Human-Scale Innovation: A Systemic Framework

Instructor: Scott Matter, University of Technology Sydney

Date: Monday, September 18, 3-6pm Pacific (Tuesday, September 19, 8-11am AEST)

Location: Online

Capacity: 20

Fee: $100 USD for EPIC Members

Registration

Overview

It keeps happening: A steady stream of innovative products, services, and policies go haywire when they meet the complexity of social and ecological systems. We need frameworks to understand proposed solutions within these systems so we can design better products, anticipate impacts, make more successful decisions, and reckon with the “externalities” that narrowly scoped research and risk assessment too often ignore.

In this tutorial you will learn a participatory, ethnographic, and systemic design approach to innovation derived from Human-Scale Development. Using this successful, widely tested approach to human needs and satisfiers, you will be able to:

• Understand the relationships between human needs, satisfiers, and economic goods/services
• Map solution spaces with participatory methods
• Assess innovation proposals and anticipate unintended consequences of specific solutions
• Advocate for more equitable and sustainable innovation

Integrating Human-Scale Development into our innovation processes, from research and design to implementation and evaluation, can help to prevent unintended negative consequences and increase the chances that our interventions will lead to positive and successful outcomes.

A set of recommended readings will be distributed prior to the session to give you an initial understanding of key concepts in the framework. We will collaborate virtually in Miro during the session.

Instructor

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