Adam Zeiner

"Design" means one thing to a graphic designer, another thing to an engineer, and something else to a business consultant. Even within the design discipline, a Silicon Valley manager and a Danish joiner are unlikely to be imagining the same thing as they both talk about design.

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.

Systems analysis at the ‘front end’ of service design can help us to better understand complex social problems and identify opportunities to respond more effectively and profoundly.

1. Alignment & common language

The challenge is to connect strategy and tactics.

I worry sometimes that there’s a danger of embracing the theatre of systems thinking — using it to position services and to navigate what’s desirable, feasible and viable within the existing system — without actually reshaping the system itself.

Depending on the use case you will scope your stakeholder map differently but generally having an ecosystem map offers three important benefits: