Designing the X

The role of design in complex problem solving.

As the pace of global change accelerates—ecologically, socially, and technologically—our traditional ways of understanding and responding to change fall short. We now live in an era of supercomplexity, where challenges like climate instability, migration, technological disruption, resource depletion, and systemic inequality converge and defy conventional solutions.

Designing the X meets this moment with a bold and timely proposition: when data, science, and analysis alone are insufficient to move us forward, we must turn to design as a powerful mode of reasoning through synthesis, where intuition meets insight and imagination drives action. Design enables us to move with complexity, not against it, and to shape futures beyond the limits of the present.

Grounded in praxis and research—including 67 interviews with designers, technologists and scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs, urbanists, and educators—Designing the X makes a compelling case for design as an essential partner to science and technology: integrative, inventive, and profoundly human.

The “X” stands for what’s missing in today’s analytic methods: the leap from parts to greater wholes, from current conditions to future potential.

This book is for anyone seeking agency in an age of accelerating change. It’s a compass for those ready to imagine—and design—the future we cannot yet see.