Insights and Observations – Lifeworld Academy is here!

Design Thinking: where concepts come to life

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.

Lifeworlds

A person’s lifeworld is everything that happens in their daily life and what it means to them: where they are, who they are with, who and what they care about, what they do, how they feel and think about it and how all this creates meaning in their life—or not.

Take a moment to consider where you are now. Look, listen, smell, and feel as well. This is your lifeworld. How did you end up there, where will you go next? Think about the things that occupy your mind—emotions, ideas, stories, beliefs, etc. Those are also your lifeworld. Think about how all the places, things, impressions and ideas are woven together and mix while you live you live your life. That is your lifeworld.

Lifeworlds are typically filled with things, places, people, actions, ideas, emotions and judgements as we go about doing what it is that we do in life. Understanding lifeworlds enables us to design meaningful things, services and systems, and testing what we make in lifeworlds provides the ultimate judgment: are the right values actually expressed or did anything get lost along the way?

The lifeworld is where we are happy—or not. Where we feel alive—or not. It really is that simple, even if it is rarely that clear cut: if something makes a positive difference in people’s lifeworlds, it is worth something. If it doesn’t, why bother?

Outer and Inner Worlds

The world we interact with, our experiences of those interactions, and the interpretations we create of them all mutually define each other. These are dynamic processes that unfold in time. As we live, we shape them and they shape us. Sometimes we know what we’re doing, sometimes we are lost. Lifeworlds are messy, but they are the home of the stories of our lives.

Sometimes we have agency, sometimes we don’t. An agent in a situation knows what to do and is able to act effectively. The importance of this cannot be overestimated. Agents feel that they make a difference—because they do. Your ideas about your world and your concrete experiences in it combine into a process of sense-making. What you know determines what you perceive and vice versa. Meaning in life is a dynamic process shaped by purpose, surprises, habits and everything in between.

Societies develop… or not

Most of the societies we live in need a serious makeover. The public and private systems that we interact with are rapidly becoming dysfunctional, unable to deal with the complexities of unfolding global, regional and local networked communities. The complexities at the level of systems, organisations and infrastructures are dazzling and cannot be rationally understood or analysed in useful ways anymore, let alone be predicted or controlled.

These changes force us to rethink all our systems and how they interconnect. Why do they exist? What are they for? What values do they express? From a human perspective, systems are infrastructures for our lifeworlds. If they suck, our lifeworlds suck, and life becomes hard and frustrating. If they embody or empower the the creation of meaning, they make us feel alive, inspired and creative. Creating new systems should start with envisioning lifeworlds: how do all our different activities in life come together in our lifeworlds: where, when, how, and most of all… why? Ultimately, existential questions are rooted in the lifeworlds of people. That is where they become meaningful… or not. Helpful… or not. Inspiring… or not. This is a radical change of perspective: don’t look at systems in terms of what they are supposed to do in isolation, but in terms of how they are experienced in people’s lifeworlds and what they mean for them.

We advocate a lifeworld-based approach, where different challenges come together in a string of moments and situations with many potential interrelationships. When we try to deal with a pandemic without considering current challenges in agriculture or education, we’re missing opportunities. But only when we look at these issues from within lived experiences, we can start to see promising connections and discover new strategies for meaning and integration.

Ground ourselves in meaning

Digital transformation enables decentralisation on a massive scale. New forms of communication, expression, reflection and agency can be created and experimented with very quickly. This makes the digital medium extremely flexible and fluid. We constantly invent new ways of doing things and this tends to create a sense of confusion as trying to keep up with all those changes becomes a permanent challenge. Tech is fast, tech is disruptive, tech means change.

Or does it?

