Design thinking seems to be one of the hottest “buzz-phrases” right now. Many project based classes at school are based around the idea of design thinking, and even I was persuaded into taking a d.school class this quarter. The culture around design thinking feels very liberal and “California”. As someone from a smaller town in Virginia, I usually don’t questions the Californians on the topics they seem most passionate about until I try them for myself.
There are many pros of design thinking that are clear right off the bat: it’s a new (to many) approach to problem solving, it facilitates collaboration, it allows you to think beyond mundane solutions, and it helps you have a better understanding of the customer or your market. Even more appealing, there seems to be a learned formula or framework that can help you make yourself more marketable and successful in work and every day life.
It takes a little more critical thought to understand the perils around design thinking (which may be a peril in and of itself). It seems that many people learn and move toward the idea of design thinking with little thought of the downfalls or what could be missing. Personally, I had not challenged myself to consider the perils of design thinking until this reading.
One clear peril after the assigned reading was that these savvy design problems seem to often undermine larger issues. In the Gainesville example, the goal of our design problem was almost irrelevant to a deeper race and socioeconomic based problem at hand. If the revamping of Gainesville had been “successful”, what would this have meant for the East Gainesville population? Possibly an increased wealth and opportunity gap? While reading this, I was also reminded of a similar phenomenon to the white savior complex. It seemed like these educated, liberal-minded thinkers were coming in to these communities and proposing that their solution and way of thinking was somehow superior to the structures already in place. It also felt like the design thinkers felt that they were “saving” the Gainesville community.
While I think these points are important perils, I do have one devil’s advocate perspective. Is it really ever possible to address all the problems or issues at hand in the contexts of these complicated problems? I believe it is almost impossible in all cases to even consider all the potential problems that could exist in a society or an organization, so saying that design thinking doesn’t always make things right seems like a weak argument to me.
GAINESVILLE PROJECT: I think one of the issues that led to the failure of this project was the misalignment of the aim of the project (“competitiveness”) with the needs of the community. I believe this project could have had more success if we looked at what was fundamentally causing the community to suffer and starting with that. Another clear issue was the leadership style of Lyons. If we implement good policy with bad leadership, it likely won’t go as we would want.
I think the designers should have chosen a more fundamental issue that the city was facing internally before attempting a project that aimed to bring people in externally. I do not think it would have taken many interviews and conversation with the poorer community members to understand that competitiveness was not the correct direction to take to revamp the city.
