I remember first coming to Stanford, as someone who grew up in Singapore and Japan. The bay area culture of entrepreneurship, innovation, and design thinking was foreign to me, and something that I honestly thought was quite strange and unrealistic. As much as I love the idea of design thinking, it was hard for me to understand how design thinking practices (ex. Sticky notes and drawing on whiteboards), at least in the way it was taught on campus, would really help solve deep, engrained issues within society. Sure, I love processes that help brainstorm new ideas without locking people into a certain, standard mindset. Yet, design thinking alone is not enough.
With the situation in Gainesville, we notice that the IDEO designers failed to empathize with or research the populations that make up the city. Though “surface level” changes such as a new logo can be important in advertising the city, such changes alone do not suffice. The researchers seemed to have approached the design thinking process without a lot of customer empathy, which seems like an intuitive first step but admittedly may be a form of hindsight bias on my part. Why would the people of Gainesville care about a logo change? What are the lives of the people here like? What do they care about, and what are they struggling with? What assumptions do design-minded thinking make? What does design-minded thinking mean for the everyday problems that the various communities face? Is it even the “right”/”best” approach? Why are their lives the way they are (ie what is the context behind this problem?) How do our proposed solutions impact existing communities? How can we involve local communities? What do the communities think about our ideas? Exterior changes, like a new logo, only act as a bandage to much deeper problems. The designers also seem so confident in “design thinking” that they felt that just by educating the people on being “design-minded”, they could fix many problems. Did they even consider other approaches? Or consider how design-minded approaches align with the values of people. In fact, as Debbie points out, ignorance and blind belief in design thinking can even exacerbate existing problems. The “promise” of design thinking blinded many from taking crucial, early steps in understanding the people and the problem at hand (ie the system that makes the city what is is).
In the end, as much as a universal solution seems promising, such ideas can be dangerous for many communities. There is no shortcut or quick formula to understanding people and societal problems– it takes time and dedication to understand complex systems and it is crucial to be humble (and not overconfident) on any proposed solution. This is not to say design thinking is bad; it just cannot simply replace other user-centric research and approaches that can be overlooked with design thinking.
