Towards a More Critical Design Thinking
Design thinking is a skill you cultivate. It can be used as a great tool for finding new ways to approach problems or opportunities. Instead of looking at the said situation on the surface level, design thinking teaches you to dive deeper, to really understand the problem or opportunity and what caused it to be there in the first place. Designers like Michele Washington describe design thinking as the way of tackling complex problems and as a test of one’s ability to understand all sides of what you’re focusing on as well.
The five main steps of the design thinking d school model include 1. Empathy: to learn about one’s audience, to understand why they need this product/solution; 2. Define: creating a POV on the user’s needs to fully address them; 3. Ideate: to come up with as many solutions as possible, both big and small; 4. Prototype: to build on that idea creating a rough draft to show to others; and 5. Testing: to share this solution with the person/people it is designed to help. The best part about this process is that it can be tailored to pretty much any situation. Later in this paper, I will discuss the ways in which I would add to this process to make it better.
The positives of design thinking are that it promotes “empathy, optimism, iteration, creative confidence, experimentation, and an embrace of ambiguity and failure” as explained by IDEO. However, I have found that design thinking is a great way to truly understand a problem outside the lens you may have first seen it. It allows you to grow and expand, fluidly moving with the world and the constant changes that happen around it: this is why it is so powerful. Design thinking proponents like Gisele Murphy talk about design as a way of solving problems and design thinking as co-creation, and the processes of how to solve problems. It is a way of bringing people together, she says, to think about new solutions. This is something I agree with, as when you have multiple different people from various backgrounds all working in a collaborative effort, each brings their unique scope on life and what they have learned in their lives.
The main drawback I have with traditional design thinking is that it comes off as a linear process and leaves huge gaps in what happens after the product/solution is created. There is a need for extra steps involving situational training, refinement, as well as complexity, and sustainability testing to really make sure whatever you make works. Furthermore, design thinking is not linear it is more like a loop. And just as life is messy so is design, as well as problem-solving. Solutions need space to adapt and update in order to remain effective and sustainable. Designers like Michael Lee Poy talk about this, saying that design thinking is a “scientific process” as well as a way of thinking that one refines over time. He talks about design thinking as finding a question to a potentially good answer. Listening to his interview at the time, I didn’t know quite what he meant, but now I realize he is referring to the level of depth one needs to go when creating/thinking about solutions in order for them to work and be sustainable.
With regards to Natasha Jen’s Ted Talk entitled “Design Thinking is Bullshit,” I do agree that there seems to be an overall lack of critique with the design thinking process. Critique or “crit” as Jen calls it is super important at every stage of the development process for any sort of creation. However, I disagree with the blanket statement she made saying that one cannot really critique design thinking because there is no direct outcome. I do not agree with this statement largely impart because design thinking is a process and it is up to the user to input levels of critique: the two are not mutually exclusive.
There are three additional steps I would add to the design thinking process to make it better, those steps are: differentiate, critique/refine, and sustainability testing. The first differentiation is a step that starts at the very beginning of the process. This step is meant to allow the user to differentiate if the situation that they are looking at is a problem, opportunity, or both. I got this idea from “Design’s Unsexy Middle Bits” article that talks about how “not everything is a problem.” There are problems and opportunities, opportunities within problems and visa versa. I believe it is important to understand which one of these situations you are dealing with before starting the process. The second step I would add is critique, or “crit” and refine stage. This step would occur after the testing phase where creators would expose their products to the harsh criticisms of various other designers and groups of people. After this stage the product may come out completely different or not at all; the creator would then go back and refine their product making sure it meets all its intended initial goals, strengthening the end product as a result. Lastly, and perhaps most important, would be the sustainability step. This step would be put to ensure the product/outcome is sustainable even without the user there. This is crucial as so many products claim to be “sustainable” but once the creator is gone they fall apart.
In this forever changing and continually complex world, I think it is imperative now more than ever to have individuals across disciplines practicing design thinking. Doing so would not only promote overall empathy and kindness to the world but also promote a new and more encompassing way of problem-solving that has not been traditionally used. Ultimately, after finishing this class I cannot help but feel grateful for the opportunity to have taken this course, and to have met so many passionate individuals across disciplines who have taken the time to share their stories and promote this new way of thinking. With that being said I will continue to “think outside the box” and promote design thinking in all aspects of my life as much as I can.
Sources
https://cwodtke.medium.com/designs-unsexy-middle-bits-a8cc17f0246d
