The way design thinking is presented sparks optimism, creativity, and motivation to build—one of the steps is literally “gather inspiration, ” which is intended to inspire new thinking and innovative solutions based on customer needs. To those who don’t know where to start, design thinking helps them break problem solving down into a step-by-step framework. The creators of design thinking, IDEO, promise to bring professional-level design thinking to the masses, saying that “anyone can do it.” But, design thinking is by no means a guaranteed way to develop solutions that fully meet customer needs, and the way IDEO markets it just feels like they are facilitating the Steve Jobs mindset that one must introduce things to people that they supposedly don’t know they need. As the article demonstrates with the story of Gainesville, simply focusing on branding and aesthetics without critical thinking to appear more startup-esque completely misses the mark. Applying design thinking to Gainesville was one example of a “theater of innovation” and failed to address the more significant underlying issues such as poverty and structural racism. These “wicked problems” as defined by Rittel do require design approaches to tackle them, and it’s impressive that design thinking mobilized members of Gainesville’s local government to take action, but going in acting as a savior frankly doesn’t allow for true empathy and ultimately results in superficial solutions.
One example of a badly failed design thinking project is Stanford’s neighborhood system. After surveying Stanford students and noticing that one area that campus life was lacking in was the formation of stable communities, Stanford administrators took it upon themselves to “innovate” and port over the localized residential communities of east coast rivals like Harvard and Yale. The result? An (in my opinion) severely underwhelming and restricting system that limits students’ freedoms to live anywhere on campus and generates inequities both between and within neighborhoods. It was flawed to believe that the residential systems of other schools was what Stanford students wanted, as Stanford greatly differs from other institutions in regards to its campus design, culture, and most importantly, its students.
