Art is an expression of our ideas into forms that are meant to provoke. Design is what transforms that provocation into service. Both are exercises in balancing freedom with constraints. I'm writing this having just watched a disturbing YouTube investigation into the role of AI-generated copies and publishing by the educational entertainment channel Fern. Fern blends investigative journalism with statistics-laden, data-driven, education into documentary-style YouTube videos, which are seen by millions. They carefully expose and illustrate how unscrupulous actors are basically stealing, copying, and manipulating their own content to serve their financial needs, while generating videos that are either misleading, highly incomplete, or outright false in their claims.

Remember the Nintendo Wii?

Design thinking needs rethinking about ethics, tools, and models.

Generative AI allows us to create content, but it doesn't allow us to become something more. A look at how design and human creation transform us and how AI is taking that from us if we let it.

Travelling offers up some of the clearest examples of how complexity, connection, and coordination intersect. Consider how many relationships, represented in networks, embodied practices, and individual nodes (people, transactions, units) are involved in a flight from one place to another. It's an amazing feat when you think of how often things go relatively smoothly and straightforward, despite the many things that are going on and can happen. What I love about using the travel example is that it represents one of the most difficult aspects of complexity and systems, which is the fact that many complex systems have within them elements of simplicity, complicated arrangements, and chaos alongside those that are complex.

Design Thinking Mode Design Thinking is the process we use to conceive our products and guide the process of design. This is the design journey. The benefits of engaging with design thinking go bey…

When the online mechanisms for fostering professional networking fail, what do we do? Could the lowly email newsletter be the key to building the trust needed to network well and maintain what was once lost from the platforms who no longer serve our needs.

The idea of entanglements is central to understanding complexity in systems and the knots that they generate The idea of entanglements and systems is at the heart of our understanding of complexity…

What if we designed for seasons, not static systems? A living systems approach to creating better services and systems means designing like gardeners, not engineers. The implications for health systems is enormous.

Explore the power of two critical questions in design to improve products and services effectively. Discover more in our article!

Learn the fundamentals over lunch

Explore the SWOT analysis tool: its history, applications, strengths, and criticisms in strategic design. Unlock your team's potential today!

Explore how strategic design can address classroom complexity and transform educational practices for better learning outcomes.

Looking at the evolving nature of writing in the age of AI, highlighting concerns over diminishing human creativity and independent authorship. Through examples from various writers, I illustrate how AI's influence compromises the authenticity of content creation. Ultimately, the piece emphasizes the importance of preserving personal expression in creative endeavors.

Explore how design-driven evaluation empowers intentional change in complex systems, enhancing learning and impact within diverse fields.

Change involves navigating our expectations and perceptions then taking action. It might also involve getting pushed from those behind you.

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Discover how Cense leverages strategic design to drive health innovation and create impactful solutions for organizations. Book a free consultation today!

Among the many definitions of health, few describe how we create and relate to it within a dynamic world, leaving us with models that put the onus on individuals, not systems. That requires change. This is one of many "thinking through writing" posts that I'll be publishing as I journey through how I see design for health. This is not about shaping biology, clinical treatments for illness, nor is it about the social determinants of health. Rather, it's on how we shape the services and systems that health professionals, advocates, and individuals use to…

Spending time designing a health system that is entirely hypothetical can provide insight into how we shape the health systems we have in ways we wouldn't have otherwise. Theoretical exercises aren't usually top of the list of what most leaders want to spend time doing. That presupposition might require some qualification. Let's start with a question: What If We Could Design Our Health System From Scratch? This was the provocation that was put forth to a group of health-minded individuals at a recent Impact Talks event organized by Kindler & Company…

When undertaking strategic planning for organizations operating in the complex space of health and human services, how do you account for creating meaningful ways to learn and adapt? Developmental …

I Want To Believe I Can Tame Complexity Quickly Among the great lies that people tell is that they can tame complexity through technical means, quickly, when the truth is much slower than that. Hot takes, tips and tricks, and simplistic models of AI, data, governance, and decision-making aren't going to solve complexity. Complexity won't be solved. Some complex problems might get solved, but most won't, although some problems might evolve and transform into something else. You might be able to manage some of the effects of complexity (we do this all the time), and there will be times it will overwhelm your capacities (which also happens).

In an earlier post, we looked at what classroom complexity might look like if we peeked in to a typical school. I introduced some of the many scenarios that play out in schools and how some might be connected through the myriad intersections that comprise the current classroom context. In this post, I’m providing a way through it. I’m not providing specific answers (I don’t have them, nor do I know of any that are worth pursuing as a matter of policy). Instead, I'm drawing on what we know about…

Discover how Cense leverages strategic design to drive health innovation and create impactful solutions for organizations. Book a free consultation today!

Milan design week might have reached peak brandification this year, but there were still plenty of outstanding independent exhibitions to be found in the margins. Below, the Dezeen team shares nine of...

Classroom complexity is a term creeping into the educational policy landscape. With it, we're seeing many ideas about solutions when what we might need are different ways of thinking. If you have been to school as a teacher, parent, or student recently, you'll know that the classroom isn't the same place it once was. As a teacher, I can relate. I train graduate students and I've seen an enormous cultural shift within the classroom -- whether that classroom is online or in-person. I have friends who are teachers and some with children and I hear the same thing: …

Preparedness and strategy need to be fit for purpose. This article looks at a recent event in Finland that parallels COVID-19 and illustrates how we need to think of health systems strategy as a dynamic, complexity-ready process, not a static plan.

Leaders might assume that LLMs are able to offer a kind of unbiased, outside perspective. But new research found that leading LLMs have clear biases when it comes to strategy and consistently recommen...

Massive signals everywhere that are noise on their own. AI and our new automated culture of writing and production is making it hard to know what is signal, what is noise.

Finding and Setting System Parameters for Innovation