Innovation​

My approach to design innovation revolves around three themes:

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1. Replacing Certainty with Imagination

Philosopher Richard Rorty says that the quest for certainty should be replaced with the demand for imagination. That one should replace knowledge by hope. He urges us to stop worrying about whether what we believe is well-grounded and start worrying about whether we have been imaginative enough to think up interesting alternatives to our present beliefs. Remember the "I have a dream" speech? From this view, “building a better future” has primacy over the obsession about “correspondence to reality”. So, I equip designers and users with the right tools to transition from "what is" to "what if".

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2. Coupling Knowing to Change with Changing to Know

Most of us are trained to know a situation before trying to change it. I advocate for an approach that suggests trying to change a situation in order to get to know it. The father of Action Research, Kurt Lewin, says "you can't understand a system until you try to change it". In other words, participation is the best way of knowing. So, users, design team, and I create a community of practice with a bias towards action. Together we participate in telling stories, generating ideas, creating things, and running mini-experiments all with the purpose of learning through changing a situation. By the time a new architecture or design is born, we have changed, and a situation has changed for the better.

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3. Leaning into Change by Movement vs Change by Mandate

The most innovative solutions to a people's toughest challenges are inside them. To access those solutions, I tend to elevate them from subjects of research and design to partners of research and design. Equipped with a people's collective genius, the design team tackles the design challenge in its holistic form as opposed to breaking it down into "digestible" challenges; we access exotic and non-obvious as a source of design inspiration as opposed to relying on mainstream patterns; and we create solidarity because people support what they create.

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