all its perceived nebulousness, was built around nurturing exactly this kind of imaginative capacity. Studio-based learning, sustained critique, material engagement, and the cultivation of aesthetic judgement are not quaint traditions – they are the mechanisms through which designers learned to navigate ambiguity and produce work of genuine value.
Neodesign, by contrast, tends to treat these practices as obstacles. Craft is dismissed as a legacy concern – an ‘arty farty’ relic of a not serious enough discipline. Intuition is regarded with suspicion. Playfulness is either proceduralised (scheduled brainstorming sessions, anyone?) or omitted entirely. In their place, designers find themselves navigating a landscape of curated job titles, certified methodologies, and tightly defined domains of responsibility.
Oh and don’t forget to wear that linen suit, because the promise was that designers would ascend to the C-suite (the reality, for many, has been bureaucratisation).
There is a further irony here, in that the businesses that first embraced design did so because designers thought differently – who brought a different sensibility to the table. Why on earth would they then respect designers who simply end up regurgitating corporate norms? The industry valued imagination precisely because it was not business-as-usual, or yet another management consultancy. Yet in attempting to gain credibility within corporate culture, Neodesign has repressed the very qualities that made design valuable in the first place.
This dynamic is now being replicated pedagogically. Many university design curricula increasingly privilege methodological proficiency and the appearance of orthodox processes over the cultivation of imagination and critical reflection. Students are trained as implementers of formulaic processes rather than as creative thinkers capable of engaging with complexity. When Design Thinking, already a reduced subset of actual design practice, is introduced into the design classroom it further constrains students’ capacity to explore.
The arrival of generative AI sharpens these concerns considerably. A Neodesign ethos – procedural, compartmentalised, reproducible without reflection – is, in effect, a practice purpose-built for such formulaic automation. If design is reduced to a sequence of steps that can be followed without critical judgement, then it is a discipline that has been designed out of relevance. The practices that resist automation are precisely those that Neodesign has marginalised: intuition, aesthetic judgement, sustained critique, the capacity to imagine and reflect.
Obviously, the relationship between design and industry is symbiotic and longstanding. The challenge is to resist the reduction of design to its most procedurally legible elements. Because, when we remove imagination and criticality from the practice, what remains is not design, but a simulation of it.
As previously noted, graphic design and other traditional design disciplines have long struggled for recognition within the broader design discourse. The Neodesign ethos has arguably deepened this marginalisation, treating craft-based practices as relics rather than as living repositories of the imaginative and critical capacities that the discipline needs most. If design education is to prepare students for a future shaped by AI and continued corporate integration, it would do well to retain – and indeed foreground – the messy, reflective, and imaginative challenges that have long distinguished the discipline from its imitators.
Cook, R. (2019). Design thinking, neoliberalism, and the trivialisation of social change in higher education. In B. Gray, S.C. Cook, T. Toffa, & A. Soudien (Eds.), Standing items: Critical pedagogies in South African art, design & architecture (pp. 12–25). University of Johannesburg.
Folkmann, M. N. (2014). Unknown positions of imagination in design. Design Issues, 30(4), 6–19. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00293
Jen, N. (2018, August 21). Graphic designer Natasha Jen poses six questions for design thinkers [Talk]. Design Indaba.
Ramírez, R.H.,and Meron, Y.(2025) Neodesign: The Loss of Craft, Imagination and a Playful Attitude, Learn X Design 2025, 22-24 September 2025, Aveiro, Portugal. https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2025.096
Stern, A., & Siegelbaum, S. (2019). Special issue: Design and neoliberalism. Design and Culture, 11(3), 265–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2019.1667188
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