Reimagining Stanford d.school’s Design Thinking Process for ICT4D

The School

Stanford’s Design Thinking school, or “d.school”, is an interdisciplinary institute that offers courses to Stanford students and professionals on Design Thinking. The school was founded in 2005 by six Stanford faculty members who wanted to instill a sense of creativity in the process of solving problems. With the help of Hasso Plattner’s endowment, David Kelley, Bernie Roth and others set out to create a place to foster and heighten creative confidence in Stanford students. The d.school most famously has coined and lectured on the “Design Thinking” framework. According to the New York Times, d.school has been one of the most sought after programs at Stanford [1].

The d.school’s framework is a fantastic resource that enables designers, engineers, thinkers, and doers alike to solve problems with the human-centered design process. It can be used to solve problems cross-disciplines and industries.
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We wanted to include additional considerations in the human-centered design process — specifically when dealing with humanitarian design and design for developing contexts. So with the help of faculty and experts in HCI, we made few amendments to Stanford’s framework in the ‘Empathize’, ‘Define’, and ‘Prototype’ modes.We hope you enjoy our amendments and we welcome reactions to our new mini framework, “ICT4D Design Thinking”.

Empathize Mode

Empathize involves the designer coming to an understanding about the lived experience and struggles of the user(s). The d.school identifies three methods employable by the designer to create empathy for the user:
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Observe
View users and their behavior in the context of their lives.
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‍Engage
Interact with and interview users through both scheduled and short ‘intercept’ encounters.
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‍Immerse
Experience what your user experiences.

Empathy is a cornerstone of human-centered design practices, but continues to be a massive stumbling block for the design community. We propose that in doing humanitarian work, the designer should see themselves not as an outside, objective observer discovering the universal truth about a certain group of people, but as an individual with their own position in the world understanding the user group through the lens of their situated knowledge. By understanding our position and the intersecting identities of the user group, we can create empathy that respects difference and prioritizes pluralism.
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Further, we propose that empathy is not best accomplished by only doing needs-finding work, but by also uncovering a community’s assets and capacities. The struggles of a community that are surfaced “are not regarded as part of the truth; they are regarded as the whole truth,” painting an incomplete and often problematic portrait of the community [2]. Activities to supplement the Empathize mode are as follows:

Adopting an intersectional lens to understand users
Designers know that user groups are not homogenous, but tend to draw on personas and consumer behaviors to differentiate between them and generate empathy. In the humanitarian space, where we seek to shift power to individuals and communities that have been historically marginalized, a different framework is needed to understand user differences. Designers can better create empathy for their users by leveraging an intersectional lens; that is, by seeking to understand the various identities or roles that a person within a community occupies, and investigating how those roles intersect to impact the individual’s everyday, lived experience. Intersectionality is as complex as it is important; to learn more about using it, view the additional resources at the end of this guide.

In adopting intersectional lens to understand users, how might empathy mapping or personas change to consider the user’s intersecting identities in addition to their explicit behaviors?

Beginning with marginalized perspectives
A more complete understanding of the users’ lives means challenging dominant narratives or pervasive assumptions about their values and perspectives. Designers can leverage feminist standpoint theory to work towards this, which posits that all knowledge is socially situated, and that marginalized viewpoints provide unique and important perspectives on power structures and social conditions that would otherwise be missed. By beginning generative research by including diverse and suppressed perspectives, the designer can “expose the unexamined assumptions of dominant epistemological paradigms, avoid distorted or one-sided accounts of social life, and generate new and critical questions,” [3].

Adopting a capacity-based approach to generative research
We have been trained as designers to understand users in terms of their problems: for example, the d.school sees engagement’s key purpose as a way to “uncover needs that people have which they may or may not be aware of.” While needs-finding is a crucial aspect to human-centered design, we believe that generating empathy, as well as creating effective design solutions, requires mapping a community’s capacities as well as their struggles. When a designer’s relationship to the user group is framed wholly in relation to the community’s problems, two problems occur: first, the needs of the community come to represent the peoples’ identities in the eyes of the world; and secondly, the community comes to see themselves as victims, with their problems only solvable by outside help [4]. Instead, during the empathize mode, we must also investigate and identify the community’s assets, just as we would the residents’ needs. This means mapping “an inventory of the gifts, skills and capacities of the community’s residents,” as well as the structural capacities of the community’s businesses, NGOs, and environment. This approach sees each individual within the community, regardless of their position or history, as a site of ability and asset.

Define Mode

Define focuses on converging rather than diverging thoughts and insights in order to craft an actionable problem statement and a point of view.
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The point of view
The point of view or “POV” in Stanford’s d.school’s framework is about the uncovering and solidification of the root of the problem designers are — in the next phase — ideating solutions on. “The point of view or POV should focus on specific users and insights uncovered during the Empathize mode”[5].

Unpacking the point of view
The designer’s point of view is carried into practice and is cultivated as she deepens her expertise. It’s a way of thinking and acting in the world. Ultimately, the point of view is where the values of the designer manifest [6]. Three activities to supplement the Define mode are as follows:
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Positioning and reflexivity exercise (How you think)
‍What values are we putting into the design and how does that affect the people that are using the technologies we design? Understanding how your specific background influences your design POV is vital to understanding the inherent biases you are bringing to your design decisions and ultimately your solutions. Acknowledge your position as a designer, your background and experiences.Establish relationships with the users you are designing for and make their values and beliefs guide you while reframing the problem space [7].

