Design Thinking: Good, Bad or..

In the summer of 2016, I stumbled into the world of co-working quite by accident. At the time I was looking for a workspace and agreed to help them with a business growth plan in return for a place to work. After a month, when I presented my findings and ideas, I realised that my recommendations were worthless without the knowledge and expertise how to execute the findings and ideas.

Problem-solving workshop Zhejiang Wanli University, Ningbo, China

I decided to stay on for another 4 to 6 months to help with the implementation, until they had found someone else to support them. The journey took a bit longer than I expected. It lasted over 6 years.

In 2023, MIT published an article that “the biggest piece of the design problem is not generating new ideas but figuring out how to implement and pay for them. What’s more, success sometimes can’t be evaluated until years later, so the time-­constrained workshops typical of the design thinking approach may not be appropriate. There’s a mismatch between the short-cycle evaluations [in commercial design] and the long-cycle evaluations for policy.” 

The principles of Design Thinking have been around for decades, it was American psychologist J.P Guilford in the 1950s who drew attention to these modes of thinking. Design Thinking, or also known as the Double Diamond process, is a great approach for ideation, brainstorming and validation but dreadful for implementation that requires long periods of training and commitment. Something that most organisations do not seem to have a huge appetite for.

In 2021, IDEO, the creator of Design Thinking, worked together on the Diva Centres project in Lusaka, Zambia. The project aim was to support teenagers in accessing contraception and learning about reproductive health. Employing the design thinking protocols, the team came up with the idea of establishing nail salons as a safe environment for teens to receive guidance. The team successfully constructed three prototype sites, receiving recognition for their work. In 2016, the Diva Centres project received the Core77 Service Design Award, and the case study remains available on IDEO’s website.

But while the process focused on offering the most exciting user experience within the nail salons, it neglected to consider the complex network of public health funding and service channels that made scaling the pilot “prohibitively expensive and complicated,” as the IDEO leaders later publicised. IDEO intended to build 10 centres by 2017, however IDEO and its partner organisation never reported reaching that milestone. 

It may be time to reassess our drive for generating new ideas and focus more on developing the expertise, behaviour and resources necessary to bring those ideas to life. After all, design is not just about thinking, but about actually making a sustainable impact in the world.