Very nice reminder to all designers!

Bill Moggridge (IDEO co-founder) illustrated the bigger and bigger scope of human-centered design in his book in 2007 “Designing Interactions”.

And Peter H. Jones (a design consultant & academics) illustrated Design 1.0 to 4.0 in his book in 2013 “Design for Care”.

How designers can address complex sociotechnical problems is proposed by this academic paper (open access) by DA Norman and PJ Stappers, emphasizing mutually incompatible constraints among multiple systems as well as the designer’s need to be closely involved during implementation. Designers need to be “muddling through” and perform incrementally, navigating — indeed — political issues, too. CMU Design School provides a more radical howto by proposing a focus on the changemaking, by using social science theories for systemic change. See their seminar in Transition Design. Stanford d.School also proposed HCD + Systems thinking.

The required change is not just spatial but also temporal. Designers need to understand both scale of social impact and scale of time to see the change to happen. This helps identifying the multiple issues interacting with each other, in order to prioritize which issue can be more immediately addressed, which issue’s smaller social impact can incrementally lead to bigger impact, etc.

Just my 2 cents.