Tag: DesignThinking

Playing poker by the rules of noughts and crosses

This week I am writing about how we make decisions in design. I’ve written before about David Snowden’s way of describing systems using a games analogy (see reference…

Does power support change?

Earlier this week I wrote about designers needing to understand the conditions for change. What enables change and what blocks it. If we understand organisational culture as how…

What’s holding the current situation in place?

Design is about making change. Our aim is to turn an existing situation into a better situation. Sometimes that might be about designing a new thing. But other…

Designers as insiders

Yesterday I said designers are outsiders. Here’s the tricky part: we are also insiders.  That’s because we need to earn the right to work with the people we…

Designers as outsiders

As designers we are outsiders. The norm is the middle lane. But we want to make things better. To change the direction of travel. To advocate for something…

On the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and teaching design

In the first year of my undergraduate chemistry course, we learnt about a concept called the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This term refers to a phenomenon predicted by classical physics…

Design versus Shopping

If the client knows exactly what they want at the start of a design process, then it isn’t design – it’s shopping. Shopping for the answer that you’ve…