Designing Structured Design Thinking Framework for Societal System Design in the Unknown Context

Abstract

Currently where everything has increased in complexity, systems designers such as a business model designer are challenged to solve ill-defined problems by creating innovations and designing societal systems. For handling such problems, design thinking has attracted attention as a methodology for solving "ill-defined" problems. However, design thinking cannot create innovations or design societal systems by itself because design thinking cannot guarantee reproducibility in a system design.In fact, design thinking is effective when applied to the systems approach process and when embedded in its processes. This paper proposes using the advantages of both design thinking and the systems approach to build a structured design thinking framework. This framework integrates the nonstructured design thinking process and the structured systems approach process. We used this framework to redesign a local community in Japan and to design a new concept of an aquarium. We further confirmed that this framework is effective.