The Best of Both Worlds: A Sense-Making Project

While I previously struggled to fully understand what my Undergraduate degree in Economics offers me and where I stand with it, taking a module on 'Design Thinking for Social Impact' has shed more light on my blind sports, giving me a more nuanced understanding of whole systems and their complexity. Engaging with students and experts from different schools of thought has allowed me to understand how placing these diverse interactions in a whole system with a purpose helps fill little gaps, that might go unnoticed, giving rise to wicked problems that would surface later.

I think that Economics is like the slice of pizza. Based on strong foundations of quantitative rigor, it focuses on distribution by quantity (or size). In contrast, I liken studying an IATL to the diverse layers of ingredients that make a pizza what it truly is. Every ingredient is different in size, shape, form, texture and taste.

Economics uses a ‘causal thinking approach’; it asks the question: ‘What is the shortest, most direct path from one point to another?’ Moreover, an economist seeks to establish expertise in one layer or another, whereas a design thinker is one who may not be an expert in any one dimension but knows how to bring together experts to create the desire result. She knows the right combination of layers (both sauce and solids) to bring together, to create the best pizza. A design thinker sometimes climbs a bridge, always takes the road not taken, and almost never looks only straight ahead, but also up above.

It is where the base or the slice and the layers meet where true magic happens. No one can be dismissed at the expense of another. I can now see clearly that both economics and design thinking are useful tools, as long as one knows when to use which, depending on the context of a problem and the desired outcome.