In early 2020, organisations across the world did something that they had resisted for years. They trusted employees to work remotely, they adopted telemedicine and they digitized services in weeks. These ideas however, were not new. The technology existed, prototypes existed, the research existed. What changed was that not adopting them was no longer an option. The risk perception shifted from “if we allow remote work, the productivity would reduce” to “if we don't allow remote work, the company would shut down”. Crisis does something powerful. It makes experimentation socially acceptable and increases the collective willingness to do so. From the evolution of aviation and communication after wars, to digitized public services after COVID, transformation has often accelerated under threat.
But if threat is what forces adoption, then design isn’t leading the change, crisis is. This talk questions: How can we design systems that won’t require disaster, pain and suffering to find its courage? And as designers, can we innovate at the first sign of friction rather than at breaking points?
I believe these systemic signals usually unfold in 3 stages, instead of surfacing unexpectedly.
1. Micro-frictions: small inconveniences, inefficiencies and discomfort. (eg: a slow app or a confusing form)
2. Structural Discomfort: persistent system failures that we normalise. (eg: burnout, long wait times at hospitals, persistent traffic congestion)
3. Crisis-level Suffering: when systems collapse/break. (eg: pandemic, wars)
Level 2 is where systems begin to quietly settle into dysfunction. That’s when design intervention becomes critical, to avoid the persistent systemic failures to turn into an irreversible collapse. It’s because if we design only when things break, we are not designing for the future, we are repairing what failed and this would be a never ending cycle. The talk focuses on the need to move from reactive to anticipatory design, from efficiency to resilience and from designing products to systemic solutions. Japan offers a powerful example of this mindset where resilience is hardly ever an afterthought when it comes to infrastructure, public transport and policy systems. Denmark is another wonderful example of systemic and social resilience.
Drawing from my multi-disciplinary practice across UX/UI, visual design, game design, instructional design and conducting participatory workshops, I observed the same phenomenon where what scales is not always what is best but rather what feels more urgent. This talk would allow participants to walk away with frameworks for identifying the early systemic signals, understand how behaviours, structures and incentives interact in a system and learn how tools like speculative design, foresight and game-based experimentation can be leveraged to communicate and test critical ideas effectively.
The talk equips participants to design interventions that influences the system as a whole and in doing so, recognise their agency as designers.
