From the course: Design Thinking, Social Innovation, and Complex Systems

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Infusing your design thinking with systems thinking

Infusing your design thinking with systems thinking

From the course: Design Thinking, Social Innovation, and Complex Systems

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Infusing your design thinking with systems thinking

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- I've been a designer for over 30 years and some of my best friends are designers. So don't take what I'm about to say the wrong way. We may think systemically, but that doesn't make us systems thinkers. Yes, we understand how to map touchpoints in a user's experience. And we apply ethnographic practices that generate empathy. And we often focus on solutions instead of the initial conditions that created the problem to begin with. We can get so focused on innovating ways to mop up a floor that we lose sight of where the water is coming from. Systems thinkers meanwhile understand it's better to find the tap and turn it off before doing anything else. Designers can also be so focused on details that we lose sight of larger forces at play. It's like removing the liver from the human body to study its complexity but forgetting that is connected to a body. System thinking looks not just at the micro but the meso and the…

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