The rise of design thinking

While reading one of this week's articles, Design Thinking of Social Innovation, I was struck by the beautiful simplicity of the concept and confused as to how this human-centered approach had only been recently institutionalized.

As the author points out, "time and again, initiatives falter because they are not based on the client's or customer's needs and have never been prototyped to solicit feedback".

The idea of quick, "dirty" prototyping to receive feedback from the community and beneficiaries is part of a system of lean business startup in the business world. Why design a product that no one is going to use? Though the needs of the population you are serving may be met at the mid-point in product development, will they still be met at the finish? Prototyping allows design thinkers to conduct social experiment and actually test their ideas.

Many of the stories in the article feature product innovations in less developed regions in the world (eyeglasses for children in India, a woman's cooperative in Rwanda). Certainly, the advent of design-centered inspiration, ideation, and implementation (the three "spaces" in the design thinking process) is a welcome change to the rigid and outdated frameworks in use by international development agencies like the World Bank and the IMF. Indeed, if a cookie-cutter recipe to providing clean drinking water doesn't work in a specific country, then design thinkers will look for work-arounds and improvisations with a distinctly local feel.

My question to you this week is: With the appearance of the human-centered design toolkit, are we not risking to box in our ideas and fall prey to generating ideas and change through the use of frameworks? The last thing we would want is for design to be a simple manual.

Favorite quote from the article:

Henry Ford: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said 'a faster horse.'"