Member-only story
Beyond Thinking: Feeling Our Way Through Design
The Tyranny of Thinking
In design education today, we are surrounded by theory. Curricula are heavy with strategy frameworks, critical lenses, typographic systems, design thinking toolkits, semiotic analysis, and the endless language of “research methodologies.” Walk into a contemporary design classroom and you are as likely to encounter Post-It notes, process diagrams, and references to Deleuze and Baudrillard as you are pencils, paper, or paints.
None of this is inherently wrong. Thinking, after all, is indispensable. But when thinking is elevated above all else, when design becomes a matter of intellectual gymnastics and linguistic performance, something essential is lost: the feeling of design.
This imbalance was already recognised in the nineteenth century by John Ruskin, the art critic, social thinker, and educator who spent much of his career railing against the mechanisation of art and education. Ruskin believed that to reduce art to a matter of technical skill or intellectual categorisation was to sever it from its human roots. For him, education was not about producing compliant workers or clever analysts, but about shaping whole people — alive to truth, justice, and beauty.
His warnings feel eerily prescient today. As design schools expand their theoretical…
