Levels of thinking

Bruce Mau believes we have to redesign the car into a whole new economy.

Of course, the process is slow and messy, corrupted by vested interests, inhibited by technological challenges, and imperfect in its environmental implications!

But change is happening, in the right direction. And despite appearances, it’s happening extraordinarily fast.

Problems are never discrete things; you cannot take a problem out of its context and expect to solve it satisfactorily. You have to expand the brief and think about the problem in the context of its entire ecology.

Once you articulate this ecology, you can design at a higher level of complexity. This leads to a rapid expansion of possibility, because the solution you’re looking for may lie in entirely other domains to the expected ones.

As designers, we must always be ready to shift our levels of thinking. The larger the view, the greater the optimism and the better the potential outcome.