Design thinking can be a useful framework, but it can fall short. It boils down the design process to five easy steps, but it is not the performance of these steps in themselves which ensure success, it is the quality of work, thinking, and research involved in understanding users and problems which are much more important.
The reading brings up a real-world example of a badly failed design thinking project. The design thinking project involved Gainesville, Florida, a poor medium-sized city. The designers intended to use design thinking to make Gainesville a “more competitive place for new business and talent”. They employed strategies such as interviewing city residents, and prototyped and tested solutions. They also adopted rebranding with a logo, and tagline, and created a “Department of Doing”. However, these steps still led to failure. The project ignored the reality of the majority of Gainesville residents. In Gainesville, where Black residents make up around 22 percent of the city population, the distribution of income and resources is not racially equitable. Black residents have a significantly lower medium household income and are “almost 2.5 times as likely as white residents to be unemployed”. The Gainesville project failed to address the needs of many of the poor and Black residents in Gainesville. These residents did not see “competitiveness” as a large problem and were instead more concerned about affordable housing, eliminating food deserts, and increasing graduation rates.
The main issues that led to the failure of the Gainesville project were the failure to fully understand the needs of all “users”. The designers only focused on the more well-off residents while ignoring the reality of poor and Black residents. Furthermore, the designers seemed to have an end goal of increasing “competitiveness” in mind while performing design research. Instead, they should have approached the problem with an open mind and learned about issues without assuming anything at first. If the designers could have done something differently, they should have been more thorough with their research by understanding a wider variety of the residents of Gainesville and their problems. The issue did not lie in the process itself, but in how thoroughly the designers executed the process. If the designers were willing to more deeply understand and empathize with the “users” and their needs and were willing to scrap old ideas and iterate on new ideas that better meet needs, they could have perhaps started to address some of the more systemic and real issues in Gainesville.
