The explorer’s metaphor is a series of articles that aim to provide an introduction to sensemaking and complexity management for designers, managers, and decision-makers. Read part 1 here.

You are explorers. You are navigating on (more or less) calm seas and see on the horizon an island. You don’t know how big the island is, or what to find there. If you were to land on its shore, you wouldn’t know where you are because you don’t have any point of reference yet. …

An invitation to be explorers, not just problem-solvers

We tend to see design and innovation as problem-solving spaces. This engineering and sometimes mechanistic approach is not bad in itself but brings a lot of limitations, one major being to quickly frame whatever challenge into a narrow, finite, solution.

When facing uncertainty, designers, and changemakers might feel unempowered. We look for recipes and pre-packaged generalist solutions — “the answer”, that sells an illusion of certainty through the economy of speed — to help us disambiguate our very specific contexts.

Problem-solvers look for answers. Explorers look for better questions.

Rather, challenges should elicit curiosity to bring diversity in perspectives because…

🔥 TL;DR;

The main claim is that the Design Sprint (Jake Knapp, Google) is a great tool for gaining a deep understanding of the problem context and users' motivations, if well executed. I reply that this not a matter of execution but goals and that it was never the point for the Design Sprint to gain a deep understanding of anything.

The Design Sprints' main goal is to move quickly from idea to materialization, with a minimum understanding of the problem, to validate it (the metric is speed), which make (kinda) sense in the context it was invented in (Google Ventures).

📝 Long reply

I…

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🔥 TL;DR;

The criticism made by the author here is that [Design Thinking] does not take reality (and its complexity) into account. My answer is that it was never the point.

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The main commentary on this article is both understandable and erroneous. What the author criticizes are the ‘ontological concepts’ that are supposed to represent “The Design Process” — one of the many reasons I came to think that ‘design is in an epistemological crisis’.

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Several points to note here:

1. these concepts (like the double-diamond, design thinking, etc.) were designed to communicate…

In this episode, we discuss with Pascal Briod, Head of Product at Monito, about user research and UX design in a Startup company.

From the very inception of the company to managing a growing team of UX & UI professionals, Pascal had to basically learn & practice many aspects of design & product management at the same time. This helped him build a very pragmatic approach to UX, research, and design decision.

🔗 About Monito

Monito is a Swiss-based company, specialized in money transfer provider comparison.

🔥 Monito is looking for a Senior UX/UI Designer and a Product Manager. Find out more

We should be even more skeptical when we want to believe.

The “new wave” of business management and innovation “truths” are mainly about selling a point. They often advertise models, not to help you work with reality and be less wrong, but instead are nice & shiny ideas that have the potential to sell books & conferences and, altogether, help their author gain a place in the pantheon of “those who make authority”, not because they’re necessarily right about anything but because they “convinced” others to believe in them. …

There is a lot of discussion going on about ethics in Tech, Design, innovation, etc. many of them revolve around (legitimately) the societal consequences of companies’ decisions. One of the logical steps is to look for public institutions and our politics to intervene, regulate, etc. but institutions are slow and mainly work through systematic audits & expensive fines to incentivise change in behavior. How does it even apply to innovations?

Another perspective would be to address the subject by involving organisations directly, and, for instance, see how we can transition businesses to different models that help them make better…

Hi everyone, Kevin here.

Some times ago, I proposed the concept of “space-for-action barrier” as a potentially useful description of the conditions of a context that hinders your ability to act & learn in a “necessary space” because of imposed constraints.

I recently wanted to extend it a bit further and provide a path through it, in the light of 1) some words of wisdom from D. Snowden and; 2) my own, surely limited, understanding of his work at Cognitive Edge and my endeavor through Systems & Complexity themes.

The “necessary space” here is what we think/believe we ought…