From my very first HCI class, I thought the design thinking process of popularized by the d.School was revolutionary. It allowed me to put complex problems into more tangible conflicts in which I could quickly think about and navigate various solutions. Of course, my experience with design thinking has mostly been positive because of the contexts I have worked within. As a student in the Silicon Valley, most of the issues I have been tackling have been relatively superficial and could easily be achieved with mobile applications. Just last year, my team designed a game for mindfulness that encouraged users to exercise gratitude. The mental health market has become saturated over the years as techies wish to create the next big thing.
Although the design thinking process encourages us to empathize with our users, design thinking is not designed to truly empathize. The idea of rapid development creates tension with empathy. It is not something you can develop from a week of user interviews. The contexts of other humans can not be understood within 5 days. Although we may hear their stories, we will not feel or understand their pain, struggles or needs without actually immersing ourselves in their environments. When looking at Gainseville, we see designers trying to rapidly come to a solution for a community that they hardly understand. The inequity that marginalized communities, especially Black and Latino citizens face in that city, was simply overlooked. Why didn’t designers truly empathize with this community? How did they decide who deserves empathy and who does not?
We often put trust in designers, especially from well-known institutions such as Stanford/Silicon Valley and Harvard. Although these people may be good at designing solutions for problems they understand and/or don’t hold much weight, their process does not help them design for people in marginalized communities whose stories are not normalized. Another example of this is the story of tracing Ebola in Sierra Leone between 2014-2016. Harvard-based epidemiologists wanted to track Ebola transmission in order to contain the outbreak via cell phone tracking. This has worked well with other pandemics in the US, and we even saw its advantages during the COVID pandemic. However, these Harvard “designers” failed to see that many citizens of Sierra Leone do not own their cell phone. Many have multiple cell phones or share cell phones with their family members. The cell phone attached their identity as it is in the US. Here, the designer put their own cultural context in the solution, and completely ignored the cultural context of the community they were working with. They declared themselves as the norm, rather than normalizing the needs of the community they designed for.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6175342/
