Design Thinking for Humanity · Resilience · Regenerative innovation
The challenges of our time are wicked, connected and accelerating. Solving for the user alone optimises one person and leaves the system in the dark. Design Thinking for Humanity combines five lenses, Futures, Design, Ecological, Systems and Exponential Thinking, so that organisations, society and the planet win together.
Classic human-centred design puts the user in a spotlight. Everything else stays in the dark: the community, nature, future generations, the partners and the AI that shape the outcome.
Design Thinking for Humanity turns the ecosystem from a passive backdrop into a stakeholder. The customer is no longer only the person who pays or clicks, but the web of relationships between people, nature and technology.
A resilient system bounces back, often to the same vulnerability. An exponentializing system uses the shock as fuel: it learns faster, adapts and comes out stronger.
No single method can bring a system back into balance. The five lenses work together around one centre: human- and life-centred values. Select a lens.
The wheel
Between the lenses sit the concepts that leadership teams increasingly need: from foresight and speculative design to biomimicry, from leverage points to the massive transformative purpose. The book connects them in one process, so teams no longer have to choose between imagination, empathy, ecology, systems and scale.
Each future is the sum of today’s decisions. The book closes with four scenarios and one question for every leader: which of these will you actively work to create?
Scenario 1
A world of isolated pockets. Scarcity drives conflict, foresight shrinks to survival, ecological thinking gives way to the fight for resources.
What price are we paying for designing a world where the scarcity we feared became the reality we built?
Scenario 2
Pervasive AI manages every facet of life. Unprecedented order, at the cost of autonomy, critical thinking and the ability to see truly novel disruption.
What moral contract did we break when perfect efficiency became our ultimate dictator?
Scenario 3
Humanity sees itself as part of nature. Distributed, resilient networks, collective intelligence and ethical AI accelerate regeneration and solidarity.
What choices must we embrace so that technology serves not the market, but the collective soul?
Scenario 4
Unwavering belief in technology. Brilliant breakthroughs and rapid growth, but stratified access, siloed innovation and widening divides.
How do we rationalise a world where innovation became a runaway engine of division?
These four futures are not prophecies. They are blueprints.
The book follows one speculative design challenge from vision to global scale: a new economic and agricultural model that makes the regeneration of the world’s topsoil the primary measure of agricultural success by 2050.
Integrated in the Resilience Blueprint
Massive transformative purpose
The Living Soil Mandate. Make the regeneration of the world’s topsoil the primary measure of agricultural success by 2050.
Preferable future
Regenerative Abundance. Agriculture as the engine of planetary regeneration. The standard shifts from “bushels per acre” to “profit and resilience per acre”.
Win-win-win value proposition
Key interventions
Carbon Harvest platform to verify data and trade credits · Safe Harbor contract with floor price and yield insurance to bridge the valley of death · Digital twin linking soil data with weather models for hyper-local forecasts.
Six leadership commitments from the book. They turn the five lenses into a culture.
From the first climate conference in Berlin to Antalya, the goals have been set. Türkiye calls COP31 the “COP of implementation”. The open question is no longer what, but how.
Implementation.
Implementation is a design challenge. It needs all five lenses at once.
From one inspiring hour on stage to a programme that builds the capability inside your organisation: end to end across all five lenses, or as a deep dive into one.
Inspire
For leadership events, conferences and boards. In English or German.
Apply
Hands-on with the book’s tools, on your own challenge.
Build
Build the skills to apply the lenses without outside help.
Programme builder
Choose end to end across all five lenses, or select the deep dives your organisation needs most.
Voices on the book from science, sustainability and innovation.
This insightful book elevates design methodologies into a systemic framework, providing leaders with the practical tools needed to integrate planetary boundaries, geopolitical risk, and technological advances into modern decision-making.
An essential guide for leaders shaping the future, where scaling AI is not just a technical act, but a moral and systemic evolution in human wisdom and empathy.
This unique book brings Design Thinking back to its original purpose: solving the world’s wicked problems, charting a course for a new era of designing exclusively for humanity.
This bold and essential blueprint calls on leaders to move beyond human-centered design, providing the transformative framework needed to address today’s wicked problems through systemic, regenerative, and life-centered action.
Human-Centered Design was once the prevailing model; today it has expanded and Lewrick provides the clear, powerful frameworks needed to put these principles into practice and create a sustainable 3-wins model.
The book
Practical tools and methods to build resilience for a better future
From the author of the international bestseller The Design Thinking Playbook. With a preface in dialogue with Jeanne Liedtka, the full toolbox for all five lenses, the Living Soil case study and the Resilience Blueprint. Illustrated by Nhu Nhu Nguyen.
Contact
Keynote, workshop or capability programme: in a first conversation we find the format and the lenses that fit your organisation and your challenge.