Understanding macro forces and trends' impact on communities is crucial. Analyzing systems contextually reveals opportunities for innovation, driving growth and value creation through systemic design principles.

Re-Thinking Systems is a platform dedicated to advancing knowledge and practice at the intersection of systems, design, and strategy. Our work focuses on enabling large-scale transformations by collaborating with changemakers—whether corporations, NGOs, investors, entrepreneurs, or government agencies—to better understand how global macro forces and trends impact communities and shape new opportunities for growth. By applying principles of complex adaptive systems, we reveal how designing at the intersection of systems can drive innovation, value creation, and the emergence of new economies.

Our approach involves strategically analyzing products and services in the broader context of systems. We observe offerings and define the everyday infrastructure in place, considering the problem space and the opportunity to intervene in the system. The principle guiding questions include:

How do interactions between agents create context and consequently, systems?

How are new system trajectories influenced and designed?

How are agents within complex spaces of innovation enabled to have politics?

How are infrastructures governed through the common pool of resources, providing agency and politics for non-human agents?

How can we communicate the new system in place and articulate the opportunity space?

How does redefining new agendas and goals impact the design of products and infrastructures?

How do the flows of things, capital, and resources through systems determine the overall performance of the system?

  • Carlos is the Charles L. Owen Professor in Design at the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech, where he teaches graduate courses and advises doctoral students on the strategic use of design capabilities in complex spaces of innovation. He is also the director of the PhD program at ID.
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  • Deaa is a design expert, who blends academia with practical design consultancy. He co-founded the design program of Jordan University of Science and Technology. His expertise spans strategic choice-making in the energy, mobility, health, and food sectors. Engaging as an advisor contributed to design consultations and tech startups. His PhD work is on studying the transformation of public infrastructures into private platforms and vice versa, focusing on sustainable, equitable, and intelligent design outcomes like EV charging and cashless payments.
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  • Jessica is an expert in equity-focused design practices, design management pedagogy, and creative processes. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. Her research and professional career focuses on designing for equitable economies, framing equity as an innovation driver, and developing inclusive design management pedagogy.
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  • Andre is the CEO of Leap and an Associate Faculty of Design at Johns Hopkins University and is affiliated with Brown University School of Public Health. Former Deputy Director of the D-Lab at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which he co-founded in 2019, André began his career in design as a PhD Researcher at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech while also helping create the school’s Action Lab.
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  • Jordan is a Capital Designer and Partner at Fuse Strategy, with 15 years of experience working in, and with, some of the world's largest institutional investors. His research investigates how design can influence institutional investing via Capital Design. He previously led strategy and innovation roles in Investing and Pensions at OMERS.
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