Use Case: Coronavirus and wet markets

Image of Wuhan Wet Market — People at a seafood stall in Wuhan, China, in November 2019, whence coronavirus may have sprung.
Credit: Arend Kuester via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.

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Design is about more than creating beautiful objects. We’ve embraced the broad notion of design that includes “design thinking,” the use of empathy, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and other techniques to solve practical problems in areas not traditionally associated with design.
Already, designers and design thinkers play a vital role in solving the identified pain points such as poor hospital administration, government bureaucracy, lack of stockpiles, and policy indecision.
This article describes three ways design thinkers could contribute. One has to do with Cleaning up China’s wet markets. Many of the early victims of coronavirus worked in or visited one of Wuhan’s largest wet markets, where a wide array of wildlife species—bats, civet cats, snakes, live wolf pups—were sold as food. . . . Designers may not be able to change a country’s dietary preferences. But they could address the infrastructure Coronavirus and wet markets hygiene.
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.
We could also rethinking China’s health care system: China does not have enough hospitals, and the ones it has are bureaucratic, inefficient, and poorly organized.
Chandler, C. (2020, January 28). The coronavirus problem could be solved with design thinking. Fortune. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-problem-could-solved-design-180743459.html