As homo sapiens' entry in any intergalactic design competition, industrial civilization would be tossed out at the qualifying round.a ' David Orr, Earth in Mind
Design has built global brands, disrupted industries, and transformed our lives with technology. It has also contributed to the complex challenges we face today. In The Intergalactic Design Guide, business strategist and designer Cheryl Heller shows how social design can help address our most pressing challenges, from poverty to climate change.
Social design offers a new approach to navigate uncertainty, increase creativity, strengthen relationships, and develop our capacity to collaborate. Innovative leaders like Paul Farmer, Oprah Winfrey, and Marshall Ganz have instinctively practiced social design for decades. Heller has worked with many of these pioneers, observing patterns in their methods and translating them into an approach that can bring new creative energy to any organization. From disrupting the notion of experta by seeking meaningful input from many voices to guiding progress through open-ended questions instead of five-year plans, social design changes how humans relate to each other, with powerful positive impacts.
The Intergalactic Design Guide explains eleven common principles, a step-by-step process, and the essential skills for successful social design. Nine in-depth examples'from the CEO of the largest carpet manufacturer in the world to a young entrepreneur with a passion for reducing food waste'illustrate the social design process in action.
Social design is a new kind of creative leadership that generates both traditional and social value, and can change the way we all view our work. Whether you are launching a start-up or managing a global NGO, The Intergalactic Design Guide provides both inspiration and practical steps for designing a more resilient and fulfilling future.
Preface
The Answer to Everything Seeing Edges and Patterns: Scoping and Framing Past as Prologue Mastering the System
Nine Stories of Leadership by Design: Brown's Super Stores: Solutions inspired by people who need them Ruth Gates: Mixing science and social design to address climate change The Salvage Supperclub: Navigating with feedback loops Interface Net-works: Creating new models and solving problems along the way Erik Hersman: Tapping the power of limits Paul Polak: The story is in the context The Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus: Using a network to create a new future for a city Sisi Ni Amani: Communicating the way to nonviolence MASS Design: Process is Strategy
Getting from There to Here Some Things Worth Reading
Acknowledgments Notes About the Author
""The Intergalactic Design Guide is a call for entries to design our way out of the civilization we have created, by using our collective creativity to change the human condition. Readers will come away transformed by the realization that we can use the invisible forces of social design to create a future where we live in a state of mutuality with one another and nature. This is one of the most critical design books of our time.""
' Ivy Ross, Vice President of Google, Hardware Design
""This book fills the cavernous gap between our awareness and understanding of 'design thinking' and 'design doing.' The first truly useful guide for those of us working to have impact, it shares numerous case studies of people and organizations that have transformed reality by combining the skills of thinking and acting in a design context. An absolute must-read for all of us looking to change the world in our own special ways!""
' Len Schlesinger, Baker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School; President Emeritus, Babson College
""There are design problems and there are human problems. Cheryl Heller's genius is to see them as one and the same with the goal of building human capacity, not just buildings. This is the framework for designing the design process.""
' David W. Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Oberlin College
