Design for humans

Design Thinking encourages a human-centred perspective on innovation that is applicable to business, health, education, organizations, social innovation and other domains of life. Although popularly associated with Stanford D.School and IDEO, the roots of a creative but systematic approach to innovation lie with Herbert Simon's Sciences of the Artificial, Rittel and Weber's Wicked Problem Formulation, and a generation of American Pragmatists. These principles and attitudes demand an open ethnographic approach to understanding and designing for innovation spaces that intersects with Agile Systems approaches but is also distinctive. In this discussion I outline the key principles and exemplify with three recent projects - service design for homeless families (pro bono for RMIT competition), integrating innovation into a NZ-based SME (consultancy work), and urban design in urban Sweden for an aging population (collaborative research grant with Linkoeping University, Sweden) why it matters to understand both theory and principles