Design is a field that brings together creation, imagination, and thinking about people and situations. When we learn how this field is organized, we’re better prepared for making things better. Design’s a funny word. As a verb, it describes an action of planning and creation. As a noun, it points to an entire field of …
Empathy is considered to be at the bedrock of good design. But what if how we’re thinking about empathy is wrong? Empathy is certainly having its moment. Anywhere you look for writing on design and innovation and you’ll likely find a big role for empathy. Designers are encouraged to empathize with their potential customers and …
A recent article titled ‘The Right Way to Lead Design Thinking’ gets a lot of things wrong not because of what it says, but because of the way it says it. If we are to see better outcomes from what we create we need to begin with talking about design and design thinking differently. I …
Leadership & Design Thinking: Missed Opportunities Read More »
If design is everywhere humans are and shapes our interactions in the built environment, which dictates how we interact with the world around us should it not be considered important enough to be a part of public health? I recently picked up a copy of the architecturally-inspired Arcade Magazine because of its theme on Science, …
At issue is that wicked problems are made more so by having both complex and non-complex elements working together, requiring a level of strategy development that is far more sophisticated than many first thought. Even a review of the better management texts using complexity give short shrift to the relationship between the complex, the simple and the complicated working simultaneously in environments and how we plan for that.
Until we recognize this complexity — no pun intended — in the way we plan, there is great risk of replicating the hype cycle when our sole use complexity-based models yield poor results of a different nature than the poor results we are seeing from traditional linear, reductionist thinking models applied to many of the problems we deem as wicked today.