On the surface, yes, it seems so. But on a deeper level, our human needs and values stay the same. We still value frienships, though we way we communicate with our friends has changed. We still value our loved ones, although the way we care for them has changed. Human values, emotions, and life goals don’t change as quickly as technology—if at all, at the deepest level. Digital technologies offer us new tools and infrastructures, but those ultimately address human values, needs, and desires that have been with us for ages . It makes more sense to ground our thinking and our design choices in a deeper understanding of human life than to focus on existing or new forms or technologies that become obsolete very quickly. Understanding who we are and what we care about enables us to make better choices in the design of future-proof systems.

Meaning is not a thing. Nor is it property of things. Nothing is meaningful or meaningless in and of itself. It is essentially a situated and dynamic relationship: something is meaningful or not in a specific situation when it makes a difference in that situation at that moment for something or someone. People find things meaningful if they address there needs, desires, beliefs, values, etc. in situations. Three lines of poetry can be extremely meaningful in a psychologically dark moment, but annoying when you’re trying to catch a train and your daily poetry app decides to notify you on the screen of your phone as you’re trying to find the right platform.

In other words, meaning happens in lifeworlds: specific situations, specific moments.

Values are expressed in lifeworlds

As we live, we learn. We learn how to do things, how to make sense of the world, of each other and of ourselves, and we learn what makes us feel good and what we find important in our lifeworld, in the world, and in life. When we realise that a certain aspect of the world is generally a good thing and we want to see more of it in the world, we have discovered a value that we care about.

Values are ultimately characteristics or features of our lifeworld that we find important. We want more of them in the world, we want to make sure they stay intact, and we are willing to sacrifice for it: time, money, our lives, sometimes even our life. This is actually a bit tricky. What if there is something that we care about, but we don’t want to sacrifice in order to nurture or cultivate it. Is that a real value? Or a lip service value?

When the lifeworld is our starting point as well as our end point for design and innovation, we don’t work from values and principles, we work towards them. Values and principles are only interesting if they can ultimately be experienced in the lifeworld—directly or through interpretation and sense making.

Also, every product, service or system expresses values. Sometimes this is explicit and intentional (cars are carefully designed to be safe and reliable), but sometimes there are (desirable or not) side effects. Many people love how a commute from work to home also gives them a private moment to mentally make the transition from a professional to a personal environment. Tables are designed to put things on, but most of them will hold a person as well when a lightbulb needs to be replaced.

Theme investigation: what is it all about?

Theme Investigation

Theme investigation or thematic analysis deals with the central question in complex projects: what is it all about? Formulating what are taken to be the most important experiential human and social issues, is basically asking ‘what is the problem field about?’ in the broadest possible sense. This opens up a field of values, meanings, insights, associations, analogies and metaphors that can be keys to unlocking meaningful new perspectives on the problem field.

Thus, thematic analysis can be seen as the conceptual soul of frame creation. The goal is to understand, and not yet to reframe or design something new. It is fun and rewarding to do, as well. Wonder and curiosity combine into a search that never fails to deliver. There is usually a strong sense of depth and insight into the social and psychological forces that need to be dealt with. So, what is it exactly and how is it done?

De-framing: naming themes from context and field

When we’re trying to understand the problem field, there is never just a single issue that everything revolves around. It is crucial at this point to move away from existing ideas and directions, into a conceptual space that is not about the specific problem, but also not (yet) about solutions. The process of identifying frames from a certain problem context or situation can be called ‘deframing’. When reflecting on the problem field and preferably also a number of issues surrounding it, you start asking ‘what is all this about?’, and you answer the question with a list of human themes that identify different concepts that contribute to human meaning: values, emotions, convictions, ideas, preconceptions, etc.

This list of themes is a field of meanings, a deeper layer of the concrete issues that are at play. It has its origins in the problem field, but once it has been identified, it can be researched ‘as such’—without any references to its original problem field, in an attempt to understand them more deeply and broadly at the same time. If ‘insecurity’ is a theme, how can you understand that concept more deeply (what is it, how does it work?), and more broadly as you look to other situations or contexts where it is important (are there examples from other life situations where people deal with insecurity?).

