IIT’s Institute of Design (reincarnation of the Bauhaus) teaches Structured Planning for Complex Systems Design. The course is based on methods developed by Charles Owens, noted designer and consultant, who literally wrote the book on systemic design thinking called Structured Planning.

The book — yes I do mean book — could definitely use a refresh to make it more approachable and usable, but the system still makes sense. Many ID students graduate to work at IDEO and other consultancies, so I know they know the methods, even if they rarely get to employ them on project work.

Which gets to the root of the problem. As you alluded to, incentive drives change. But ability enables change. Both are vital to its realization. Incentive without ability is impotent; ability without incentive is idle.

When it comes to *real* problems of large-scale socioeconomic concern, the people incentivized by change are often not the ones capable of producing it. Issues of hunger, or climate change, or transportation have multiple stakeholders (users, non-users, influencers, etc). Designing for multiple stakeholders requires more human-centered design, not less. If a designer is actively ignoring user groups or portions of the problem, that is just negligence.

The failure isn’t in human-centered design and its methods — it’s in not applying them correctly and widely enough, across stakeholders and networks. If you see a shoddy house, you blame the architect, you don’t condemn the practice of architecture.

If we want to solve these gnarly issues, we need to align incentive and ability. We need to be more inclusive and involve all the stakeholders (communities, companies, governments…). We don’t need a new framework for design, we need a new faction of Designers.