The Ethical Limits of Design Thinking

Although the concept of design thinking originated in the 1970s, it was not until the early 21st century that it gained widespread traction in the business world. Its core premise has always been to “design solutions that respond to user needs.” Yet, when taken to the extreme, this logic can give rise to serious ethical concerns. The case of the vaping brand Juul illustrates this clearly. While its products were originally conceived as an alternative to help people quit smoking, the optimization of the user experience through design thinking ultimately led to widespread adoption among teenagers.

This case reveals a fundamental paradox in contemporary design: value for the user does not necessarily translate into value for society. Features such as infinite scroll, designed to enable seamless and frictionless navigation, have contributed to compulsive usage patterns on digital platforms. Similarly, systems built to maximize user interaction have ended up amplifying the spread of false or misleading information, as such content tends to generate higher engagement. Even seemingly neutral decisions—such as allowing hosts on an accommodation platform to access personal information about potential guests—can result in discriminatory practices.

In all these cases, design thinking works effectively according to its own logic—improving the user experience—but fails to anticipate its systemic effects and negative consequences. In the article “Responsible Design Thinking” (Journal of Marketing, a FT top 50 journal, Impact Factor: 10.4; 2026), co-authored with Minu Kumar, Pietro Micheli, and Neil Goldberg, we examine the main ethical challenges associated with design thinking.

Rethinking the role of empathy in design

In design thinking, empathy serves as the starting point of the creative process and as the main mechanism guiding the generation of solutions. Through a structured set of practices, designers seek to understand how users feel, what they need, and how they experience a product or service in their real-life context.

As in the tradition of customer-centric marketing, value creation is conceived as a direct response to users’ needs, desires, and experiences. However, placing the user at the center of the process does not, by itself, guarantee desirable outcomes in a broader sense.

The issue is that empathy in design thinking tends to be selective. It focuses on a specific set of users defined as relevant, while overlooking other actors who may also be affected by the product or service. These include not only non-users—those outside the target market who nonetheless experience externalities—but also broader systems, such as communities or the natural environment.

In this sense, empathy does not disappear, but becomes partial, limiting its ability to guide ethical decision-making. As a result, design thinking risks operating with a fragmented view of reality, where benefits are concentrated among target users while costs are unevenly distributed.

The blind spots of design thinking

Our study identifies four structural blind spots in the current practice of design thinking:

1. The exclusion of the environment from the design process: Although products depend on environmental resources and generate ecological impacts, these are rarely considered explicitly in design decisions, reflecting a tendency to treat the environment as an externality rather than as a stakeholder.
2. A narrow definition of the “user”: By focusing on those who use or pay for a product, design thinking may overlook its effects on other groups. This becomes particularly relevant in technological contexts, where benefits for certain segments can translate into broader inequalities, as seen in advanced technologies accessible only to specific populations.
3. The emphasis on rapid prototyping: While iterative speed is valuable for experimentation, it limits the ability to assess long-term consequences. Testing with small samples and over short time horizons rarely captures complex or cumulative effects, reducing the visibility of potential risks.
4. Scaling without considering systemic issues: Many products developed through design thinking are intended to scale rapidly, particularly in digital environments. However, what works at a small scale can produce radically different outcomes when amplified. Phenomena such as misinformation or antisocial behavior on digital platforms illustrate how risks—initially marginal—can become systemic problems when combined with network dynamics.

Designing with a systemic perspective

In response to these limitations, our study proposes moving toward a responsible design thinking approach that expands the scope of design beyond the immediate user and incorporates a systemic perspective. This approach is built around three key capabilities.

1. The systemic inclusion of stakeholders: Identifying not only direct users but all those who may be affected by a product, including communities, institutions, and the natural environment. This shift entails moving from designing for individuals to designing for systems.
2. The anticipation and mitigation of harm: Incorporating tools that help identify potential negative consequences before they materialize. These include practices such as scenario analysis, simulations of misuse, and the evaluation of impacts across different levels of scale.
3. Ethical governance: Recognizing that design does not occur in a vacuum, but within organizations shaped by incentives, metrics, and structures. When success is measured solely in terms of speed to market or growth, ethical considerations are likely to be sidelined. Therefore, integrating social and environmental impact metrics into evaluation and decision-making processes becomes essential.

Beyond value creation

While one of the central contributions of design thinking has been to emphasize user-centricity as a driver of value creation, this premise falls short in contexts characterized by high complexity, interdependence, and scalability. As we have seen, value creation cannot be understood solely in terms of benefits for the direct user.

In this regard, responsible design thinking does not seek to replace the traditional approach, but to complement and extend it. It introduces an additional layer of reflection that enables designers and organizations to address questions that have often remained outside the design process, such as:

• Who benefits? 
• Who bears the costs? 
• How are the effects of an innovation distributed?

More than a methodological adjustment, this approach calls for a shift in the underlying logic of design, recognizing that innovation is not neutral. Ultimately, the challenge is not to stop designing for users, but to design with the awareness that users are not the only actors that matter.