Keynote Hubert Rampersad @ The Design Lab, University of California, San Diego

Prof. Hubert Rampersad conducted a live webinar on “Eco-Design Thinking for Personal, Corporate and Social Innovation” for the prestigious Design Lab at University of California, San Diego on 20th April, 2022.

The UC San Diego Design Lab at the University of California is the home of interdisciplinary design. It’s focused on providing research, education, and community interaction to advance best practices in human-centered design and to address complex problems facing society. The UC San Diego Design Lab works on major societal issues, such as large-scale education, automation, healthcare, visualization of complex phenomena and data, social interactions, citizen science, and the ethical issues that are of ever-increasing importance. For the Design Lab, design is a way of thinking, addressing the core issues, always taking a systems point of view, emphasizing the role of people in the complex systems of the modern world. The UC San Diego Design Lab is the world center for excellence in innovative design research and education.

Prof. Rampersad also conducted a guest lecture in London for the prestigious Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) and Global Innovation Design (GID) students (two joint programmes with Imperial College London and the prestigious Royal College of Art) on Monday 21 February, 2022 in the main lecture theatre at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, London. Royal College of Art is the world’s most influential postgraduate institution of art and design.

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Details about the topic:

Eco-Design Thinking for Personal, Corporate and Social Innovation

“Empathy is just what is needed to make the world a better place for all animals and humans. Personal integrity is the foundation of empathy, in which there is no room for ego”. — Hubert Rampersad

Today’s complex world requires sustainable design & innovation. This related webinar is based on Dr. Hubert Rampersad’s new book “Eco-Design Thinking for Personal, Corporate and Social Innovation; How to Become a Disruptive Eco-Design Thinker Like Elon Musk“.

Please read his related articles “How to Design a Better World” and “Design For Sustainability“. “Sustainability is a holistic and ethical system in which humans and nature can exist in harmony for a very long period of time”– Hubert Rampersad

Remember what Einstein said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”. This new way of thinking entails eco-design thinking. Rampersad: “Eco-design thinking is the creative process of empathizing with yourself, the end user, and the environment“. Traditional design thinking approaches are not suitable for designing a better world. There are so many products badly designed, such as the rollout of vaccines in America, Citibank that lost $500 million because a user-unfriendly tool for managing loans, and the $2 trillion F-35 project. This Figure shows the top-10 causes of bad designs.

Traditional design thinking approaches lack sustainability because they are neither authentic nor holistic. Moreover, they are mainly process-driven, and focus on analytical thinking, such as how to follow design steps, organizing cozy meetings, how to complete related tasks in certain order, and how to use design tools. These approaches do not inspire imagination, creativity, and innovation sustainably.

For designing a better world, sustainably, you need a new design approach in which personal innovation, personal disruption, and personal integrity are embedded. It also requires eco-innovation that makes the link to personal innovation, corporate innovation, and social innovation. “Today’s complex world requires sustainable innovation. Traditional innovation approaches are not sustainable because they are not holistic. They are cosmetical, theatrical and cozy, instead of sustainable. They don’t fit in my definition of real sustainability: Sustainability is a holistic and ethical system in which humans and nature can exist in harmony for a very long period of time”— Hubert Rampersad.

The speaker will also elaborate on his new eco-innovation model that promotes eco-innovation through eco-design thinking.

Eco-design thinking for sustainable circular economy starts with personal innovation. It is about time to understand that without personal innovation you cannot be an emphatic eco-design thinker, and corporate innovation and social innovation will be cosmetic. Eco-design thinking includes imagination, which is a combination of convergent and divergent thought, and creative intuitive thinking. Creative intuitive thinking is iterative and cyclic, although analytical thinking is linear. Designing a better world requires a new way of thinking. The difference between traditional way of thinking and eco-design thinking is shown in this figure. It’s about a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset.

In his new book, the speaker has introduced an eco-design thinking model for designing innovative products and services that reflect all aspects of life effectively. Eco-design thinking is an iterative, incremental, cyclic, and concentric model of exploring, ideating, prototyping, and executing. The different stages in the eco-design thinking model often form iterative loops and do not necessarily follow any sequence. Each iteration reveals new insights. This process should be repeated until the designer’s and customer’s issues are on an acceptable level. Rampersad: “Eco-design thinking is a circular and iterative process that never ends; it’s a continuous process of testing and refining your design, while empathizing with yourself, the user and the environment”.

