One of the great appeals of d. school/IDEO’s design thinking is that it seems easy to follow. As long as you’re truly listening to and empathizing with the people involved, then you’ll be able to define the crucial problems, and eventually brainstorm + prototype + test the solutions. Brainstorming alone is often a long-winded and chaotic process; design thinking, on the other hand, packages itself into five neat little steps (aside from the repetition). However, a glaring problem is that many people think they can do it too, without fully understanding the “empathy” part—including IDEO themselves.
Take the city of Gainesville, Florida. The mayor wanted Gainesville to become “a more competitive place for new businesses and talent”, in hopes of increasing economic activity and retaining the University of Florida graduates. To figure out how to improve the city, he visits Silicon Valley and ultimately hires IDEO to “fix” the city via design thinking. After 8 weeks in Gainesville, interviewing hundreds of city residents, and prototyping and testing various solutions, IDEO comes up with a highly revered plan:
-Rebrand the city with a new logo, tagline, and visual style
-Create a “Department of Doing”
-Train city employees in “design thinking”, so they’ll use design methods to solve problems
-Replace City Commission subcommittees with de$ign thinking workshop$
From far away and without any context, “rebranding” a city to make it more appealing for businesses/talent may seem like the right thing to do (this successfully happened with Leavenworth, Washington — a small town that rebranded itself as an authentic “German” town).
But here’s the reality: Nearly 34% of the city is below the poverty line (double the national average), and 57% struggle to meet basic needs. For a company/philosophy that praises their ability to truly listen and empathize, they seemingly forgot about the people that already exist here. One of the first prominent issues is the apparent negligence of the Gainesville citizens who are already in need. Regardless of the mayor’s desire to bring in new businesses and keep their UoF alumni in the area to make the city “better”, why are you not starting with improving the lives of people that are already here?
The article states that IDEO did interview “hundreds of city residents” — but what were the socioeconomic demographics? If IDEO didn’t interview anyone from a lower tax bracket, that’s sheer negligence. If IDEO did interview less privileged people, then their design thinking is flawed: a new city logo is not going to pay people’s bills.
Design thinking is so seductive because it says “There are just 5 steps; you can do it too!” that people forget how broad and complex and nuanced humanity itself is. At the end of the day, you are trying to help and impact real, live people. Empathy itself is so much more than just listening to people and trying to understand what they’re saying. Who are you talking to? Who are you not talking to? Are you just going to design pretty packaging to cover a mess, or are you going to actually help clean up or build real systems to clean that mess up yourself?
