ABOUT

NextD Journal: Making Sense of Design for Complexity

Greetings 2024 Readers:

Concerned about the state of design leadership in what we saw as a rapidly changing world, we began posting on this subject in 2005. At that time we often encountered considerable resistance in the community to the notion that design methods (product, service, experience) were not exactly suited to the rising complexity of challenges found in organizational and societal contexts. Rather than help, the "design thinking" movement actually exacerbated the slow adaptation problem regarding acceptance of need for change. While that movement drove change in other communities it tended to block change in the design communities. Why change something perceived by many to be working/selling? Numerous years were consumed in that cycle but we are still here!

Along the way, we published many NextD Journal community sensemaking conversations and our second book "ReThinking Design Thinking, Making Sense of the Future that has Already Arrived" in 2020. At that time we pointed out that an emerging practice community had launched and was busy reinventing design for complex contexts. Many of the folks involved in the Rethinking Design Movement early on, were change advocates, often practice leaders, rather than institutions.

In the following year we began to see the tide finally turning as numerous realizations regarding traditional design thinking took hold, along with rising recognition regarding planet earth and complexity of challenges facing collective us. Today, there is rapidly growing interest and recognition that an internal stream of change needs to be ongoing to better sync the possibilities of strategic design with the complexities facing organizations and communities.

We are happy to have played a small role in that still evolving rethinking design transformation. NextD Journal has itself evolved. Our focus remains sensemaking around this Design for Complexity subject.

NextD Journal, NextD Academy and NextDesign Leadership Network, are part of an experimental community sensemaking initiative founded in 2002 by GK VanPatter & Elizabeth Pastor.

Humantific: ReThinking Design Thinking

Humantific: Innovation Methods Mapping

Corporate Sponsor:

Humantific: SenseMaking for ChangeMaking

[To become a sponsor of NextD Journal write to us at getready (at) nextd (dot) org.]