Adam Zeiner

So, there are two kinds of competences that make up what design is: the theoretical and the practical. And we can use this as a mental model for how we think and talk about design – as a kind of philosophy for what design is, what it means to be a designer and to do design.

Embedding design thinking, methods, and tools from the outset of ecosystem development will help companies produce integrated ecosystem offerings that delight customers, stave off threats, and create new sources of value.

What I've come to recognise as core to my practice is the challenge of taking an extraordinarily complex, integrated, incomplete problem and wrapping my arms around it conceptually in a way that helps and empowers practitioners to actually do things about it.

The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across a set of intersecting but necessarily incomplete perspectives.

I like the concepts “strategy” and “tactics” to capture what these two sides of design are about. As far as I can tell this appears to be the choice of words that professional designers and design leaders use.

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.