Reframing

Thus, when ‘deframing’, we shift our attention away from the actual situation to a set of themes. Thematic analysis analyses these themes ‘(‘fear’, ‘loneliness’, ‘insecurity’, ‘joy’, etc.) ‘as such’, with no preconceptions about future conceptual directions. When we want to understand these themes more deeply, we need to investigate, empathise, and analyse. We’ve all felt insecure at times, we know people who have struggled with it, science has researched it, artists have addressed it, etc. Thematic analysis aims to deepen the understanding of a theme, through reflecting at it from different perspectives.

After thematic analysis, this deeper and broader understanding, will subsequently allow us to identify new perspectives on the original situation. We are then ‘reframing’ the situation in search for new and meaningful possible directions. Example: If a potent source of ‘insecurity’ is ‘low self esteem’, then a new way of looking at the issues (a new ‘frame’) can involve ‘methods for improving self esteem’.

So: problem field —deframing—> list of themes that are researched —reframing—> frames.

What is a theme?

A theme is a dynamic psychological or social construct (with internal structure and dynamics), that can play a crucial role in motivating people to act in a situation. It exists in the domain of lived experience. This is crucial: a theme refers to something that can be experienced as such in life: fear and joy are human themes, but ‘social cohesion’ is not. No one ever feels ‘socially cohesive’. Social cohesion needs to be broken down into different experience themes in order to be meaningful: people may care about each other, they may want to feel at home in their neighbourhood, they may enjoy feeling accepted by others, etc. Those are experience themes that relate to the more abstract notion of ‘social cohesion’.

Themes can also be used to understand personal experience when looking for the dynamics of meaning in a certain problem field. Meaning is never static; the desire and the attempt to make sense of life are dynamic processes that constantly change and unfold. Examples: fear, loneliness, feeling appreciated, ambition. Often, groups of themes have interesting interrelationships (example: fear, risk taking, forgiveness and courage have many relationships).

Themes are conceptual constructs with different psychological and social aspects that can be closely connected. The architecture of a theme can be done at a generic level: What other concepts is it related to (e.g. relationship between ‘fear’ and ‘stress’). But it is also useful to situate it in a different contexts: how does it play out in a specific context that is different from the original context?

Theme Analysis

Below, we will discuss two aspect of theme analysis: 1. what to look for (structure and dynamics), and 2. how to actually investigate (sources of information, knowledge and insight).

What to investigate?

Themes can be analysed in terms of their internal structure and in terms of their temporal dynamics. Structure refers to a network of meanings, concepts and other themes around a theme (e.g. ‘fear’ is the opposite of ‘hope’, it is related to ‘a perceived threat’, or to ‘anxiety’). Temporal dynamics refers to the way a theme develops over time (e.g., what causes someone to BECOME afraid, what’s it like in that moment to BE afraid, what are the possible reactions to fear, how does one stop being afraid, what can possibly happen afterwards?

A. Structural aspects of themes

Themes are multifaceted. They can be spiritual, physical, social, etc. And all that at the same time. Below is a checklist of different possible aspects of themes that can be investigated. The list does not pretend to be exhaustive, but it has served us well in many different situations.

Consider the following aspects of a person’s psychology and pay attention to how they are/may be related in terms of structural relationships: what influences what? Don’t force anything, try to stick to obviously relevant factors.

Spiritual

Does a theme relate to a person’s essence or to deeply felt beliefs or values? Example: a problem like unemployment is not just a social or financial issue, but can have deep effects on someone’s sense of self or their purpose in life.

Emotional

What emotions are involved? How? Emotions are powerful components of themes. They drive people’s actions, and are often interrelated in complex ways. Example: If we want to deal with anger or violence, it is worth understanding possible relationships between emotions like fear, desire, frustration, and resentment, since violence is often the end result of complex chains or emotional patterns that need addressing at earlier stages unfolding patterns: prevention in early stages is usually more effective that repression in later stages.

Cognitive

Look at mental models, knowledge, learning processes, thinking, etc. Our beliefs, our knowledge and our memories determine how we interpret the world, and people have different capacities for and styles of learning. Our ideas about the world strongly influence the way we perceive and experience it. It is important to understand the role of knowledge and mental models in a theme, and to consider where and how learning can make a difference. Example: Self-confidence, a positive outlook on the world, or knowledge in a certain domain can help a person to feel empowered to go out and act rather than sit down and complain. Anticipation can be an effective strategy to prepare for an experience, Knowing that anger is a natural part of a mourning process can help once it occurs. Many things can be consciously learnt. The interplay between our thoughts and our emotions is strong and this is something to look out for and work with.

Motivational

What personal goals are or can be involved? What drives people to do the things they do? At what level? Does a person want more money or is money a means to an end like more freedom? Is money a source of social status? An event may trigger an emotion which may trigger a set of actions, but there may be deeper reasons that go beyond superficial emotions. Example: frustration may cause a person to become angry, but at a deeper level there may be insecurity about one’s ability to deal with certain challenges. Building confidence may then be more useful than finding ways to deal with frustration.

Physical

Does the theme have physical/biological aspects? Does the human body play a role? A theme like ‘fear’ may have obvious physical features such as increased heart rate or sweating, but themes like ‘insecurity’ or ‘vulnerability’ may relate to a person’s self image of their body. Psychologists often use the concept of ‘arousal’ as a container for a general sense of excitement, positive or negative. Hormones and neurotransmitters play an important role here: adrenalin, dopamine, serotonin, etc. Once the body starts producing a certain hormone, its effect will linger for some time.

Social

How can social relationships affect the theme? This is a very important part of theme analysis: other people and what they mean to us. Not only are we social creatures, but a deeper insight into social structures can be a very fruitful starting point for interventions in later stages of design. Friends can provide help. Strangers can make people insecure. Peer pressure is always a force to be reckoned with. Recommendations from others can make us trust someone. The list is long, and this perspective is always worth investigating.

Contextual

What external factors can have an effect on personal experience? Physical space? Specific events or circumstances? Time constraints? A feeling like ‘anxiety’ may only occur in specific situations where much is expected from a person, whereas in other situations, the feeling may be absent even though the challenges are the same. The privacy of a home creates a completely different psychological space than the streets of a city or the board room of a company. Like social relationships, contexts can be redesigned and changed, so be alert!

B. Dynamics

Causality and Intensity

How can the personal experience of a theme change over time and through which causal relationships is this possible or plausible? How does intensity influence personal experience regarding the theme? A little bit of something may be irrelevant, but above a certain threshold, things can go crazy. Are there discontinuities or is everything smooth and gradual?

Make a list of factors that have a negative or positive influence on a concept. Draw a rough flowchart-style diagram of how different factors relate to the theme in terms of modulating causal relationships. It should show crucial structure and dynamics in a simple way. Don’t make it too complicated. The goal is group inspiration, not universal truth.

How does the theme develop: what happens before, during, or after the experience of the theme? What are factors that make it develop or change?

How to investigate

Themes can be researched in different ways. Below is a list of methods that can be used. This list is not exhaustive. Any source that makes you feel you understand a theme better is a good source.

In practice, the process of theme investigation is inherently constrained by time and teams. Any theme is worth years and years of study, but in reality you will only have weeks, days, or hours. The good news is that even a single hour or afternoon will produce results you feel you can work with. Also, when doing this with a team, you can divide tasks: one persoon looks at science, one person will interview people, etc. And you discuss the outcomes together. Again, even a one hour discussion with your team will yield results and deeper understanding.

It is important to realise that theme investigation is not a quest for truth, but for inspiration. We want to deepen our understanding and our empathy in order to create something new. Once we do that, we can test it to know if it makes sense.

Scientific literature: empirical

This is not always easy, since scientific literature tends to be very specialised. Searching databases for ‘ambition’ will give thousands of results, and more specific search queries may be less useful for a more general understanding of a theme. But when a search is successful, it can be conceptually insightful, with roots in empirical research.

Philosophy: conceptual

Philosophy can be a great starting point for some themes. Some philosophers literally devote most of their thinking to specific themes. Examples: alienation (Marx), otherness (check out http://discourseontheotter.tumblr.com), responsibility (Levinas), etc.

Art (music, visual art, literature, film, etcetera): evocative

The arts are interesting because good artworks can give universal insight while being very concrete at the same time. Art is evocative, it makes you feel something, which can be a powerful addition thematic analysis. Example: The film ‘The Dead’ by John Huston is a mind-blowing excursion into the experience of ‘loss’.

Field work: contextual variation

Examine the theme in a real life context. This can be the context of investigation, but not necessarily. Other contexts may provide new kinds of insights or inspiration. In each case, the goal is to examine the theme as such, without paying attention to the original problem. Observe and talk to people!

Personal experience: personal

Consult your own experience or interview people about theirs. Have you ever experienced ‘trust’? What triggered it? What did it feel like? What were you thinking and feeling? What changed it? What did you do? How did the situation develop? Did other people play a role?

D. Tips and Tricks

When there is little time for researching a theme, some of the approaches above are too time consuming. What generally works well in a group of people with one or two hours of time is to focus on personal experiences and focus on key concepts and relationships between them. Also, if there is online connectivity, try searching for quotes about the theme. For some reason, google queries that also include the word ‘art’ yield very interesting results in very little time. Example: ‘ambition art quotes’.

Useful sites are:

http://quote.robertgenn.com/ (for art-related quotes about themes)

http://www.emotionalcompetency.com (has great flowcharts for themes like ‘fear’)

http://www.synoniemen.net, http://thesaurus.com/ (thesauri are always interesting starting points, since they always show collections of related concepts; the first (Dutch) site actually shows graphic clouds of related concepts).

Enjoy!

For more information:

Dick Rijken (dick@37c.nl)

Making values work

How do lifeworlds live in organisations? Does the CEO of BMW know what ‘fahrvergnügen’ is about? Do managers at NIKE play tennis or football? Do sales people actually believe in the products that they sell? Do civil servants know how it feels to not know where their next meal will come from? Do professionals know what their services really mean for people? Does everyone involved ‘understand’ what plays out in different internal or external lifeworlds? Do they ‘feel’ it?

How can we give different lifeworlds—with their values and emotions—a salient presence in private companies or public organisations that goes beyond lip service, focus groups or abstracted customer journeys?

An important aspect of the lifeworlds of real people is that values never come alone. They always live in a field of values and meanings where trade-offs are the norm: ‘quality’ is ‘expensive’, ‘convenience’ can be ‘bad for the environment’, ‘health’ can be at odds with ‘quality of life’, etc. Every lifeworld is literally filled with trade-offs between different values. Whereas policy makers and market analysts may think about value trade-offs at very abstract levels in order to create policies, protocols, and procedures, the reality is invariably more messy than these abstractions can handle.

Trying to balance these values at an abstract policy is hard and often leads to frustrating bureaucracy with tons of procedures, protocols, rules, regulations, and even exceptions to those to complicate things even further, that make life miserable for everyone involved. It’s often easier and more meaningful to create room for dealing with these values in specific situations—in the lifeworlds of the people involved.

Another problem is that not all values are created equal. Some values function as goals to be achieved: health, convenience, helping a friend. Others are conditional for different reasons: efficiency, accountability, safety. Some relate to general principles about how we want to live together: equality, fairness. And even others can function as preconditions, having no conceptual relationship with goal values at all. And (the name even implies it), they literally precede everything else: affordability, legality.

The bad news is that all these different kinds of values interfere with each other, often causing conditions or preconditions to seriously hamper or even completely prevent the expression of a goal value. When professionals spend more time on writing reports about what they have done (accountability) than doing what it is that they are supposed to do (effectiveness), something has gone wrong.

