Does Design Thinking in Journalism Work? Yes, but! No, but! But this should take over.
Design thinking is about giving the audience a stake, a say in a product’s journey, be it an iPhone or a story, often now referred to as human centred design.
It’s a marked shift from how teams of designers once worked putting out a product to market. Believing in their own acquired knowledge was enough. Think of the feedback if Bauhaus designers solicited the views of the audience, or Braun designer Dieter Rams, with a strong aesthetic vision, was required to ask buyers what they wanted. Rams’s artistic flare led and audiences followed.
Yet, design thinking has been with innovative designers for a good while now, particularly those whose empathy with the users isn’t just relegated to them as cash machines.
If you’re putting a product into a new market, then it’s all but a default to engage in a genuine cycle of user interaction, focus groups and feedback loops in achieving a better outcome.
In journalism, there’s the bleeding obvious and some. Journalism has always considered the audience, but not necessarily in shaping the pressure points in the story cycle. That’s the insight you want from an editor with years of experience — doesn’t always work!
In 2004, Tech journalist Dan Gillmor unfurled a radically brilliant book that pierced through journalism’s workings and was praised universally. Called “We the Media”, in interview after interview, Gillmor would openly profess that he’d realised with the critical mass of the Internet that his audience knew much more than him. This was the undergird of Wisdom of Crowds in modern journalism.
The audience, thanks to the Net could blog, and crowd source. There were sites in Asia showing the rest of the journalism globe the way. Now, journalism became participatory, less top down, and more bottom up according to Gillmor. Readers could help shape the product. This was an aesthetic of Design Thinking (DT) entering journalism’s gateway.
DT’s manifestation though in journalism became highly quarantined. The article/ story was still uni-focused by the storyteller, with interviews, but not enough to warrant user influences . For that, journalism was gifted the comment section where users’ comments were a form of meta journalism.
Pragmatically too, if you’re running a daily newspaper, deadlines negate considered feedback from audiences in writing a story. In Holland, one newspaper overcame this by collecting blogs around an issue, which would then shape what the paper put out in the afternoon.
Characteristics of DT include empathy, which, well, that’s never truly been a feature of the mouth guard journalism. In a publication leaning to any spectrum of ideologies, one group wins and the other tossed away. Er, Daily Mail. Empathy is to the core audience.
But there is an aspect when design thinking plays a role. Certainly on long form stories, or in setting up a platform. The approach is a variation on
Uncover: define: iterate: prototype — the lean theory, where each node can bring in users’ views and a system of plays around postits, brain storming and putting out something to test the market (MVP).
There are few companies in tech in particular who aren’t following these design principles, but there are two horizons to consider; one where design thinking has not worked — evidenced by the status quo — and another which is a threat to the exclusive approach of human centred design.
If design thinking is about also enabling radical, cross lane ideas, why is it that large groups who engage this approach fail in diversity? In other words design thinking does not deliver on diversity of ideas across cultures. Should it, when your target audience is already fixed?
This isn’t to say design thinking doesn’t work, but it has a major achilles, in cognition, across its teams and output that embraces diversity of cultures. Stay in your lane! Also, there’s a world of difference in Sillicon Valley and China’s system’s approach.
But the real threat to design thinking as a stand alone is AI, and psychometric user feedback. It’s not what the user says, but what their actions and subconscious are saying.
In China, Smart Finance uses Huaweis AI and data points to glean feedback from users which are invisible to the naked eye. The company is one of the leaders in tech banking, which is revolutionising China’s once underbanked system. As a product going to market, it uses predictive algorithms to determine whether a new customer should be considered a loan based on things, like how fast they type in their details to their platform, what coffee they drink, and which phone they’re using.
Design thinking or human centred design isn’t a solution in itself, but it’s the zeitgeist for now. But new models are always being devised to correlate with both human behaviour and choice.
Having worked over thirty years at the top end of creative disciplines and come through different degrees, what, I thought, could embrace a newer form of thinking that takes account of diversity and machine-human learning?
I am a maths Chemistry grad, attended LSE for Global Economics, and Falmouth for post-degree in journalism: I’ve been a journalist at Newsnight, a creative director, and editor for various dotcoms e.g. Justgiving.com. I was an artist in residence at the Southbank, and have won international awards for innovation.
On the module I teach at Cardiff University, I call it the SACK’ED model and over the next 12 weeks I’ll post some insights about it and the groups we’re working with; from psychologists; tech entrepreneurs and mentors.
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