The design opportunities for a post-pandemic world require untangling many knots in our systems. With so much of the world locked down, shut in, or at least restricted in what they can do, there’s been some time to reflect on the state of things and imagine what might come next. The creation of this next …
When systems are changing everywhere the opportunities to direct some of that change to design the world we want has never been greater. Systemic design has been developing over the past decade from a set of loosely connected ideas drawn from different streams of systems thinking and the multidisciplinary field of design. Brought together, this …
Just like with drugs, dosage and interactions matter with learning and innovation; it’s about amount, mix, and more. If you know someone over the age of 80 (including you) there is a good chance they (or you) are taking drugs — lots of them. Medical science has done a remarkable job with finding pharmaceutical therapies …
Planning is something that is done all the time, but the shape in which these plans unfold is often complex in hidden ways. Without the same resources to evaluate those plans (and make different ones should they change) many organizations are left with great expectations that don’t match the reality of what they do (and can …
Innovation is a term commonly associated with ‘new’ and sparkly products and things, but that quest for the bigger and more shiny in what we do often obscures the true innovative potential within systems. Rethinking what we mean by innovation and considering the role that quality plays might help us determine whether bigger and glossy …
In Orwell’s classic Animal Farm the characters often oscillate between their evaluative assessments on the merits of two or four legs. The value was socially constructed, however in practice there are real tangible benefits socially and otherwise to having two legs, which serves as an apt metaphor for understanding the role of scaling in social …
The MOOC offers enormous potential to re-shape the way people learn and promoting access to content and expertise that many in this world could have only dreamed of years ago. But the naivete that such learning can be done in an monocultural way without losing something special about the context in which people learn and use what they learn might lead to some expensive lessons.
Yes, but does it scale? – Question asked at nearly every presentation on a social innovation ever made* It is maddening to see wheels get reinvented and something that is so impactful in one setting never seen outside of that context.  At a time of widespread austerity, global resource constraints, and pressing social problems it is tempting …
Mythmaking about speed and scale in social innovation Read More »
Create systems that are too bounded (dry) and we risk sucking the moisture from the human elements (the wet) that make real social innovation happen. Our challenge is finding the right balance between the controlled, stable environments that these new technologies afford and the self-organized, emergent and innovative environments needed to implement and scale our initiatives more effectively.
Meaning is something that requires attention to create and use and the more variables competing for attention in your life, the less meaningful things might be. If this is the case, can we design programs and initiatives that scale up from small to big? Or do we need to reframe the way we see scaling to something akin to a network, whereby there are a lot of small nodes connected together? Networking nodes seems to be a way to go big and go small.
If so, what does this mean for designing systems that scale?
