Applying Design to Complex Problems


The work we do for–and with–clients bridges disciplines to shape sustainability, business performance, and healthy places.

We bring our extensive skills and experience in design and system dynamics to a variety of persistent problems that seem to perpetually elude traditional ways of solving them. Although these problems can seem insurmountable, solving them can result from a rewarding journey of discovery that we and our clients take together.  New approaches, ideas and ways of doing things can then emerge.

Whether issues are centered on human habitats or pertain to broader strategy and operational concerns within organizations, our core strengths enable us to tell sustainability’s compelling story and develop simple solutions which drive positive outcomes for business, health and wellbeing, community and environment.

Our clients range from policy makers, NGOs, municipalities and corporations, as well as individuals and communities looking for new ways to reduce risk, be more resilient, or solve complex social, economic, business and health problems.

Our four main services areas are:

  1. ✦Systems Thinking: Consulting services that apply the discipline of design and systems thinking to identify problems and opportunities, unleash creativity and promote innovation

  2. ✦Process, Product and Place Design: The shaping of innovative products, environments and habitats

  3. ✦Place-Making: Community-based design to improve how habitats work at the street and neighborhood level

  4. ✦Sustainability & Resilience: Services designed to help organizations and communities become more efficient and mindful about the use of scarce resources and energy so as to improve quality of life and business success.

Services Overview

Service Areas

Home

Systems Thinking

Process, Product and Place Design

Place-Making

Sustainability & Resilience

Our specific areas of expertise and academic qualifications encompass several professional disciplines:

  1. ✦Design thinking & creative intelligence (as applied to products, place, process, business and organizational effectiveness)

  2. ✦Prototyping (especially environments for human habitation, learning and health)

  3. ✦System dynamics (a.k.a. ‘systems thinking’ and simulation modeling)

  4. ✦Sustainable building advisory consulting (neighborhoods, new and historic structures)

  5. ✦Architecture, urban design & planning

  6. ✦Engineering & renewable energy systems

  7. ✦Public health planning (health impact analysis of built environments)

  8. ✦Strategic planning


Much of our work builds on the field of system dynamics and also Christopher Alexander’s extensive pattern language research and community-based projects of the 1960s and 1970s.

The journey of discovery and change we take with our clients helps distinguish real problems from symptoms, encouraging the development of solutions that are simple, implementable and measurable.  Along the way, we apply both the discipline and the tools of systems thinking so as to provide clients insightful understandings of the likely impacts of the solutions that emerge from our close collaboration.

This gives us and our clients a way of seeing how sometimes the small things that mean a lot and have emotional connections to people can in fact change the bigger picture of problems and opportunities and point the way to better quality, more resilient solutions.

For more details click on the menu items on the upper left of this page.