Signals

Northern Lights is the first project in the world allowing industrial companies to transport and sequester their CO2 emissions. The project is owned in equal shares by TotalEnergies, Equinor and Shell.

Dendup and Samdrup are the founders of NoMindBhutan, the country’s first artificial intelligence startup that makes and deploys chatbots.

ut given Bhutan’s closed physical and digital economy, NoMindBhutan’s journey is not easy. Startup and tech industry experts believe that for Bhutan to truly benefit from AI, the entire ecosystem needs to evolve.

“One of the main challenges we face is the inability to access international payment platforms such as Stripe and PayPal. Additionally, we do not have access to cloud servers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to host our AI models, which is crucial for reducing costs and improving the quality of our AI,

“People believe it really can solve a lot of things that it can't. I mean, the unfortunate thing is that OpenAI was amazing. But it was useless. It can't really do anything.”

Nearly half (47%) of employees using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect, and 77% say these tools have actually decreased their productivity and added to their workload.

By introducing new technology into outdated models and systems, organizations are failing to unlock the full productivity value of generative AI across their workforce

bringing together and equipping people with the necessary skills; dispelling the AI aura; and establishing the necessary organizational infrastructure.

Don't buy their lies. Generative AI might be steeped in the language of high fantasy, but it’s a tool, one that they will not admit is a terribly-flawed and unprofitable way to feed the growth-at-all-costs tech engine.

The sources I’ve spoken with could only recall one company that filled an executive level chief design officer role in the second half of the year—PayPal, who brought on Rachel Kobetz from Expedia, in September of 2023.

Now there is more inspection and less trust. As leaders we need to learn how to be really awesome stewards with resources. We need to defend the investment in design with total clarity. That part is new.”

we explain why design thinking as typically practiced has not been able to create impactful and sustainable solutions to complex social issues. Instead, we call for a critical stance on design,

decontextualization also perpetuates the myth that design thinking is an objective and apolitical approach. Within this fiction, designers perceive themselves as impartial agents in design projects

When communities feel as if they’re being repeatedly asked to recount their experiences without witnessing the changes promised by the organizations that ask for their stories, participation becomes tokenizing, extractive, and triggering.

In the design-thinking process, the organization initiating the project and/or the professional designers working on it typically frame the problem at the beginning. However, external actors who do not experience the problem firsthand rely on assumptions to determine the accuracy, validity, and/or relative importance of the problem.

A critical design stance questions whether prioritizing novelty serves organizational priorities and designers’ freedom of creativity above community needs and desires. Impact does not necessarily require developing novel services or products but can result from leveraging resources to support communities’ initiatives—as the local government organization Southwark Council in London realized after working with the consultancy Engine Service Design in 2009. Engine collaborated with the council and citizens on solutions on issues related to health and the domestic environment. To the surprise of the Southwark team, who thought that residents would request new services or technology, several of the residents’ ideas relied on already-available community experts and resources. For instance, one idea proposed to use many of Southwark’s spaces and buildings for community-building activities like dinners and sports activities. Another recognized the presence of local food and health experts and recommended that these experts coach families on how to make healthy meals.

a critical design stance might ask whether scaling should be equated with increasing the number of beneficiaries. Could it instead be about solidifying or improving what an organization does in service to the same group of people?

Rather than focusing on demonstrating impact by increasing its numbers of beneficiaries, Amartha chose to focus on deep impact by doing more for the same communities in one region.

we urge those who practice design thinking to ground their practice in a critical design stance and to be reflexive and deliberate about the intentions, actions, and effects of their work