Rita Nguyen, a past Stanford d.school Civic Innovation Fellow, for example, is working on making access to nutritious food part of US health care and health insurance systems. Jae Rhim Lee, also a past d.school fellow, is working to make burial practices in the United States more environmentally sound in the face of the funeral industry and well-established societal expectations.
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It is essential to know where to act within a network of different stakeholders and entities to create the greatest benefits. It is also important to know the short- and long-term effectiveness of solutions within the conditions of a particular social system—that is, the full range of human and institutional elements that compose and feed into a given issue, and connections between them.
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- [note::This nicely summarizes why I'm so interested in these fields!]

A design approach emphasizes discovering the right problem to solve, and investing in both problem-finding and problem-solving. For both human- and systems-level challenges, we need to identify the problems worth addressing if we are to create meaningful change. Understanding the right problem, we can better create effective solutions. A very simple characterization of a design approach is that we move from working to understand a challenge, to working on creating solutions in response to the challenge.
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- [note::Design approach = Your approach for figuring out the right problem to solve and designing solutions to solve it]

This work of sense-making is an act of abstraction: We move from the concrete (gathered information and observations) to abstract (a new perspective), and then back to concrete (new solutions). This abstraction helps us achieve new and meaningful viewpoints and solutions, rather than simply jumping to a quick fix for the visible symptoms of a deeper issue.
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- [note::Sense-making is a cycle: gather information -> gain new perspectives -> create (and test) new solutions -> gather information]

(highlight:: With this frame of a design approach, if we were to advance a project using human-centered methods, we might use this series of tools:
Obtaining data by interviewing users to gather stories and information
Unpacking those stories and inferring the meaning to gain insights
Creating brainstorming questions to describe the design opportunities—we often call these “How Might We” or HMW questions
Prototyping solutions to make them tangible and testable.)
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observation, user diaries, cultural probes, and analogous research—just within the practice of qualitative design research alone.
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But a human-centered approach has its shortcomings. You might create solutions that address the symptoms of a problem, but in turn overlook opportunities to address root causes of the problem. You could get preoccupied with solving for human needs that are not highly impactful. You might overlook downstream consequences of your creations—not only for your beneficiaries, but also for other stakeholders or society as a whole.
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(highlight:: When things are this complex, systems thinking tools can help us strategize. Here are four common systems thinking tools we might use here:
Obtaining data about the system by researching relevant stakeholders and noting the value exchange between them
Mapping cause and effect in the system to gain insights about what is enabling or inhibiting the progress we would like to see
Identifying points of leverage in the system as opportunities where interventions may have outsized effects
Experimenting with solutions to see if the desired outcomes are created)
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In a typical systems approach, a team may also jump from their well-thought-out-but-untested-strategy to a pilot. Pilots often aim to show the effectiveness of an intervention at a significant scale. They can test a solution in the true complete conditions of the system, but there is danger in committing extensive resources to an untested solution, and the motive shifts from learning to proving the idea works.
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