Design thinking is about creating a narrative of activity, or of modeling a behavior and designing solutions that will ensure the expected or anticipated behavior. We typically find ourselves telling a story of how someone experiences or interacts with a physical device or service. Much of what design encompasses is narrative.
I have recently been reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and the implications this has on design thinking is striking. The Black Swan theory tells us that we create narrative to try to explain an unexplainable world; we reduce reality to a narrative of comprehensible portions and tailor the narrative to fit our limited model of the explainable. Our natural inclination is empirical. Create a story from our experiences. Are there examples of a design solution that were once thought to be sound, catastrophically failing after performing as expected for length of time? Are there examples of designs that failed and had major negative impact? If so, what role did the designer play in those failures (and the narrative that was created in the process of design) ? Here are some that I came up with: The Titanic not really, user error. The Space Shuttle disaster (1st) - maybe. 9/11 Failure of the process of gathering intelligence. A structural failure - translated: is this a failure in engineering, not design (maybe) A service would be more interesting, but I cannot think of an example. Happy Friday! Chris
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