First, I really like the title of this post, was design thinking designed not to work? It’s really thought-provoking as I don’t think anything In this world was ever designed not to work. The inventors always try to design something to work. Although with design thinking, I think the problem is of scale.
We see the same thing in Computer Science software too. Software that works at a small scale performs terribly as the scale gets large. I think design thinking is a nice set of tools when the problem is simple and not “wickeder” (in the words of Rittel). Suppose the problems are related to designing a product or a website, or even your personal curriculum. In that case, design thinking provides a very good set of tools to break down the problem into smaller problems and then tackle them. However, when the scale becomes larger, outliers start coming in, the underrepresented, the marginalized, etc.
While the tail of a distribution doesn’t matter for a product (If 90% of your users are happy with your product, you are good) or for a website, it matters a lot when it comes to designing the cities and other critical things. It’s important to uncover more turtles and dig down deeper when handling these critical problems, even the tail matters.
I believe that design thinking is a great set of tools if applied properly in the correct domain. Is Design Thinking the holy grail which can solve all problems humanity has? No, definitely not, but can design thinking help us solve the issue at our workplace and personal life? Possibly yes.
I think the example mentioned in the reading about Gainesville is the best example of a failed design thinking experiment. But I would also like to contrast it with multiple successful products that the company has. What was the difference between those successful products and this Gainesville’s project? I think the main difference was the difference between the scale and the tail. While they were designing the products for the masses, you can’t just ignore minorities in a city.
