Oct 08, 2021 | by Budi Tanrim
My view on design practice
The way I see Design change over time.
I used to see design as a creative outlet—to channel some visual ideas I have. The output would be icons, illustrations, or some interfaces.
Then, Human-centered design hooked me. The idea that design should always concern about the end-users needs and desires sounds profound. It gives me a deeper meaning for what I do as a design practitioner.
Through human-centered practice, I learned how to observe people and synthesize the findings. The toolkits enable me to collaborate with multidisciplinary teams effectively.
However, lately, I feel the human-centered practice is insufficient to tackle wicked problems like poverty, overfishing, lack of access to education, climate change, and more.
We need to look from a larger perspective. For now, I believe that system thinking is one of the essential practices to learn more. There are many practices I’m excited to learn: System thinking, Theory of Change, Participatory design, Speculative Design, and much more.
In the last 11 years of my career, I’m zooming out more and more.
A chair in a room.
A room in a building.
A building in a neighborhood.
A neighborhood in a city.
A city on a planet.
A planet in a galaxy.
One of my biggest mistake was to think that Design Thinking was one holy-grail approach that can solve almost anything.
There is always something bigger. I can’t wait to learn new practices to better wrestle with wicked problems.
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