maria gil ulldemolins

Mr. M. and I are watching The Wire (we’ve just started the 3rd season, so please! No spoilers! Thanks!). I am going to skip the whole “It’s the best TV series ever- It’s so overrated I want to cry” debate and go straight to what I wanted to say: I love seeing how the team works to solve the cases.

I have been going nuts all over Google trying to find an image of the boards where they explore the case and the suspects and their relationships. No such luck. The closest I’ve come to is the image here. The thing that strikes me the most is how very similar this picture is to the ones I take in my Design thinking and innovation workshops. I basically came to say that what McNulty and his mates are up to is precisely that, Design Thinking.

Let’s analyse the parallelisms:

• It’s Visual: in both cases, the priority is to make sense visually of what you are dealing with, and therefore walls become essential tools for expansion.
• It’s Physical: have you noticed the name tags they pin on their boards? They are big. They have a materiality. And then they use strings and tapes to physically link one piece of information to another. I think that is key to making a Design thinking workshop successful. You can touch what you think and prototype your ideas.
• It’s Collaborative: the work is done in teams with different professionals involved. Actually, in the series, they regularly team up with suspects to figure out more. Now, collaborating with consumers it’s not quite the same thing, but you get what I mean.
• Feedback is essential: Design Thinking is not a step-by-step process, but rather a space to navigate. In this way, you can always go back to something you’ve looked into and re-feed that information into what you are doing. And what you learn from your mates and the case gets processed right back.
• One needs to Research: People often imagine creative geniuses having a sort of inspirational fit that leads to them vomiting a fabulous piece of art or design. I am not a genius but I can tell you that it takes a lot more than that. One needs tor research and investigate again, and again and then some more. Like police people.

So there, what did you think of that? There are some more points I could add, like the fact that Design thinking is hard work and so is case resolving, but since I’ve never been shot during a workshop, I’ll leave that aside. Also, as a designer I can shower and sleep and it doesn’t lead to marital problems. There’s only so many McNulty’s in this world.