Professor Anne-Laure Fayard is Chaired Professor in Social Innovation
"Revisiting Design Thinking: Embracing a Critical Design Stance"
ABSTRACT - As we are faced with increasingly complex social challenges, a growing number of non-for-profit organizations, governments, and international agencies are turning to design thinking. The notion of “designing for good” has become a trend over the past decade, leveraging the tools of the creative problem-solving approach known as design thinking. Design thinking– also labelled human-centered design, a variant particularly appealing in the social sector–purported to be particularly well suited to addressing complex social and environmental issues, attracting many in social innovation and international development organizations in search of disruptive innovation to “wicked problems” (Buchanan, 1992). At the same time, a wealth of critiques has emerged about design. In this talk, building upon a paper co-authored with Sarah Fathallah and recently published in Stanford Social Innovation Review, I will discuss some current shortcomings of design thinking as well as proposed potential alternatives. At a time when critical thinking is under attack, it’s crucial that design disavows the promise of the silver bullet. Design thinking has shown that it isn’t one, but no single other alternative can be either. Hence, rather than an attachment to a set of methods, we invite designers to be committed to a critical stance, which is relational, reflective and politically committed.
BIO: Anne-Laure Fayard is Chaired Professor in Social Innovation at NOVA School of Business and Economics. She coordinates the DESIS (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) Lab @ NOVA SBE. She is also a Visiting Research Faculty at New York University. Before joining NOVA SBE, Anne-Laure spent 15 years at New York University, where she created the Design Lab @ NYU Maker Space. Prior to NYU, Anne-Laure was faculty at INSEAD in Singapore and France. She has held visiting positions at the Center of Sociology of Innovation at Ecole des Mines in Paris, Imperial College Business School in London and at the London School of Economics.
Anne-Laure is an ethnographer of work, whose interests involve collaboration, technology, innovation and design. Her work has been published in several leading academic such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science and Harvard Business Review. She is also the author with Anca Metiu of The Power of Writing in Organizations and has co-edited with Raza Mir The Routledge Companion to Anthropology and Business.
She is passionate about human-centered design that she teaches, researches, and practices. Her research as well as social innovation projects has been frequently highlighted in major newspapers and magazines such as New York Times, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian and Le Monde.
Details:
Type: Zoom
Time: Tuesday, June.4,2024 from 10:00 to 11:00 AM
Zoom Link: https://ivey-uwo.zoom.us/j/4466898079
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