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design thinking” has also reached the halls of power. You can find it in the upper reaches of corporations and governments and universities. It organizes and mediates decision-making among executives and elites. At Stanford’s d.school, as cofounder Robert Sutton has said, “design thinking” is often treated “more like a religion than a set of practices for sparking creativity.” So what is it?

Here’s what I say “design thinking” is: using a particular set of design methods to solve problems that traditionally have fallen outside the purview of design. I show my students what designers call the “hexagon diagram,” a ubiquitous image that came out of the d.school in the mid-2000s and purports to represent the five steps of design thinking. It consists of five hexagons that read: “Empathize,” “Define,” “Ideate,” “Prototype,” and “Test.” The idea is that design thinking involves listening to and empathizing with some group of people, then using what you’ve heard to define the problem you want to solve. Then you come up with ideas, prototype those ideas, and test the prototypes to see if they work.

Suddenly everything is a design-thinking problem: postpartum depression, racial injustice in sentencing, unsustainable growth. To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But my students aren’t stupid; they’re smart. They’re picking up on something. In the worlds they inhabit, “Better by design” is a dominant structure of feeling.

Any solution implemented would leave “traces” that couldn’t be undone. “One cannot build a freeway to see how it works, and then easily correct it after unsatisfactory performance,” they wrote. “Large public works are effectively irreversible, and the consequences they generate have long half-lives.” The designer had no “right to be wrong,” because these problems mattered. Human lives, or the quality of human lives, were on the line.

Rittel called them “wicked problems.” They were “wicked” not because they were unethical or evil, but because they were malignant and incorrigible and hard. There did exist simple problems that didn’t rise to this level. But “now that [the] relatively easy problems have been dealt with,” the problems worth designers’ time were the wickedest ones. The hardest problems of heterogeneous social life called for designers’ exclusive focus and concentration.

Design was a multiplicity of critical voices batting a problem around unknown terrain until it formed itself, or not, into some kind of resolution.

“It is not easy to live with epistemic freedom,” he wrote, and so designers often sought out sachzwang — practical constraint, inherent necessity, “a device to ‘derive ought from fact.’” But they shouldn’t. Without methodological constraint, design had room for heterogeneity. It had the capacity to surprise. “Nothing has to be or to remain as it is,” Rittel wrote, “or as it appears to be.”

In 1987, Peter Rowe published an ethnographic study of designers called Design Thinking (this may be the first printed instance of the phrase). But Rowe’s study of observed evidence concluded, just as Rittel and Papanek had argued, that in fact there was no one “design thinking.” “Rather,” Rowe wrote, “there are many different styles of decision making, each with individual quirks as well as manifestations of common characteristics.” It had become a commonplace that there was no one way to make design. The more interesting question was how to observe and negotiate the proliferation of differences.

IDEO is just another multinational corporation. But it’s a multinational corporation whose niche branding and marketing, funded by the success of “design thinking,” have been so phenomenally successful as to seem like straight sorcery.

even as “design thinking” rendered “design” yet more capacious ,  it also jettisoned the self-conscious suspicion of “methodology” at which designers, following Horst Rittel, had arrived in the ’60s. Design thinking was unambiguously a recipe, a formula, a five-step program

It was design for a service economy: memorable, saleable, repeatable, apparently universal, and slightly vague in the details. Horst Rittel had convincingly described the folly of trying to define or rationalize design’s “how”; IDEO’s template for design thinking brought back the “how” with a vengeance.

So it was that in the United States in the early 2000s, design again became not just a method but a universal method — and a method that seemed a little bit magical. It applied to everything, and anyone could do it. “Contrary to popular opinion,” read a sidebar in Brown’s 2008 Harvard Business Review essay, “you don’t need weird shoes or a black turtleneck to be a design thinker.” You didn’t need, in fact, to be a designer. All you needed was a set of designerly qualities — empathy, “integrative thinking,” optimism, experimentalism, a collaborative nature — and that brightly colored five-step map.

Lyons and IDEO’s design-driven project aimed to solve the alleged problem of insufficient “competitiveness.” That problem, as stated — and the changes Gainesville instituted to address it, including beautiful graphic design, better web resources, and that friendly new office called the Department of Doing — had at best a tenuous relationship to the experiences of many of Gainesville’s poor and Black residents. Although the plans were intended to boost Gainesville’s economy on the whole, they did not create affordable housing, eradicate food deserts, or raise high school graduation rates. They didn’t address those for whom “competitiveness” seemed a distant problem. They seemed to leave much of Gainesville behind.