The lifeworld of a care worker should revolve around expressing ‘humaneness’, with everything else being secondary—it is simply the essence of that field. The lifeworld of a teacher should revolve around ‘inspiration’ of children or students, and not be tainted by complicated bureaucracy that is meaningless for them, and ultimately destroys the essence of their professional practice.

Understanding and empathising with lifeworlds is a potent medicine to ensure the blossoming of goal values. Are we still making the difference we want to make? Do we still add the value we set out to deliver? If not, what can be done? Lifeworlds provide the benchmarks for these questions.

But how and where do lifeworlds live in organisations? How can this be organised in the different layers and departments of complex organisations or—as we increasingly see—networks of organisations? Lifeworlds are the focal points of feedback loops back into an operational organisation: are we still doing the right things and does anything need adjusting? This requires a permanent dialogue about (the different kinds of) values and how they are handled at different levels of management. But how is that done? Who talks to who? And how does that happen? How do we create a vibrant dialogue about values and lifeworlds?

This involves all layers of management. Top managers need to design processes and organisational cultures that ensure that feedback loops are fluid and effective. Middle managers are responsible for making these feedback loops and different dialogues vibrant and salient in all departments. Professionals need to know why they are doing what they are doing, they need to personally believe in it and feel empowered to do what they think is necessary to make values live and report back when a value is structurally compromised.

These organisational issues are explicitly addressed in our educational approach where personal discovery is favoured over theoretical teaching, and participants are challenged to create different kinds of ‘portraits’ (of people, lifeworlds, and ideas) that can be exhibited or used in other ways to communicate insights that go beyond abstract analyses and cognitive understanding. Also, we explicitly invites organisations to send teams that span different layers of management of organisations.

‘Design’ is dead. Long live design!

Design used to be a collection of disciplines that were tightly connected to specific media and crafts: graphic design, product design, fashion, architecture, interactive media. Designers could be skilled masters of form or materials, or conceptual thinkers who added multiple layers of meaning to their concrete interventions, or anything in between, but the underlying craft (the ultimate ‘how’) was the essence of their professional identity. This is changing rapidly, however.

First of all, we are seeing cross-disciplinary collaborations: different kinds of designers in teams, designers and artists, designers and software engineers, designers and professionals from other disciplines, from other sectors in society, like care or security. Much of this may seem not-so-new, since design has a long history of working with engineers and other professionals, but there’s more to it. In the past, technological developments would basically spawn new disciplines. Architecture came from construction, product design came from the industrial production of goods, interaction from the IT revolution, service design from the way IT enabled the coupling of different interfaces to services and infrastructures. New technologies, new design disciplines, with a clear adjective preceding the word ‘design’: ‘graphic design’, ‘industrial design’, ‘interaction design’, and, quite recent ‘user experience design’ and ‘social design’.This was part of a designer’s professional identity, and it was part of design education. You would study graphic design in order to become a graphic designer and you would end up doing graphic design. Straightforward. But as more design disciplines were being created, there was a growing awareness of what connects all these disciplines together: not materials, forms, or media, but more a kind of a mentality that is focused on creativity and originality, on beauty and human meaning, on subjective interpretations (from the designer’s point of view) of problems, challenges or issues. As design moves away from the senses and from tangible products, into domains like ‘experiences’, or ‘social relationships’, notions like ‘quality’ or even ‘beauty’ become conceptual and, more than ever before, even existing design disciplines start valuing conceptual over sensorial. It’s more important for even an industrial product to ‘do the right thing’ than it is to ‘look good’.

When Rob Schröder, a well known graphic designer in The Netherlands, asked me to run the post-graduate degree in ‘graphic design’ with him at the Sandberg Institute in the mid-nineties, we decided to scrap the word ‘graphic’, and just call it ‘design’. Although we would mainly get students with a graphic design background, they were free to work in any medium. This resulted in student projects that featured many different media: not just books and posters, but also interactive software, documentaries, rituals, installations, environments, etc. We would stimulate them to collaborate with people from different fields in order to ‘get it right’ with respect to technological and organisational aspects of their work. We also noticed that the students never thought twice about engaging with different crafts and form languages. We would judge students on their ability to translate original ideas into concrete interventions; visual appearance was considered less relevant.

