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To compare discourses related to different ways of thinking, a bibliometric analysis was performed on the Dimensions database of research documents. Terms related to 78 ways of thinking were ranked according to the number of documents containing them over the last five years (2020 to 2024). Twenty ways of thinking were subjected to further analyses, examining (i) those that are most prevalent (with the top five being critical thinking, design thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking...

This blog launches a new co-design toolkit to support the development of services for early years. The co-design toolkit is a practical set of resources created to enable local authorities and communities to design public services together. It has been

For about 15-20 years, a rather small-yet growing-community of designers started getting involved in public policy innovation and public problem solving activities. Those design activists (willing to work for the common good, public welfare and social justice) have decided to apply their design skills, tools and methods in order to help public authorities of all levels (from village, to city, metropolis, national governments, or EU commission, etc.) reset & solve public problems and/or fix...

Essential how-to guidance for government product managers and digital teams.

Organising for Systems Innovation at Scale Our team at Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation have been experimenting with and evolving a Challenge-led Innovation Approach (based on Mission-oriented approaches developed by Mariana Mazzucato at UCL IIPP and others internationally). We are using this approach to guide the way we work internally and engage with our systems innovation partners. We’ve facilitated intensive Re:Treats, worked with government bodies, businesses and civic...

Many readers recognise and understand that complex is about as simple as it gets for major policy and management. This guide is for those unwilling in the Anthropocene to shrink back into the older platitudes about ‘keep it simple’ and ‘not to worry, we’ll scale up the analysis later on’. This guide offers key concepts, methods, counternarratives, and analogies that recast major policy and management issues in ways that do not deny their complexity but help render them more tractable for action.

Nearly all challenges in international development tend to be complex because they depend on constantly evolving human behaviour, systems, and contexts, involving multiple actors, entities, and processes. As a result, both the discovery and scaling of innovations to address challenges in development often involve changes in system behaviour or even system-level transformation. This is rarely a linear process over time and can result in unexpected outcomes. Existing evaluation techniques...

The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it...

Outside of community-led design projects, most participatory design processes initiated by a company or organisation maintain or even strengthen power imbalances between the design organisation and the community on whose purported behalf they are designing, further increasing the absencing experience. Radical participatory design (RPD) is a radically relational answer to the coloniality inherent in participatory design where the community members’ disappointment is greater due to the greater...

What is systemic design? Systemic design is the acknowledgement of complexity and interconnectedness throughout the design thinking and doing process. It is both a mindset and a methodology - considering the structures and beliefs that underpin a challenge. It asks both designers and non-designers to radically reimagine and create new ways of living. The climate and biodiversity crises, and associated social injustice, are the biggest challenges facing humanity today, and so design must...

Systemic Design Toolkit Our way of putting the Systemic Design Framework into practice. It is for people who want to use design to address the climate emergency, but who find that their current methods and ways of working are insufficient for the complexity of the challenge. The toolkit contains 11 tools that sit across the systemic design stages, helping you to adopt a systemic approach.

This chapter reviews key literature and concepts relating to the co-creation of digital public services. For this task, it is firstly important to consider what kind of digital public services may be suitable for co-creation. In order to do so, the first section of this chapter defines what a digital public service is (e.g. with respect to different types of service providers, different types of services and service delivery) and considers what kind of digital public services allow for...

This open access book attends to the co-creation of digital public services for ageing societies. Increasingly public services are provided in digital form; their uptake however remains well below expectations. In particular, amongst older adults the need for public services is high, while at the same time the uptake of digital services is lower than the population average. One of the reasons is that many digital public services (or e-services) do not respond well to the life worlds, use...

How can we design and build digital technologies to support people in poor and low resource environments to achieve their objectives? And how can we do this inclusively and ethically, while considering the complexity of their living and working environments? This is the central question in my research. One of the grand challenges of international development cooperation is to make digital technologies available for social and economic development of poor regions of the world. To achieve...

La pandemia de la Covid-19 ha brotado súbitamente en un momento de transición para las instituciones y organizaciones sociales de medio mundo. Cuando aún no se había superado la crisis de confianza de la última década entre los ciudadanos y los gobiernos, en un momento de gran impulso de las iniciativas de gobierno abierto, planes de innovación y transformación digital, para hacer más democráticas y eficientes las administraciones a través de programas políticos encaminados a configurar un...

A pandemia da Covid-19 surgiu de súbito num momento de transição para as instituições e organizações sociais de meio mundo. Antes ainda de se ter ultrapassado a crise de confiança da última década entre os cidadãos e os governos, num momento de grande impulso das iniciativas de governo aberto e de planos de inovação e transformação digital para tornar mais democráticas e eficientes as administrações através de programas políticos encaminhados para configurar um novo contrato social, verde e...

This working paper compares six of the most prominent adaptive approaches to emerge over the past two decades. Three come from the world of innovation, largely in the private sector (agile, lean startup and human-centred design), and three from the global development sector (thinking and working politically, forms of adaptive management and problem-driven iterative adaptation). While all of these approaches are valuable when used in the right context, practitioners may be perplexed by the...

Your awesome model doesn’t get to serious scale unless others replicate it, too. Here’s how to make it happen.

Daunting social problems need scalable solutions. Here’s how to know if you’ve got one.