I have two opinions about whether design thinking is functional:
1) Yes, because if it does not lead us to the right answer, it at least does not let us linger on the wrong idea for too long. It allows a creative team of designers, engineers, and product managers to fail fast. Instead of investing tonnes in an idea and seeing it through execution only to find that it is not a good solution for sociotechnical interactions, design thinking principles could perhaps shorten the failure discovery process and get teams on the right track.
2) Yes, insofar as we don’t copy-paste the design thinking processes taught in classes and workshops. The conceptual framework behind design thinking such as problem-obsessed not solution-obsessed or iteratively testing interactions before making a high-fidelity solution seems a great lens to solving a problem. Design thinking itself might not solve issues like biases and representation and it might not be able to anticipate all layers of stakeholder interactions and consequences a solution will have.
Much has been written about Google Glass and its failures. I have no doubts that Google went above and beyond to test Glass for usability and comfort. But one of the reasons I think Google Glass failed was because its designer probably did not take into consideration how a person wearing Google Glass would be perceived. Unlike VR, which is meant for private virtual immersion, Google’s AR Glass was supposed to augment social interactions and learning. However, people wearing Google Glasses were perceived as either weird or not enough value addition to everyday human interactions. Perhaps designers could have really focused on sociotechnical interactions and caught these flaws and their workarounds.