“Design thinking” can’t solve the wicked problems that organize Gainesville’s inequality: poverty, income disparity, structural racism, environmental injustice, unregulated market capitalism. You face wicked problems by struggling with them, not by solutioning them. You argue, you iterate, you fail, you grieve, you fight.

This is what worries me about design thinking: its colossal and seductive promise. There was an earlier Anglo-American vogue for design — a love affair with industrial design, beginning in the Depression era — but it was relatively benign in its claims and its outcomes. This more recent vogue for design thinking seems more insidious because it promises so much more. It promises a creative and delightful escape from difficulty, a caper through the Post-it Notes to innovative solutions. And it promises this as a service, delivered at what is often great cost — not just to IBM and Intuit and Starbucks, but to villages and nonprofit organizations and cities like Gainesville without enormous resources to spare.

By embracing “design thinking,” we attribute to design a kind of superior epistemology: a way of knowing, of “solving,” that is better than the old and local and blue-collar and municipal and unionized and customary ways.

Americans love design most when we’re afraid.

design isn’t magic. To address a wicked problem is to look for its roots — and there’s no hexagon map for getting there

There is no consensus as to how resources should be distributed, social life arranged, justice done. To design, really design, is to acknowledge those divergences — and then to listen one’s way, and push one’s way, to somewhere new. Such battles from competing positions can be truly wicked, Rittel believed, but it’s better to fight than to obscure irresolution with optimism. He had a point. Design may come in an elegant package, but it doesn’t always make things right.

“Censorship cannot be regarded as a country’s internal matter. Information control in a given country can have consequences all over the planet and we are suffering the effects of this today. The same goes for disinformation and rumours. They make people take bad decisions, they limit free will and they sap intelligence.” 

RSF has taken measures to ensure that it remains as fully operational as possible while guaranteeing the safety of its personnel and partners. The data RSF collects comes from its network of bureaux and correspondents. Tracker-19 offers an interactive world map on the press freedom situation, constant coverage of developments and analyses of key issues. 

On January 24, the government opened a control room to deal with the situation, made plans to isolate people, including home quarantine, and looked at the existing provisions of equipment including N95 masks, and PPEs (Personal Protective Equipment). On January 30, India registered its first Coronavirus infection in Kerala; it was a student who’d returned home from China.As of May 4, 462 people have recovered from the infection in Kerala, and there have been just three deaths. Even the oldest patients have recovered—a couple, aged 88 and 93. “When their tests came back positive, they were moved to a medical college because they were very vulnerable,” she shares. “In fact, we had special nurses and the best ICU set aside for them. And so, we brought them back to life,”

Kerala has long been focused on public health, education and social upliftment. Over the last few years, and since Shailaja Teacher got the health portfolio, there’s been renewed attention to the state’s public healthcare institutions. “We had a three-point agenda: government hospitals should be patient-friendly, high-tech, and out-of-pocket expenditure must reduce. Primary healthcare units are very important, especially in rural areas, they now have testing labs and are able to catch early signs of different diseases. Medical college hospitals have new equipment, and good infrastructure. Our focus definitely strengthened the system,”

a daily video conference with different frontline staff of the healthcare community across 14 districts. “Each day’s video conference is dedicated to groups of people doing different kinds of work, from district medical officers, nurses, ASHA workers. It gives us the opportunity to talk to people and hear them out. Keeping in touch with those working at the grassroots level is extremely important, we try to maintain that at all costs. When the minister, or a health secretary directly wants to understand their ground reality, it makes a huge difference, especially to keep morale up.”

Morale is especially important because there’s little knowing how things will pan out. Shailaja Teacher is cautious: “It will take time to get back to normal life. It is a truth that people must accept now. This virus is not like others. Many people test positive then test negative within a few days, but others take upward of 30 days to test negative. It sometimes takes five or six tests before it comes back negative. So that means this virus remains in the body for a while, and there’s a possibility of a transfer. In Kerala, we have it under control but if we get over-confident then we may have a second wave.”

When I spoke to Shailaja Teacher, she had another 9 or 10 hours of meetings, files, discussions, and even a press conference ahead of her. Her husband, two grown-up sons and their families, check in on her just before midnight via phone calls.