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Showing posts from November, 2012

Design Opportunities and New Responsibilites

As a follow up to my last blog on the evolution of design, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Design Firms go Beyond Gadgets as Portfolios Expand , focuses on the opportunities that are arising with traditional design firm's advancing frontiers. However these new opportunities should also signal the need more generally for some serious reflection on the difference between designing 'stuff' or 'things' and designing 'social systems' with the understanding that every design is either a part of a system or a system itself. This understanding brings new responsibilities and accountabilities into the preparation for and practice of design. In the 60's there was a keen interest in applying the very successful 'systems thinking' approaches (a set of approaches developed beginning in the Second World War for dealing with complex and large scale technical systems) that had worked so well in technical contexts to health, education and business