I have grappled with the ethics of designing in marginalized communities since I started studying Product Design. There is certainly a disconnect between my cohort of student designers and the old school-d.school paradigm of design thinking. We loved the little hexagons at first—how simple the process, the toolkit, we needed to identify and solve problems out in the world. However, it quickly became clear that it was just that: simple. Oversimplified. When courses popped up about redesigning systemic issues, the pathos was attractive, but the execution seemed dubious. Yes, systems are designed, so it must be possible to redesign them. However, it seems to me that there are issues too large to prototype. When problems are underpinned by or extend into policy, law, or financial systems, it feels like an impossible overestimate to turn to design thinking.
The pro of design thinking is that it can work. It can create joyful experiences and products, but this happens only when it is done with the right people. When the process is collaborative and not extractive. When the solution exists beyond the designer. When the designer is designing for their own obsolescence. The peril of design thinking is just how much harm its methods can cause. Design that is not culturally competent or trauma-informed can alienate and demean the people it is trying to help. I think at its worst, design thinking enables people to enter communities only to paternalize them and co-opt, resell, and up-charge solutions created by the very people they’re selling to.
In the case of Gainesville, part of me believes the problem domain was out of scope. That systemic poverty, food deserts, and low graduation rates are not something that can be solved with one design; rather, it requires many interventions through law and policy that create better welfare systems. It also requires money at a certain point. The other part of me is curious. What were the prototypes they tested? Did they aim to create solutions that solved residents’ needs? I doubt insufficient competitiveness was what residents talked about in interviews. I don’t know enough about IDEO to assess what their intentions were. Perhaps the project was a glorified sale of workshops and card decks about the same oversimplified design thinking process. I think they might have discovered in the process, as any designer would when delving into systemic issues, that the problems were too large and too many. They might have realized that they couldn’t offer anything more than education, the shoddy gift of the tools they use for the city to solve its own problems. Perhaps the execution failed because of the white officials who were not from Gainesville. Either way, as Maggie Gram said, Gainesville is example of the “seductive and colossal promise” that design thinking can make and fail to keep.
