Design is a living and evolving practice, continuously impacted by what’s happening in the world. But while society, technology, and the environment are rapidly and dramatically evolving, we designers keep relying on the same tools that were established in the early stages of our discipline, with little questioning or challenging to acknowledge whether they are still fit for the job.
Through this workshop, we mean to engage an audience of designers into a mutually challenging, hands-on dialogue on how to question our most rooted tools, methods, and ways of thinking, such as Journey mapping, How Might We, Empathy mapping, Business model canvas or others.
What are some problematic aspects in the way we currently use these tools and methods to frame people’s needs, behaviours, and identities in our practice? What better approaches can we find to describe and design their experiences? How can we mindfully continue pushing forward the design discipline?
We will start with an introduction on the origin and role of design tools, and concrete examples of how we are evolving our design practice through new and evolving methods (e.g. Mindsets), frameworks (e.g. Do No Harm) and lenses (e.g. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). We will then propose a model for challenging our go-to approaches, and we will test it together, trying to transform and evolve the way we work.
Finally we will converge on some concrete steps on how to bring these “new” tools—and the tools to challenge the tools—into our projects, our companies, our clients, our practice.
