Let's Design a New World

I think we’d all agree that the world we’ve been living in the last few years is far from optimal. In fact, we’re getting a taste of what the world might be like if we don’t make some drastic changes and make them soon. I believe that designers and design thinkers can not only help but can lead some of the change that’s required.

The Power of Design

I made the case in the Design for America keynote I gave last August and I elaborated on it in a blog post here that designers should mobilize to tackle the big bold problems of the world and do that with a bold, global, and personal perspective.

Design Challenge Wave 1

A few short months after that, the world was hit by the global COVID19 pandemic. And in collaboration with Srini Srinivasan, the president of the World Design Organization (WDO) and Rebecca Breuer, the executive director of Design for America (DFA), we brought 255 designers together from the WDO, DFA, and IBM Design communities from 33 countries and across 17 timezones to address several urgent and potential impactful challenges. The results of that work are now available on our COVID19DesignChallenge.org website including projects addressing awareness and communication, essential workers, vulnerable communities, remote learning, and healthy habits. Everyone involved in that project did awesome work and it’s made a real difference in dealing with the most urgent issues. I did a webinar interview about the project that’s now available online and I also just wrote a Medium story that goes into the details of the project as well.

Additional Challenges

Of course, there’s much left to be done in addressing the world’s biggest challenges. I believe we need to have designers use the power of design to address topics like climate change. My colleagues Adam Cutler and Susanne Jones and I presented at the Security and Sustainability Forum webinar on the topics of “Using Design Thinking to Address Global Changes, Effectively Use AI, and Collaborate on Decarbonization”. We made the point that design thinking and AI, when used correctly, can help address many challenges and, importantly, including key aspects of climate change. Similarly, while we’re in the midst of this global pandemic, I’ve also been thinking about the root causes of pandemics and how can we use design thinking to effectively start now to prevent the next pandemic. And of course, we may still experience the next pandemic and we need to use some of the work from our COVID19 Design Challenge and more to prepare for that eventuality as well. And of course, I think most of us know that we’re not going back to the old normal but rather we’re going to be entering the new normal. We’ll also need to carefully design that. And, lastly, we need to take this opportunity to do as the title of this post suggests, design a new world. Let’s design a new world without racism, inequity, and divisiveness.

Design Challenge Wave 2

I’m indebted to the WDO’s Srini Srinivasan and DFA’s Rebecca Breuer for our incredible co-leading of the COVID19 Design Challenge and to all the talented, committed, and passionate designers who worked on it. That was Design Challenge Wave 1 and i hope that we’ll again together launch Wave 2 soon in order to address the additional challenges I mentioned in this post.

I say it’s time to design a new world. Let’s do this!