“Mixing Episteme and Doxa – The Key to Increase Engagement in Business Design Thinking” – Liang Yue

Since Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon had first described “design thinking” in 1969, the methodology of design thinking and its variations have been adopted by all walks of life. It is an iterative process in which alternative strategies and solutions are developed to tackle the human-centered problem, generally including five phases: empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Design thinking has become a crucial principle in product design in the business world, coupling with the trend of customization. Product managers invite customers to every stage of their market research, following this principle to grasp users’ demands, adjust design plans, and collect feedback. However, no matter how much consumer s engage in the product design, they would not take the product as a co-designing work. Those merchandises successfully establish a connection with the consumer but fail to build a relationship with them. Inspired by the “design justice” in StudioLab pedagogy, I realize the failure factor in relationship-building in business design thinking is the lack of “doxa”.

“Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims explicitly to challenge, rather than reproduce structural inequalities. The problems a marginalized community faces are structured chronically by the mainstream ideology, and the solutions presented by experts are also influenced by the dominant knowledge or episteme. To subvert the dominant and fixed perspective, the members of the community must engage in the process of knowledge-producing and policymaking by presenting their common knowledge, or doxa. The design justice is to bring doxa into the problem-solving discourse and eventually democratize the solutions.

However, when we reflect on the collaboration between product managers and customers, we can easily find that the colloquial phrase that customers’ opinions in are always adjusted to consumer psychology or marketing terminology, under the logic of financial feasibility. In this trimming process, the consumer’s doxa is excluded outside the commercial’s episteme. Although they participate in the production, neither their non-specialized ideas nor the common knowledge behind those ideas is maintained in the final product.

The experimental projects of StudioLab lead the way to increase engagement in business design thinking: mixing episteme and doxa. For example, the Indigenous Story Studio collaborated with the aboriginal community to work on maternity care. The information comics they created juxtaposed the differences and commonalities of western and aboriginal women giving birth to babies and further empowered local hospitals to provide attuned service to aboriginal people. The inclusion of different worldviews or ideologies, common knowledge, and collaborative creativity can sometimes contribute to unexpected results. In addition, through the role-playing of researchers and testers, the aboriginals also become makers of this cultural practice and have deep engagement with a social policy about themselves.

References:

• McKenzie, Jon. 2019. “Becoming Cosmographer: Co-designing Worlds.” In Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement: A Studio Lab Manifesto, 109-145. Palgrave Pivot, Cham.
• Costanza-Chock, Sasha. 2020. Design Justice. The MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262043458