Recipes for Systemic Change - Helsinki Design Lab

34 Chapterstrong recommendations. It also happens on a very practicallevel, such as when one makes specific choices about how tophrase a sentence or visualise an idea. The desire for clarityrequires decisions to be made about which elements are givenpreference and which are downplayed or omitted withoutlosing the richness of the original thought. When done wellthese are all acts of synthesis that recombine existing bits tobuild a new whole that is more than the sum of its parts.Maintaining an optimism aboutnew possibilities and a scepticismof the givens are powerful ways toremain open to new opportunities.Putting It All on the TableStrong synthesis relies on having options to choose fromsuch that the best of each may be borrowed to create somethingnew, and the more ‘ingredients’ one hasto choose from, the richer the result. Maintainingan optimism about new possibilities and ascepticism of the givens are powerful ways toremain open to new opportunities. Like a gooddetective, the strategic designer assumes thatthey don’t know the full story and that something,or probably many things, are missingfrom the picture. In this sense there is a conscious desireto expand possibilities and question normative patterns ofreasoning and perception. Seeking a diversity of new anddifferent inputs helps complement whatever knowledge existsin a given area and contributes to the formation of a betterbig picture. Ultimately the designer seeks to understand thepatterns governing the challenge at hand.The available information may be broadened by regularlyentering a phase of active expansion of your understandingof the problem and looking to new sources, such as searchingfor analogous cases where experience may be transferredfrom another professional domain (what?), culture (who?), orgeographic context (where?). History often provides examplesof previous attempts (when?) to solve similar or relatedissues, even if the exact problem is now being phrased differently.Regardless of the source, analysing qualitative differences(how? why?) is a way of interrogating the relationshipbetween an idea and its context to understand the criticalfactors which might affect its transferability to a new context.It is best to avoid reinventing the wheel, but often the treadscan make or break an idea’s ability to gain traction in a newcontext.