| Summary: | In the history of altruistic efforts to correct the ills of the social body, Design Thinking is today enjoying its time in the limelight. While many designers have relegated it to a passing phase in the history of design, it continues to gain purchase in the broader public sphere, where it is increasingly celebrated as a natural evolution of design’s diverse trajectories and the realisation of its moral potentials. This article offers a brief analysis of the contemporary status of the Design Thinking brand and, specifically, its popular deployment toward the solution of social problems. As a peculiar form of immaterial labour, Design Thinking is increasingly reliant on the elaboration of a debt to design, as a way of mitigating the problem of the potentially non-productive privatisation of the commons. Drawing on the work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, I consider the implications of this for its supposed beneficiaries. I argue that, to the extent that design is recruited toward Design Thinking, figured as a model of solving social problems, it risks reproducing the dominant debt/credit logic and denying histories of unpayable debt. What I call design study, by contrast, makes ‘bad debt’ a principle of elaboration, thus opening the way for different ways of experiencing our mutual indebtedness.
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