Getting the squad to goal
Design thinking can feel like an abstract rut, but it’s really a concrete process.
The design process is like a game of hopscotch: one jumps into it with both feet, hops nimbly from one frame to the next, pirouettes at the far end of the board, then retraces the path to refine the performance. The aim is to keep moving either forward or backward. Easy, right?
The problem comes when the player freezes in place with one foot on the ground and the other suspended midair, both legs burning and quaking with exhaustion. That was me over the last few weeks, so fixated with understanding my community — the undocumented immigrants of my neighborhood — that their paralyzing anxieties had become mine.
It took an act of teaching to nudge me along the game board, to remind me that forming a squad was good, but that attaining a goal with said squad was even better. At last week’s convention of the College Media Association in New York, my CUNY Graduate School of Journalism colleagues and I explained the design thinking process to undergraduates, and it served to remind me of what I knew and what I still needed to learn.
First, my friends Laura, Kristine and Charlie explained the idea of empathy, of “listening with humility” to the challenges a community faced. At this point, I had a pretty good idea of what confronted my undocumented community: detention and deportation at the hands of immigration officers, or else destitution at the hands of abject fear.
The next frame in this game of hopscotch: defining a specific problem based on the spoken (and unspoken) information collected, as explained by Lyxie, Ghita and Sebastian. But my case of acute empathy wouldn’t allow me to recognize distinct issues among my undocumented neighbors. I could only grieve for their myriad problems as a whole.
And then it was time for me and my friend Jennifer Groff to talk about ideation, or brainstorming a solution to the defined problem. I stood before the rows of white-clothed tables inside that small hotel conference room and implored the undergraduates in attendance:
“And if the community doesn’t like your solution, then it reserves the right to take that proposal, crumple it into a tight ball and chuck it right at your fucking head,” I remember rehearsing in my head (though I don’t think I said it out loud). Emotion was steering my hopscotch game, and it was clear that I was teetering on one foot, losing balance.
That’s when Groff signaled that it was okay to land my other foot onto the berber carpet. The goal in ideation, she told me and the room, was to devise a doable solution.
Doable. This was not about splitting the Gordian knot of US immigration policy with one swing of a sword. This was about nicking it with a scalpel and pulling back some of the fibers so that the community could get a better look at its twists and turns.
And then Groff recounted how she and I once worked together on a design exercise: she was instructed to build me a better wallet, one that would be secure when carried in my back pocket. But through empathy and better recognition of the problem, she learned that I didn’t need a better wallet — I needed back pockets for those occasions when my pants didn’t have them.
So she built me pockets. Squad GOALS.
Groff reminded me that there could (and should) be an attainable objective to the work I was doing with my undocumented neighbors. My grief was not an end to itself. There had to be something beyond that.
I’m not sure which issue to examine, as my undocumented neighbors are facing so damn many of them. It could be that I haven’t encountered it yet. But this brief foray into teaching has taught me that freezing in fear helps no one, least of all myself.
It’s time to move forward.
