Design thinking’s flaw may come in its first step, empathy. That is, gathering high quality information about the audience’s wants and needs and deepest desires. While seemingly innocuous, design thinking doesn’t seem to give much instruction on who that audience is. In the case of Gainesville, the audience was a select group of non-marginalized citizens. The designers at IDEO left out a huge segment of the town’s population, thus creating a flawed design. Cooked into the sauce of design thinking is the supremacy of the designer and the client, leaving blindspots of the effects of design on different stakeholders around a community. Furthermore, designers actually could benefit from more ideas and voices.
While only hypothetical, I found this excerpt interesting from Techie Lee Vinsel:
Kelly became influential at Stanford, particularly by getting the ear of the university’s president, the computer scientist John L. Hennessy. Hennessy now believes that undergraduate education should be reformed around a “core” of Design Thinking. Kelley pushes this view, arguing for “incorporating Design Thinking into existing courses across the humanities and sciences.”
I’m not really sure what the application of this idea would look like. In fact, this just sounds like mumbo jumbo. Are Economists and Math majors gonna sit around and rapid prototype in favor of their own schools of thought which have been developed over centuries if not millennia? Am I missing the point? Whatever the case, the plan suffers from the same flaw as explored before- who is the audience we are serving? Once decided, it’s them and the designers locked away creating schemes. Consultants consulting for those who hired the consultants in the first place. Everyone else can take a hike…
