The assigned article “Was Design Thinking Designed to Not Work?” is a convincing one, and affirms my previous skepticisms around design thinking and its impacts. All my projects, all my classes that utilize this methodology do not have much tangible impact attributed to the design thinking process. However, I do see some merits to this process for marginalized communities; In theory, it provides them a more systematized way of solving their problems. It is a modern approach that they, likely lacking educational opportunities, may not have been exposed to before.
On the other hand, it may give them false hope that their problems can be miraculously solved with a simple framework. As the author writes, one of the most important factors of successful design thinking projects is having design experts themselves solving the problems.
And even then it is not fool-proof. Failures as large as some of IDEO’s failures, such as the Gainesville project, may be devastating towards underserved communities.
A real world-example of a failed design project is Google Glass. Launched in 2012, the innovative product was advertised to “augment reality”, showing user-friendly information on-screen while users engaged in everyday activities. In the end, however, Glass was labelled a flop. Why? The designers did not vet their assumptions of their users well enough– to the everyday joe, there wasn’t a specific use case of the Glass, and it provided more supplementary information, not augmented reality. Back then, the market simply was not ready for an invention as “out-there” as Glass. Today’s atmosphere around AR/VR could not be more different.
Thus, if the designers were to re-do the project, it would be to understand their consumers better and really find out what the value their product would bring to them before moving forward.