In the late nineties, the Design Academy Eindhoven also made an interesting choice in the way it structured its design education. Departments were created along the lines of human activity, rather than based on specific design fields or form languages: ‘man and identity’ or ‘man and leisure’, rather than ‘graphic design’ or ‘product design’. Nowadays, the departments have different names (no more ‘man and’ names for obvious reasons), but the focus remains on different realms of human life rather than on skillsets or media. The academy even struggles with the legacy of its own history in product design because it wants to move away from the design of things and objects, and into teaching design as a strategic discipline for creative and meaningful innovation in many contexts and domains.

Design has thus evolved itself as a discipline and has engaged itself stronger and stronger with problems, challenges and issues, rather than with forms and media.

This brings us to our second point: design thinking. Many other professionals and practitioners from different disicplines have become enamored with what is sometimes called ‘design thinking’, an ill-defined, but increasingly popular current trend that ranges from the use of empathic research and experimenting with prototypes to more thorough approaches to understanding and working with human meaning, such as Kees Dorst’s Frame Creation model, that Kees and I both work with and teach. The essence of ‘design thinking’ is that elements of design practice are seen as useful by professionals in other fields. This can range from simple visualisation techniques to imagine new futures to methods and techniques to more elusive phenomena like ‘an artistic mentality’. Non-designers are learning from design and adopting and adapting some of its practices. They are designing things, systems, infrastructures and government policies. Does that make them designers? Does it matter what they are called?

When we focus on the mentality aspect of design, how does that then translate into criteria for judging or evaluating actual designs or interventions? What is ‘good’ design thinking? Is there still a role for aesthetics? There is a long history of valuing design based on form quality—visual appearance has been very dominant for a long time. This even found its way into consumer culture, where a ‘design chair’ differs from a ‘chair’ because of its looks, while you can probably sit fine on either. As we start designing social processes, complex systems and infrastructures, it is clear that we’ve left the world of appearance behind. The question then becomes: can systemic interventions still be judged aesthetically? Is there such a thing as ‘systemic beauty’? My answer to that question is ‘yes, there is’. There is beauty everywhere, in every discipline, in every sector of society. It is not always (read: rarely) considered relevant or worthy of pursuit, but it does exist. Mathematicians can marvel at elegant proofs that are simple and at the same time powerful. I’ve had discussions with school teachers about the beauty of education, where they told me that when they witness a child ‘getting it’ after they have just explained something, they can feel elated, as if time and space disappear for an instant. If that is not an aesthetic experience, I don’t know what is. Civil servants may talk about government policies in terms of ‘ugly’ or ‘beautiful’. Care workers very often talk about their work in similar terms—that it is beautiful to help people. Not just humane, or effective, but ‘beautiful’.

These two developments force us to rethink what design is. The field itself has moved from media to meaning as it started to focus on challenges and issues (inside-out), and other professional domain are actively seeking new ways of dealing with complex problems and issues (outside-in) and are turning their attention to design as well. This is what happens when design moves away from form and defines itself by the mentality with which it approaches problems and challenges. Forget about ‘design’ ‘looking beautiful’, look for more conceptual kinds of beauty when it comes to designing systems, organisations or infrastructures. When is a systemic intervention beautiful? As with visual appearance and more traditional approaches to aesthetics, ‘beauty’ is impossible to define. It is, however, easily recognizable when it manifests, however intangible it may be. I believe that the main challenge for design education is the nurturing of this aesthetic sensibility and the ability to translate it into the design of… well… anything, really. It is not a body of knowledge, or a set of skills, it is a mentality with ‘beauty’ as a core value to fight for.