Positive Deviance as Design Thinking: Challenging Notions of Stasis in Technical and Professional Communication

Abstract

In design thinking, extreme users have found work-arounds for common problems, but they are few in number and often overlooked in toolkits and write-ups. This article posits that positive deviance, an approach to social and behavioral change that is compatible with design thinking, offers technical and professional communicators an accessible and innovative methodology for engaging extreme users. The authors analyze a case study of how the positive deviance approach was used to address federal recidivism on the U.S.–Mexico border. They conducted a positive deviance inquiry to arrive at the everyday replicable behaviors that enabled released individuals to complete their terms of supervised release successfully, despite the odds against them and without access to special resources. The authors conclude by discussing the value and implications of focusing on extreme users.

The Influence of the COVID-19 Event on Deviant Workplace Behavior Taking Tianjin, Beijing and Hebei as an Example

“…Due to the limitation of working space, employees cannot interact in time. The interviewed employees mostly adopt methods such as reducing their own role conflicts, dividing work-family boundaries, adapting to new working methods, improving economic security, and even challenging new fields of work to deal with the impact of the novel coronavirus pneumonia on family life, and balance their anxiety [ 25 ]; Emotional exhaustion has a significant positive effect on interpersonal destructive deviance, but has a negative effect on organizational destructive deviance. Affected by the epidemic, global economic development has stagnated, and a large number of companies have implemented large-scale layoffs in order to reduce operating costs, resulting in a surging unemployment rate.…”

Real-World User Experience: Engaging Students and Industry Professionals Through a Mentor Program

“…For example, Kimbell (2012) situated design in local contexts, recognized contributions from non-human actors, and de-centered the agency of the designer. Likewise, Lucía Durá et al (2019) integrated design thinking with positive deviance inquiries to offer better approaches for advocating for users. And Amollo Ambole (2020) argued for decentering Western paradigms for projects in Africa in favor of design thinking approaches that attended to the specific sociocultural contexts of local communities.…”

Composing Like an Entrepreneur: The Pedagogical Implications of Design Thinking in the Workplace

“…For example, Purdy (2014) recounts how two university scholars apply DT to create an educational summer enrichment program for elementary school students. Another example is Durá et al (2019) which chronicles how faculty members collaborate with a U.S. district judge to use "positive deviance … as a design-thinking approach" to generate a solution to criminal recidivism on the U.S.-Mexico border (p. 377). On the other hand, Greenwood et al (2019) does describe workers using DT to solve routine workplace problems, but the workers are still university scholars, and additionally, the article does not give specific pedagogical suggestions: it provides a series of first-person accounts of faculty members who use DT professionally, then uses those accounts to argue for the drawbacks and strengths of DT as a design methodology overall.…”

“…DT has been described in many TPC articles (e.g., Bay et al, 2018; Durá et al, 2019; Greenwood et al, 2019; Lane, 2018; Pope-Ruark, 2019; Purdy, 2014; Tham, 2020); therefore, I will only overview it briefly and provide details most relevant to my argument. DT is a recursive process for understanding and solving problems with a reputation for being well suited for solving complex and ill-defined problems that have no easy solution (often referred to as “wicked problems”).…”