Design thinking, as Debbie Levitt says, sells us a fantasy. But as she later brings it up, why would IDEO be IDEO if we could all just do this ourselves? We need to understand this fantasy is not our reality.
Design thinking is fast paced and that in my opinion, comes out to be its biggest pro. But then, you need to think from the perspective of those from marginalised communities. It sidelines the perspective of those who are are not considered “mainstream users”. Testing on small minorities is tough and expensive, but ignoring their existence is worse. Numbers and figures are usually not given much importance (and we all saw how that turned out in Gainesville). I also feel that in the pursuit of greater things (Gainesville again), you forget that some basic needs are not being met. For any person or group of people to make progress, I firmly believe that their basic needs need to be met first. While design thinking simplifies this extremely messy and long process, maybe it makes it too simple? The world is a complicated place and oversimplification does more harm than good.
A real world example of a badly failed design thinking projectÂ
I want to refer to the Kaiser example from the reading.
I am quite positive that this “solution” was not tested in a real world situation as then they would have figured that there is also the possibility of patients forgetting info that was relayed to them. In addition to that, they did not consider the fact that there is some patient information that is not even made available to the patient as they might not be able to take it well (i.e the possibility of a bad prognosis) — this could lead to the patient and their family panicking and you don’t want that.
The designers should have consulted with the nurses and observed them during shift changes (i.e in their natural habitat) — this would have allowed them to identify what exactly was causing the information to be lost. This would have left less room for imagination and have allowed for better idea generation that would have been relevant and implementable. They should have additionally tested their proposed “solution” with the nursing staff as that would have pointed out glaring mistakes.
I also feel there should have been someone who has held a position similar to a nurse on the team as that makes empathising a lot more easier and organic. I think the process was at fault here and they oversimplified the problem to a great extent.