Advocating for interdisciplinary partnerships (How others in your design team think)
“Phoebe Sengers and Bill Gaver agree that the field of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) should be more receptive to the notion of open-ended interpretations for its projects” [8]. Interdisciplinary partnerships help designers see diverse viewpoints and different ways of interpreting a design problem. These different perspectives can bridge the gap between designers and their target audience as well as shifting the approach to problem solving from a place of pure pragmatism, to a place of pleasure and enjoyment.
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Covering all bases in your target demographic (How users think and play)
Framing design problems for low-resource communities might seem like an easy task if the community has fewer resources than your own. The narrow focus of ICTD targeting “pragmatic” development issues may miss the key behaviors and attitudes of those being designed for, undermining their desires in order to focus exclusively on needs [9]. Further, what might be seen as “unserious” or “useless” to an outside observer may in fact be “an act imbued with deep meaning, by either a community or an individual” [10]. What are your users’ motivations, desires, interests, and passions? They are of equal importance to consider when framing the design problem and your POV.
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As a test, a good POV is one that:

Provides focus and frames the problem.
Empowers team members to make decisions.
Fuels brainstorms by suggesting “how might we” statements.
You revisit and reformulate as you learn by doing.
Guides your innovation efforts.
Takes into consideration all designers’ inherent biases.
Includes perspectives of experts in different fields.
Highlights context and culture-specific insights about the target user group.
Treats all users like typical users (regardless of whether they are in Global North or South).
Incorporates concerns surrounding agency, expression or identity.

Prototype Mode

Prototyping is getting rough and quick ideas out of your head, and into the real world. The purpose is to test functionality, deepening empathy with the problem space, iterate ideas on top of current solutions, and communicating vision with stakeholders.
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The main idea is to bring solutions to life, in a way that they demonstrate the core features and functionality.

We want designers and developers to think more carefully about the solutions that they propose. We propose the prototyping phase to be a filter to sieve out solutions that are detrimental to the existence and progress of low-resource communities.

Solutions designed and developed for low-resource communities have the potential to influence the lives of the population very dramatically. We have encountered that multiple technologies developed in the Global North have caused detriment to the population of the Global South, because of design inconsiderate towards the needs, culture, and social structure of these communities.
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Particularly for technological solutions, Winner poses some interesting considerations. All pieces of technology are political, which implies that the adoption of a given technical system actually requires the creation and maintenance of a particular set of social conditions as the operating environment of that system. Recognizing that technological artifacts have politics embedded, and trying to understand those politics is the best way to attempt to mitigate the impacts. However, it also necessitates that some technologies should not exist, and that you should simply walk away from certain artifacts if the political implications are too great [12].The activities to use in the Prototype mode are as follows:

Preferring Pluralism to Universal Design
In light of the same, a designer may want to move away from universalist design ideas, towards the pluralistic approach. A pluralist approach best validates a research idea or design method [13]. As we have seen, technology from the global north can cause harm to populations in the Global South. A pluralistic approach can help avoid that. That being said, technology made in the Global North, can be used as analogous inspiration to guide the design and development of solutions for the Global South. However, technology should not be blindly translated between contexts without any consideration of its impact[14].
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Evaluating the appropriateness of prototype
Design methods should also hinge on being culturally appropriate, for the accuracy of insights in the assessing phase. For instance, paper prototyping may not make sense in some Latin American communities because it is not an intuitive medium for communicating digital interfaces [15]. Identifying the capacities and assets of the communities, and being mindful of how the prototype leverages them, is a useful method to evaluate this.
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Advocating for access and sustainability
The income streams define the access of technology and solution. Designers need to be mindful of the conflict between the humanitarian needs as well as the market needs, and design your solution to accommodate resources in a manner that satisfy both. Designers need to also consider the sustainability of solutions and prototype. Stop gap solutions often end up being used for very large amounts of time in low-resource communities. The best prototypes are built to answer the question: “Does my solution cause harm when used for over a decade”[16]?

References

[1]Perlroth, N. (2013, December 30). Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/ 2013/12/30/technology/solving-problems-for-real-world-using- design.html
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[2,4]Kretzman, J. P., & McKnight, J. L. (1993). Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets. Retrieved July, 2020
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[3,7]Bardzell, S., & Bardzell, J. (2011). Towards a feminist HCI methodology. Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI ’11. doi: 10.1145/1978942.1979041
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[5]Holcomb, S. (2020, April 29). Design Thinking Bootleg.
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[6,14,16]Interview with Carl Disalvo (2020, July 22).
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[8,9,10]Chirumamilla, P., & Pal, J. (2013, December). Play and power: a ludic design proposal for ICTD. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development: Full Papers-Volume 1 (pp. 25–33).
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[11]Arora, P., & Rangaswamy, N. (2013). Digital leisure for development: Reframing new media practice in the Global South. Media, Culture & Society, 35(7), 898–905.

[12]Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136.

[13,15]Wong-Villacres, M., Alvarado Garcia, A., & Tibau, J. (2020, April). Reflections from the Classroom and Beyond: Imagining a Decolonized HCI Education. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–14).

Resources

Atewologun, D. (2018, August 28). Intersectionality Theory and Practice.