January 21, 2021

Engaging (Disengaging)

“The workplace is the key unit of change” Frederic Laloux 

The meeting of conscious enterprise and design thinking has ignited the social innovation sphere within an open source creative context that is further blurring lines of professional, intellectual and creative property. Indeed, it is precisely from within such interstitial spaces that true innovations will occur. As conscious entrepreneurs seek to demonstrate value to society while serving the greater good, higher education in design adjusts to a faster moving and exponentially more complex learning landscape.

Hybrids of design thinking and systems thinking methodologies will gain in currency as our societies continue to become more complex and require the second simplicity that these tools can provide. In the last ten years design thinking has gained mainstream visibility especially in the corporate and business sector. The decoupling of design thinking capacity from typically more narrowly conceived traditional design practices, along with widespread adoption of corporate environmental standards and protocols such as Triple Bottom Line, has increased overall awareness of the role of design in strategic ‘greening’ of production and supply chains thus resulting in broad diffusion of tailored approaches to design leadership and strategy.

As design thinking is ever more widely embraced by the mainstream business and entrepreneurial worlds, and academia is responding with a variety of new MBAD degrees. Following leading business schools such the the Rotman School of Management who have added comprehensive design curricula, a number of top design schools such as Illinois Institute of Technology, and Parsons The New School for Design have launched new hybrid bachelors and masters level programs fusing business administration and design. Hybrid start-ups such as Enstitute, Mycellium, The Experience Institute are demonstrating viability of alternative, immersive educational experiences to compete with conventional degree programs. The appearance of several new MBA in Design program launches (Wecker), as well as the proliferation of in-house design learning laboratories at firms such as Google and leading organizations such as Mayo Clinic are signals that design methodologies are proving their effectiveness and stickiness as mainstream business practices. <Aligning - Scattering>

Despite this proliferation of hybrid and collaborate learning models, stubborn schisms between academic research and professional practice preserve competition over specialized territories of expertise. Until design practice evolves the real theory practice synthesis required for seriousness - the the genuine cross-sector shared objectives this would entail - these devicive schisms will persist. Whether this meeting of cultures results in a clash or a fertile cross pollination is being determined in real time as we bound the contexts, create shared value propositions and work to remain flexible as our identities and missions are challenged in the process. This is a meeting of private and public, fast and slow, insular and embedded. Although both cultures value innovation they define and measure it differently. Academic licensing, accreditation and assessment tend to tilt academia toward legacy, risk mitigation and consistent standards of quality. While the business world moves faster and with more direct exposure to changing markets. Both sectors are highly creative and yet both hold outmoded assumptions that need to be reality tested. Both sectors have much to benefit from collaboration with the other. Both will continue to experience decisive shifts generated from within and without over the next several decades.

What would a more fluid academic- entrepreneurial collaborative space look like? In their book, Transversity, authors Sue L.T. McGregor and Russ Volckmann described this emerging trend while providing numerous case studies from exemplar schools around the world who are testing these boundaries and leveraging complementary synergies, without giving up the core mission of business and academe. On the contrary, these innovative partnerships, projects and degree program initiatives are having the effect of rededicating these institutions to their guiding value propositions and strengthening their core alignments. According to Frederic Laloux’s new book Reinventing Organizations, Organization is the key unit of change. Designers who wish to affect change on the collective, community, organizational and societal levels require greatly expanded toolkits beyond the conventional design curriculum. Study of design thinking does not in and of itself allow a fashion designer to handle a design challenge on the scale of organizational development. Collective social and cultural spheres, with their domains of organizational development and systemic change will increasingly become a domain of fluency for designers. The conventional tool kit of the emerging designer is changing radically in response to real-world demands.

G.K. Van Patter and Elizabeth Pastor are transforming educational transformation. Innovating in the intangible, human and organizationally centered design arena, the NextDesign Leadership Institute co-founder heads the New York based Global Sense-Making and Change-Making consultancy Humantific. Drawing on cognitive science and then integrating meaning-making with the relational and human-centered capacities of design thinking, Van Patter is prototyping new dispositions toward change for clients and organizations. A leading voice in the call for the design educational sector to adapt or perish, Van Patter characterizes contemporary design pedagogy in the United States as retrograde due to its still nearly exclusive focus on preparing students to enter careers at the scale of product and service design. “We recognize that many challenges facing organizations, societies and ultimately planet earth cannot be solved by creating more products and services. At Humantific, we are already working on the other side of that realization that is rapidly emerging in the global marketplace. Our human-centered work includes innovation research, strategy co-creation, visual sensemaking and cross-disciplinary innovation skill-building.”(Van Patter)

Humantific is a leader in articulating changing best practices and essential capacities for emerging designers during this crucial decade when a paradigm shift in role and function leaves these matters fuzzy and fluid. “…NextD coined as the cross-over era. Since 2005 we have been pointing out a substantial crossing over going on within the design industries from design at scale 1 an 2 to the much more broadly focused design at scales 3 and 4.” Humantific has published a range of papers and presentations describing the ongoing shifts in the role and the scope of concern of the designer. Humantific describes these evolutions in the status, focus and function of the design professions as a scale of increasingly comprehensive scope and complexity in the identity and role of the professional designer. Design 1.0 and 2.0 (products and services) and Design 3.0 and 4.0 (systems and societies). Van Patter directly addresses the disconnect that can happen as young designers attempt to navigate the transition from the culture of the Academy to the culture of the design firm. He offers advice to design educators who wish to help students to not just be successfully placed in available jobs in the design industry, but to achieve success with leading-edge design firms.

Humantific and other leading firms are forging new cooperative partnerships with academies in order to build effective cross sectorial alignments and change efforts. Van Patter cautions that the cultural disconnect between design academies and design professions has resulted in a situation where students may have unrealistic expectations about what their design skills and capacities will qualify them to do once they graduate. In particular he cautions that design thinking is not a magic bullet that once learned, is instantly applicable to any and all ills of the world. Design thinking like any methodology has its limits and its appropriate domains of application. Further elaborating on misleading generalizations having to do with design thinking, Van Patter emphasizes that not everything is a “wicked problem” reminding us that sometimes professional designers work at the scale and level of complexity that is better understood as a “tame problem” meaning of their relatively straightforward response to a design brief. He also cautions that what he calls Design 1.0 (product design) and Design 2.0 (service design) skills and capacities are not directly interchangeable or transferable to the contexts of Design 3.0 (systems) and Design 4.0 (societies). Furthermore, he adds that design contexts at the level of systems and societies cannot be addressed with the tools and remedies of products and services. Although I believe that the reality is more fluid than this model would suggest, I do believe that this is a helpful clarification for students and educators and professionals alike, because it brings clarity and discernment to the distinct capacities and toolkits that apply to different orders of designing.

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