Do You Want Elizabeth Holmes? Because This Is How You Get Elizabeth Holmes

My current front runner for the absolute worst think piece on COVID-19 is Clay Chandler’s, The coronavirus problem could be solved with design thinking.

Chandler laments that,

As answers materialize, designers and design thinkers can play a vital role. Among the areas where they might help:

Visualizing data . . .

Rethinking China’s health care system . . .

Cleaning up China’s wet markets . . .

Design thinking’s methods aren’t widely understood in China. Beijing tends to prefer solutions that involve top-down edict and central control rather than “empathy” and “ideation.” The Wuhan outbreak, and China’s struggle to contain it, demonstrates the need for a different approach.

No thank you. While I think we can all agree that China’s Communist Party dictatorship is awful and the country needs to transition toward democracy, the world isn’t going to be saved from a pandemic with post-it notes and bullshit.