Unified Theory of Design Thinking for Social Systems (thanks to d_school at Stanford)

I recently attended a 6-day course Designing for Social Systems at the Hasso Plattner d_school at Stanford University. We sent at team from our Wellness initiative at the University of Colorado Department of Medicine, cutely named “WellDOM” (more on this in a future post). It was … a mind blower.

What is design thinking and why is it so cool?

It is a system of thinking that both expands and focuses creative thought.
It encourages curiosity and diving into the ethnography of individuals
It also encourages thinking about positive and negative influences at many levels of social systems
It actively encourages play, physical manipulation of prototypes and sticky notes to build a joint vision
It uses storytelling, rapid cycle development, ‘what if’ and ‘how might we’ statements to spark ideas.
It is FUN.

I’ve been thinking and digesting what I learned over the past few months and came up with the graphic above. I’m a visual thinker, and although it is quite cluttered, I think it finally encapsulates the scope of what I now appreciate to be Design Thinking for Social Systems:

It is Human-Centered (focused on emotion, story, experience), the inner yellow circle
It is Systems-Aware (complex social systems impact your success), the outer blue circle
It is Strategy-Focused (keep your end-goals in mind)
The inner and outer circles interact, and the strategy lane underlies the whole group of activities.
There are perhaps 4 dozen specific activities that allow you dive deeply into every part of this diagram, in your pursuit of a creative, lateral-thinking solution to complex, ambiguous problems.

Don’t wait! Take one of these courses! And start applying it today!