Design as a discipline has a rich history of dealing with human meaning, values and emotions in a professional way. It’s the essence of the discipline. Design Thinking is a practice that has proven itself suitable for complex problems where human meaning is at stake: emotions, values, uncertainties, ambiguities play a crucial role in the way people relate to their lives and to the systems that they interact with. Art and Design have always been creative disciplines with a warm heart to embrace the complexities and contradictions of the human condition. Life is hard. Lifeworlds are messy. We know. We can handle it.
Design Thinking comes in many flavours, but all approaches have three things in common:
- A focus on human experiences in concrete situations, often referred to as ‘empathic research’.
- A conceptual analysis of human meaning that arises from the issues and situations in order to rethink and reframe issues and challenges.
- A ‘maker’ attitude of wanting to create new forms for expressing values in products, services and systems.
These are also the foundations of our curriculum at the Lifeworld Academy. We combine insights from social sciences like anthropology and psychology for analysing human sense-making in people’s lifeworlds, with the focus on creativity and innovation from art and design.