Participatory Design: Think Bigger

Day 3 at General Assembly had our class watch a video of a talk by Tim Brown, the CEO at IDEO, about how to “think big.” He went into a discussion about what design thinking means.

Design thinking, in large part, is participatory design, he explained. It means including actual users and stakeholders in the process of building something. Including other perspectives leads to divergence of ideas which then leads to a completely new innovative solution.

I had actually participated in a design thinking discussion recently, at my former job. I worked with our COO and a third party vendor in designing an internal improv program to empower employees with communication and leadership skills. White boarding, drawing parallels, it was pretty cool to see things coming together.

Participatory design (this Ted Talk was created in 2009) may not be a new concept, and I’m sure there are tons of research, articles, books discussing it. But it’s a new realization for me and it’s exciting. It’s exciting because this thinking can impact the world around us -we can find patterns in the world and understand those patterns to make a better me, you, and us.

As I watched the video, I recognized a strong parallel between participatory design and and a tenant in international development called “country ownership.” Ownership refers to developing countries (the bodies receiving aid) taking direct ownership over the development of project and programs being built by outside partners to implement the aid.

The idea argues that there is no blue print that an outside party can just apply to any country with a need. There are cultural nuances, social nuances, language barriers, and so many other subtle dynamics that react to the constraints and design of aid programs. For example, the US can’t just go into Nigeria, set up some schools that are free to attend, and expect the trickle effects of more education to occur. It is so much more complicated than that.

Furthermore, if recipients of international AID are not active participants in creating these programs, the likelihood of corruption is much greater.

Design thinking is paradigmatic to country ownership. The fact that these concepts promote success for everyone involve only mutually reinforces their importance in the creation, design, and implementation of new ideas.