Adam Zeiner

At Design Council, we work across the design economy, and — even though we have specialisms in architecture & the built environment, social innovation & business innovation — we have Experts whose design work goes well beyond that and our research and frameworks should be something all designers can use.

“Rethinking Users” authors Michael Youngblood and Ben Chesluk alongside illustrator Nadeem Haidary redefine “users” to design for an ecosystem.

...we’ve been trained to think of organizations as homogenous and mechanistic, with a clear set of rules, a command-and-control structure, and the ability to leverage hierarchy to get things done quickly by issuing top-down directives to reallocate resources to meet objectives.

For those that aren’t familiar, a boundary object is an artefact (thing, concept, discourse, process, etc.) that can hold a diversity of incomplete perspectives and enable communication and collaboration amongst those stakeholders despite that incompleteness.

The new ecosystem design will need to start with the customer’s view and deliver on the agreed-upon value proposition and experience. To achieve this, organizations can consider three domains: consumers, sectors and partners, and products and services. Design has a central role to play in each.

This matters because services designed and optimised for the current system can have the effect of further entrenching it — by introducing additional forces and interests to ‘keep things the way that they are’. This isn’t to dismiss their value — systems change is slow and uncertain, and in the meantime it’s essential we deliver the most effective... See more