Teaching to Find Design Opportunities for Behavior Change Through Causal Layered Analysis

Change is exponential. Products and services are developed faster, hold a shorter shelf-life disrupted by new offerings, and exist within global challenges such as climate change and sustainability. We live in the Anthropocene Era with human-induced Climate Change and the sixth mass extinction. Design challenges for product/service creation are shifting from a paradigm of customer-centric focus linear system to a new paradigm that includes a broader planetary context with a circular economy. The Human-Centered Design Thinking process popularized by IDEO/Stanford d.school identifies human-centered design opportunities for products and services through five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Unfortunately, a mere customer-centric view of product or service is insufficient for planetary-scale challenges requiring a broader focus that includes all life forms and the planet’s health. Thus, moving forward, design for the 21st century requires broader perspectives; design educators are challenged to overcome the limitations of Human-Centered Design Thinking. The point of this paper is that Human-Centered Design Thinking needs to be used in conjunction with new design methods that take into account the larger planetary context over time. In this paper, I discuss how futures thinking methods can augment design thinking methods to overcome limiting human-centered worldviews, epistemologies, and ontologies. In particular, how Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) can augment designers’ creative responses to behavior change challenges such as rapid-decarbonization through four layers (e.g., litany, systems, worldview, myths/metaphors). We provide a case study on CLA from design courses taught to both undergraduate and graduate design students.