I think design thinking’s ability to get original ideas out on the table by being such a strong proponent of repetitive prototyping is extremely powerful. The ability to prototype can expedite the process of planning and drawn-out creative discussions if you’re the type of person who can find a lot of value in practices like mass prototyping. Personally, I don’t know if design thinking is that effective for me. As someone who’s had difficulty getting themselves to focus, the artificial time constraint that we culturally impose on ourselves when doing common practices like mass prototyping has never proven to be very successful for me. I love the idea of using user research to gradually improve a product, but in-practice I’m not really sure if I can say that I’ve done this successfully. I think the entire design thinking process can be exhausting, and also difficult to execute successfully if the entire team isn’t a proponent of following such a gradual and drawn-out process.
I think the biggest peril that derives from design thinking comes from the fact that its success is very dependent on the judgments and biases of the designers. For example, with finding user research already being so difficult, how can we ensure that designers are cognizant of trying to find samples that are diverse and representative? With design thinking being the foundation of so many huge, successful projects, this current practice that doesn’t have some form of diversity guideline to follow is extremely dangerous. Who’s there to fact-check the fact that a design team may have only sampled a population that may either be very homogenous or leads the way to preexisting confirmation biases?
I think that these practices offer great insight and results in theory, but for the average team, may need some pragmatic values incorporated into it. I had a hard time buying IDEO’s pitch to change Gainesville into a citizen-centered city because I had a difficult time believing that the average citizen would be passionate enough to participate in these processes. Among those citizens who are passionate, I think it also leads way for a lot of disagreements that wouldn’t be easily settled, as seen with the event where qualified people who disagreed with the city manager were fired. Moreover, I think that gradual change can also be a difficult sell to people whose visions may not align with the idea. While I think that IDEO and their work are brilliant, I think that it was a tall task to solve deeply-rooted issues of a city with such a user-reliant process as design thinking. The result seemed to further marginalize the community in many aspects, as well as lead the way for existing power dynamics to become stronger.
