Seoul, July 19, 2016
Even though I have not been able to play Pokemon Go, (due to North Korean location services interference) I have seen too much of it, and cannot wait to go back home and start playing it. Recently, I have heard some negative criticism; saying that the new app is a stupid invention, making people look like fools trying to catch Pokemon on a daily basis. And yeah, it may seem like an irrelevant, childish game that has people running on their phone all day, but for me it is not just a game. In my opinion, it is the most modern example of design thinking. Niantic and The Pokemon Company designed one of the most innovative apps of the century. Pokemon Go is a meaningful, productive, and profitable experience that engages humanity.
In a 2009 TED talk, Tim Brown, Ideo’s CEO, explains “if we take a different view of design, and focus less on the object and more on design thinking as an approach, then we might actually see the result in a bigger impact.” But what is design thinking exactly? Brown defines it as a human centered form of thinking that moves from consumption to participation; or the “active engagement of everyone in experiences that are meaningful, productive, and profitable.” Then he quotes Rory Sutherland in saying that “intangible things are worth perhaps more than physical things.” Saying that user experiences are what designers have to aim for.
Take for example the invention of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, one of the youngest in the world, invented approximately 500 years ago. King Sejong noticed that within his kingdom, only the educated were able to read and write, leaving a great percentage of an illiterate population. The facts of the matter saddened the King, and he decided to create an easier alphabet, composed of 28 characters based in the shape of the tongue needed to pronounce each character. This, in my opinion, is a great example of design thinkers across history; King Sejong, trying to solve a literacy problem by engaging everyone within his reign in a new, meaningful, productive, and easier form of reading and writing.
Living in New York and commuting everyday, I believe the subway experience is an antisocial one; everyone is wearing their earphones and minding their own business. We live in an era of social distrust, insecurity, and hatred towards the unknown, and it is a problem that needs to be solved maybe using design thinking. I constantly try to think of different ways to solve this issue, and always find myself within crazy and elaborate ideas, in which I would need to own an entire company or at least be working in the field, to be able to implement. However, Pokemon Go did it for me. I never would have thought someone else saw this as a problem, and maybe they did not, but it actively solves it, at least until the game is obsolete. As I said before, this app is not just a game for kids, but an encourager of social interactions. This finally hit me when I saw a Facebook post, not sure if true or false, but a believable anecdote of a white 40 year old and two black teens interacting through the game, ending in teaching a police officer how to play it. How could you criticize an app that helps you make friends, and is a social icebreaker? If you take a look at the recent snapchat live story of Pokemon goers, you will be able to witness its social power.
Pokemon Go is an app that engages humans to go outside their houses, exercise, socialize with strangers, have fun, and lastly produce an income to the creators in order to invest in future augmented reality apps that could change the anti-social world we live in. I want to congratulate the design thinkers at Niantic and The Pokemon Company for their amazing new creation, and I hope they keep moving forward in this matter. Finally I will leave you with Tim Brown’s simple quote that reads: “Design is getting big again.”
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