A true democracy starts by separating state and bad science.
National diplomacy strategies are usually focused on promoting one's interests against others' interests. By emphasizing the global 'we' rather than the national 'I' in the climate change debate, COP 21 proved to be a case in point for a change of lenses.
The debate on climate change has been tainted by its excessive concern with individual and national interests, short-termism, and lack of solidarity in face of global threats.
A structured design approach can heighten the hit rate in the fuzzy front end of innovation processes in public and private sectors.
Design has become a universal medium for expressing ideas, raising fundamental questions, and addressing social challenges.
Being design-led means designers take ideas from the abstract to the concrete, from potential to real value.
Neoliberalism became the leading economic ideology in the U.S. and in the U.K. during Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's mandates. In this way, the leaders of the free world offered a viable solution to the economic crisis at the time: competition, deregulation, outsourcing, to name a few buzz words that have since become common place.
Looking at the numbers, the transatlantic slave trade matches the Holocaust in horror - maybe even without counting subsidiary effects like internal strife and deaths inflected on the continent, death during transport, death during ownership, collapse of African economies, and such.
Obviously, not all migration relates to global warming, but the correlation is higher than most would think.
Growth is not the end-all-goal of politics, but it is one of the most compelling deliverables.
When democracies don't deliver growth, alternatives seem more attractive.
Citizens have long been easily influenced by the opinions of others and sought social proof, but social media have amplified the phenomena to unprecedented heights. As digital devices permeate every aspect of our lives, it has boosted the way in which information can distort truth.
Democracy is not just about voting but about informed voting. If democracy doesn't have access to reliable sources of information and instead relies on social proof, then there is no way of distinguishing between junk evidence and actual knowledge.
Design has long gone from tinkering and sketching of auteurs in isolation to a powerful catalyzer of growth.
I believe that to further strategic growth and development via design, we need to have a set of public design policies.
From NASA putting a man on the moon to DARPA developing what later became the Internet, the U.S. government, through a host of different public agencies, has provided direct financing not only of basic research but also public venture capital; both Apple and Tesla have received direct public funding.
