Investigating Innovation Practice: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in International Development

Innovation practice is a transdisciplinary field that aims to create a better world out of an existing one by pooling methods and mindsets of inquiry and creation. Over the past decade, the field has become more accessible to a much broader collection of amateur designers. Development professionals treated design thinking and related fields as a silver bullet that could easily address issues of global poverty. However, due to the field’s growing popularity, debates began to arise about the field’s utility and place in society, which revealed how little knowledge is collected about how practitioners conduct innovation practice in the first place. To learn about the activities, benefits, methods, and obstacles of beneficial development-focused design practice, I detail three studies that apply lenses of analysis to innovation narratives to see how various collectives of self-determined innovators actually practice their craft. This colloquium synthesizes narratives from a variety of innovation communities, from human-centered development practitioners to Botswana innovation institutions, to learn about the dynamics, obstacles, and aspirations of innovation practice. These lenses of cross-contextual analysis reveal how the amorphous, evolving field requires innovators who are responsive and respectful of the contexts in which they are situated. Instead of offering simple solutions for good innovation, this dissertation suggests tools in any designer’s toolbox to ensure they collectively create a better world.

Speaker: Pierce Gordon, UC Berkeley