Recipes for Systemic Change

The last few years have brought growing worldwide interest in applying design methods and design thinking to social and public policy challenges. At their best these methods catalyse people to see issues and possibilities in a fresh way. They spark creativity and help us to spot the possible connections between things, which so often become obscured by the silos of daily life which dominate governments and businesses alike. This is intended to be a hybrid between a philosophical operations manual and an operational philosophy. We hope it to be thought-provoking as well as useful, but most importantly we hope that this book will inspire you to share your own experiences with the emerging community of strategic designers and other related practitioners, such as those in the social innovation community, who are motivated to find their role in tackling large-scale challenges. This is our attempt to open-source the Helsinki Design Lab Studio Model. In this book we’re opening up the ‘source code’ of the HDL Studio Model so that our work might also be useful to anyone else who is struggling with the same issues. The question we’re trying to answer is how the design studio might be used to deliver strategic input on hard problems.

Read