Drop the design-thinking crutches. Imagine you’ve broken your leg.
You go to the doctor, who places it in a cast and sends you home with crutches. You hobble around for a few weeks, then weeks turn into months, then months turn into years. You don’t let go of the crutches even though your leg has healed. It sounds ridiculous, right? But all too often, that’s what organizations do with design thinking. Then they go back, order their own whiteboards and Post-its, and follow the process as they learned it to try to institutionalize the magic they experienced here.
There’s an impulse among many who visit us to cling to the crutches of the design-thinking process rather than strengthen the limb the crutch was intended to heal. I was inspired to write this because I found myself repeatedly asking why people get stuck after they leave. But the process we use for teaching isn’t meant to be replicated and repeated verbatim in perpetuity. Tech. Season 1, Episode 3: In the early years of Law & Order, computers were in the background, and usually turned off.
Binge-watching is mainstream. And Law & Order is among the most popular television shows of all time. But nobody has binged on a show the way Jeffrey Thompson gorged himself on Law & Order. He not only took in all 456 episode in the procedural’s 20-year-run, in order. He also meticulously cataloged — with more than 11,000 screen shots — every single instance of a computer or similar technology that appeared on the show. “Does that sound crazy to you?” Season 1, Episode 9: First appearance of a computer that’s actually turned on (displaying a child abuse database).
Before you answer, you should know that Thompson isn’t an extreme couch potato; he’s an artist whose work frequently deals with technology. Then he started noticing computers. Season six: Computer sketch art, and a designer’s desktop, mid 1990s style. Season six: Unconvincing representation of email software. Pathways Methods - STEPS. Building repertoires of methods for appreciating alternative pathways This section acts as a gateway to research methods that help ‘broaden out’ and ‘open up’ pathways to social, technological and environmental sustainability that favour the rights, interests and values of marginalised and excluded peoples.
The section is split into seven parts, plus the four sections in the colourful boxes (vignettes, cases etc) on the right-hand side of this page.How to use the Methodology section Overview The suite of resources we are developing – drawing on our own work and that of others – can be used in interdisciplinary research concerned with the sustainability challenges associated with climate change, energy, pandemic disease, water scarcity, hunger, resilience, poverty and inequality. We hope the material here will help other researchers design their own methods and methodologies for research into sustainability for development. Wp-content/uploads/STEPS_Pathways_online1.pdf.
Frameworks. Systems Thinking. Visioning. Scanning. Scenarios. Community Futures. How Optimism Distorts The Future. Humans are an optimistic bunch.
We overestimate desirable traits (humor), skills (driving) and our future states (well-being and health). Worse, we believe that we are immune to these better-than-average errors, so much so that we are willing to bet small amounts of money in a laboratory setting. We’re not just optimistic – we’re blindly optimistic. The question is why. One reason relates to how easy or hard it is to process a piece of information. These findings are not psychological oddities. How does fluency relate to optimism? Thinking about positive and negative events involves not only the content of one’s thoughts but also the phenomenological experience of bringing them to mind – in particular, how easily thoughts are processed and retrieved. In other words, when we recall or forecast moments (pleasant or unpleasant) to make judgments about our happiness in the past or future, how easily those moments come to mind will influence those judgments.
Let’s translate.