Caribbean professor promotes design thinking for region post-COVID

• April 19 2020
• http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/sunday-finance/caribbean-professor-promotes-design-thinking-for-region-post-covid_192079

The COVID-19 pandemic has added new meaning to the cliché, “changed the world forever”. Governments, giant corporations, small businesses, and families have restructured to meet the challenges of a killer disease which has caused more than 125,000 deaths worldwide.

Trinidadian Dr Lesley Ann Noel, whose mother is Jamaican, is professor of practice at The Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, specialising in the field of design thinking. She believes this method can be utilised by Caribbean governments preparing for the aftermath of COVID-19.

“Education is an area in which design thinking can be used in the region. For example, a community could design an after-school programme that addresses a local problem, and then a government agency could support the implementation,” she told the Business Observer.

A graduate of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Noel completed her PhD in Design at North Carolina State University in 2018. She started teaching design in 1998, and has taught design thinking since 2010.

Noel describes the latter as “a methodology that is centred around solving problems by focusing on the needs of the people most affected by the problem. It borrows both the processes and ways of thinking that designers use to research and solve problems”.

Some of the biggest brands in the world have used the platform to expand their product and improve relationships with customers or clients. They include Nike, Starbucks, Nordstrom, and IBM.

Though she has lectured classes in design thinking at The University of the West Indies' Arthur Lok Jack Global School of Business in Trinidad and Tobago, Noel thinks because it is relatively new, it has not caught on in the Caribbean.