Design Strategy

Design Strategy
Author: Nancy C. Roberts
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2023-11-14
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262376598

A new approach to addressing the contemporary world’s most difficult challenges, such as climate change and poverty. Conflicts over “the problem” and “the solution” plague the modern world and land problem solvers in what has been called “wicked problem territory”—a social space with high levels of conflict over problems and solutions. In Design Strategy, Nancy C. Roberts proposes design as a strategy of problem solving to close the gap between an existing state and a desired state. Utilizing this approach, designers and change agents are better able to minimize self-defeating conflicts over problems and solutions, break the logjam of opposition, and avoid the traps that lock problem solvers into a never-ending cycle of conflict. Design as a field continues to grow and evolve, but Design Strategy focuses on three levels of design where “wicked problems” tend to lurk—strategic design (of private and public organizations), systemic design (of networked and overlapping economic, technical, political, and social subsystems), and regenerative design (of life-giving realignment between humanity and nature). Within this framework, Roberts presents refreshingly interdisciplinary case studies that integrate theory and practice across diverse fields to guide professionals in any domain—from business and nonprofit organizations to educational and healthcare systems—and finally offers hope that humanity can tackle the existential challenges we face in the twenty-first century.

Transforming Public Policy

Transforming Public Policy
Author: Nancy C. Roberts
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1996-02-12
Genre: Education
ISBN:

This work is targeted at practitioners and researchers who pursue large-scale system change involving multiple organizations and hundreds of people. It looks at how radical change can be achieved in public policy by "change agents"--Often people outside government who push for change using certain policy entrepreneurship and innovation tactics. The authors' ultimate aim is to build an understanding of radical change in open systems - systems without clear boundaries that can cross group, organizational, regional, even national boundaries. The authors follow a single case - educational reform through public school choice in Minnesota - and its six policy entrepreneurs over a five year period to determine the dynamics of radical system-level change.