Eco-design thinking starts with his personal disruptive innovation concept to understand, explore and (re)design oneself before solving the design problem. First, you need to inculcate disruptive skills and become innovative and empathic in order to be able to develop innovative designs for the end users. Before you start designing products, you must first design yourself. Disruptors are innovative entrepreneurs and visionary idealists. To become a disruptive eco-design thinker like Elon Musk, you need to get a good understanding about yourself and design issue before exploring the design problem. Personal disruptive innovation (designing yourself) is based on the speaker’s 4 stage model:

Read “4 Steps to Become Resilient and Cultivate a Growth Mindset“. This system unleashes your creative potential, creates new personal opportunities, disrupts your existing target market, and enables you to make a significant social impact. It is based on a framework and roadmap to build resilience, explore and (re)design your life, and develop your personal eco-design thinking brand and personal integrity. “The higher your personal integrity, the better your attentiveness, the better your empathic skills, the better your design, and the happier your customer”- Hubert Rampersad.

Moreover, it entails spiritual and emotional intelligence, unlocking the creative potential within you, and disrupting the normal course of your life. By applying the personal disruptive innovation model according to this PDAC-cycle, you will able to become visionary, imaginary, innovative, creative, and empathic:

Personal disruptive innovation will not only help you reframe your thinking but also transform yourself to become a disruptor. In this way you will not think outside the box, you will think like there is no box. It is about reinventing yourself, unleashing your creative potential, and changing your life by developing emotional intelligence and cultivating resilience within yourself. Personal disruptive innovation also entails a personal eco-design thinking branding system for effective storytelling in each stage in the design process.

“As Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Transformation (DT) are the next wave of innovation to enable us to work better, smarter and faster, it’s important to focus on personal innovation to keep up with AI and DT, because machines and robots can’t replace human intelligence, thinking, creativity, and empathy.” – Hubert Rampersad

The included personal eco-design thinking branding blueprint is meant to strengthen your storytelling, and to distinguish and separate yourself from the crowd. It shows what an eco-design thinking professional should do to succeed in the design industry and in life. Eco-design thinking also entails aligning personal innovation with corporate innovation, alignment with yourself (to enhance personal integrity and empathy) and alignment with your design team (to enhance designer’s engagement), as shown in this Figure:

For alignment with yourself, read his article “Reimagining Leadership“. Remember what Einstein said: “When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.” For alignment with your design team, please read his articles “How to Enhance Employee Engagement and Design Team Performance at SpaceX and Tesla“ and “Aligning Personal Innovation with Corporate Innovation”.

Rampersad believes in the importance of ethics in the design thinking industry and that the credibility and reputation of the design thinking profession are shaped by the collective conduct of individual design thinkers. Consequently, he has introduced the Eco-Design Thinking Code of Ethics to help designers to use their best ethical judgment.

Eco-design thinking is environmental, technological, social, ethical, and cultural; it is a people-centered, holistic and multidisciplinary approach that fits to the new normal. Rampersad therefore, provides the blueprint for establishing your own Eco-Design Thinking Lab to unlock the creative potential of your people and tackle complex design problems sustainably. By bringing your people and practitioners from all disciplines, perspectives, and backgrounds together in this lab you will make a real impact in society. This initiative will engage the practitioners in tackling real-world challenges, sustainably, with the help of provided eco-design thinking tool kit.

Join our Certified Eco-Design Thinking Practitioner program.

My quotes on sustainability and personal integrity illustrate my related thinking.

Read further his article “How to Embed SDG, ESG and Purpose in Design Thinking”.

About the author

Dr. Hubert Rampersad is a Reimaginer of Sustainability, Design Engineering, Innovation and Management, a Disruptive Innovation Futurist, and a Global Crusader for real Sustainability. He is author of 25 books on design engineering, innovation, management, authentic personal branding, and entrepreneurial leadership, published in many languages. One of his books, Total Performance Scorecard, published in 20 languages was foreworded by Harvard Business School innovation professor Dorothy Leanard. He is a former MIT Sloan guest lecturer and has been featured on BusinessWeek: …. read further About the author