Tim Brown: "Redesign democracy? No problem!"
In his 2009 bestseller, Change by Design, IDEO president and CEO, Tim Brown, with IDEO fellow, Barry Katz, evangelized design thinking to the business world. In an updated edition, to be published in March, they make the case that the practice can scale up to tackle even society’s most intractable 'wicked problems.' They’ve foreshadowed the new edition in an article in Fortune.
“Design thinkers have a responsibility to understand the outcomes they are designing for. This is a moment for 'the visible hand' of design to make intentional choices about how we wish technology to serve humanity.
“What are the problems to which designers, in partnership with the broader population of design thinkers, should be directing our energies? As we dive deeper into the 21st century, it becomes clearer that the majority of our societal systems are no longer fit for their purposes. They were designed to meet the requirements of the first machine age and have remained essentially unchanged since the 19th and early 20th centuries. What might be the impact if we can successfully apply our design-thinking skills to today’s truly 'wicked problems'?
“Through the lens of IDEO’s project work over the past decade, we can identify a cluster of dilemmas for which design has begun to chart promising solutions, even at this vast and open-ended scale.”
Article: How Great Design Could Fix the World’s ‘Wicked Problems’