developing new methodologies to address these challenges. The deeper crisis playing out alongside all of this is that, as a civilization, we are party to a tragedy of the commons playing out at a grand scale. The way we currently define progress is very much at odds with the health of our society and our planet. Our institutional structures, decision making systems and innovation methodologies fail to earn any confidence in our ability to ensure a sustainable future for our civilization. This creates a need for genuinely scaleable and radical innovation – and this is the need that drew me to Stanford. Have you observed identity crises, like the one you experienced, happening for other designers? I see this identity crisis in my students. We have a well-established design program here at Stanford, and our students are graduating with a Masters and Bachelors in Design. We also have a world-famous institute called the d.school, and the two form a continuum. The d.school is exposing graduate students from all disciplines to the power of Design Thinking, while the graduate students in our degreegranting Masters program in design spend two years delving deep into the nature of design activity. Graduate students from every part of the campus, as well as people from industry, are being exposed to design through this program, and essentially being told that they can be design leaders too. They go out and introduce themselves to the students on the design programme and say ‘Hello, I’m a d.leader. Who are you?’ There cannot be a clear understanding of what constitutes design expertise in a world where the rudiments of design thinking are becoming as commonplace as basic numeracy,
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and that certainly creates the potential for a crisis of identity. Our economics and business students acquire a genuinely powerful toolset through their exposure to design thinking, and yet there are also people here who have spent decades honing the ability to bring their design skills to bear at an entirely different level of expertise. The fact that Design Thinking is now enjoying widespread adoption and popularity is excellent, as long as the borders of the field expand rather than conflate. A certain amount of tension between the component parts of such a rapidly evolving field is unavoidable, and it would be a mistake to think of that field as being homogenous or advancing at a uniform pace. Design is a very heterogeneous field, and the real game seems to be around how you play with and leverage that heterogeneity. Despite this crisis in identity this is, to my mind, still an absolutely tremendous moment for designers – because we need them to create the highly innovative solutions that will have a deeply transformative impact on our world. How do you maintain design expertise when design is being democratized? At some level every human is a designer, if they are using creativity to transform undesirable situations into preferred ones. And yet there is a huge variation in the degree of expertise that these designers can bring to bear. I like to use the metaphor of sports: everyone can be taught to catch a ball, but not everyone can be an Olympic athlete. Design Thinking is certainly becoming democratized, and people with varying levels of experience, talent, education and skill are using it with different levels of expertise. However, complex challenges or difficult design tasks demand a level of