
NextDesign Leadership Network
Concerned about the state of design leadership skill-building in academia the NextDesign Leadership initiative was originally created by Humantific CoFounders GK VanPatter and Elizabeth Pastor in 2002. It began as a community sensemaking experiment and grew into a changemaking advocacy initiative.
Along the way we undertook and published 30 + thought leader conversations and hundreds of visual explanations regarding the current state and arriving future of design leadership.
In 2005 NextD published its legendary NextD Geographies Framework (Design at Scale 1,2,3,4) to aid in helping others better understand the various forms of design. Since then that framework has been referenced by others in hundreds of papers, books and presentations.
Since launch the NextD team has given many, many talks and held numerous public workshops around the world.
Sponsored by Humantific, the NextD Library is now located on Issuu. As a contribution to the community we happily make many documents available for free to those interested in the subject of ReRethinking Design Thinking.
We also continue to assist educational leaders interested in creating programs and cultures built around adaptable NextDesign Leadership Skills applicable in the context of Design 3 & 4 first identified as an opportunity in 2005.
As part of ongoing future work skills research NextD continues to create and share frameworks that make sense of the emerging future of design / design thinking in the 21st century.
NextDesign Leadership Principles
- Design thinking changes according to challenge scale.
- Content knowledge is not process knowledge.
- Facilitation is a process role not a content role.
- Advocating is not facilitation.
- Clarify/externalize/visualize process.
- Upstream tools are different from downstream tools.
- Proportion of sensemaking to strangemaking inverts as scale increases.
- Cocreation rises as challenge scale increases.
- Expand the universe, no more tribal acronyms.
- Think constructing challenge constellations not jumping from briefs.
- Sustainability is one challenge type, not meta design.
- Be useful in every context.

GK VanPatter Blog Posts 2016-2017
Making Sense of “Why Design Thinking Will Fail”
Making Sense of Design Thinking & Agile Method
Making Sense of “Design Thinking is Bullshit”
Methodology Ethics: Embracing a New Era
SenseMaking is Rising: Beyond Data Visualization
Clarifying Design Thinking: Forbes Vs Humantific
Double Diamond Method: Understanding What was Missed
Origins of NextD Geographies Framework
Upstream/Downstream: Harvard Downstreams Design Thinking
NextD Early Public Workshop Examples
NextD WorkshopONE at Hyperwerk in Switerland
Hyperwerk Feedback
NextD WorkshopONE in New York
NextD WorkshopsONE, TWO, THREE in New York
In The NextD Library:
NextD Reality Check
NextD Geographies / Understanding Design 1,2,3,4
ReReThinking Design Thinking
Teaching CoCreation Now!
Understanding Design 1,2,3,4 / The Rise of Visual SenseMaking
ReThinking Wicked Problems
When [Old Design Thinking] Love is Not Enough
Design [In the Real World] is Changing / Are You?
SenseMaking is Rising
Double Consciousness / Back to the Future with Jones Chris Jones
Inspired by NextD
Design For Care
Meanings of Design Spaces
Design at Scale / DMI
New Visions, New Leaders
Humantific in Finland
CEO’s Are Designers
Aarhus School of Architecture
Design Resilience
Inspired by Skill-to-Scale