There’s always an innate fallacy in a pre-packaged once-size-fits-all system, like the type of design thinking that IDEO tries to market: one size rarely, if ever, fits all, especially when it comes to designing and creating products and experiences and change for a wide array of type of people and users. Further, it’s a process that, like Debbie Levitt identifies, is limited in efficacy and effectiveness by the user itself. The type of thinking done throughout the cute formulaic stickynoting and brainstorming processes are largely limited by the perspectives of the doer, and in a field like design, where products should be user-centric, it becomes tantamount to understand and empathize with those users and their backgrounds in order to deliver a product or experience that is aligned with their sentiments. A 5-step formula taught in a 1-day workshop or hastily packaged into an infallible solution gives the person learning and using it the false pretense that it’s all up to their thoughts and what they deliver that makes or breaks a successful innovation — “design thinking” becomes a prop, like a weapon in a video game, where if the user isn’t of sufficient level to wield it, they won’t wield it well, but in the right hands, it could be powerful. It is a framework through which the wielder’s own expertise is channeled through, like an amplifier of sorts, instead of some end-all-be-all type of entity that is equally effective for everyone who uses it. It’s a process that takes time and deep and thorough understanding and empathy and the presence of diverse perspectives in order to be more effectively utilized.
The given example about Gainesville is a clear case where design thinking and the design thinkers were notably unfortunately unsuccessful. To make a city “citizen-centered”, one would think that the first step would be to communicate and interact with the citizens themselves to understand their wants and pains and needs and backgrounds and lives. The proposed solutions almost seem comical in the face of the objective reality of Gainesville and the quality and state of life of its citizens — a new logo? What does that solve? I think the designers didn’t take enough time to understand what they were really trying to address here; if the problem itself isn’t properly identified, all possible solution ideating will fall off the mark, and I feel like it was this critical first step that they missed that led them along a path that was already derailed and led them to an end destination that sounds a little absurd and a little condescending and a lot just wrong overall.
