Inventing deeply powerful new systems seems to require both systems-design expertise and also subject matter expertise (see Insight through making and Inventing the Hindu-Arabic numerals requires both design genius and mathematical genius).
Since subject matter experts typically don’t have designers’ system-design skills, the typical approach has designers facilitate of many domain experts, drawing out their ideas and iteratively synthesizing them into a system. This is the central practice of “design thinking,” a la IDEO.
But this seems to fundamentally limit the domain in which insights can be produced—excluding those which require deep subject matter expertise. The designer can only synthesize and produce vision as far as they can understand the underlying subject matter with the assistance of their conversations with the domain experts. Worse: producing a complex system in a domain may require many iterations, and the insight from each iteration may require subject-matter expertise to perceive and incorporate back into the system.
In a more active approach, the designer is not just facilitator but orchestrator, engaging with the subject matter themselves as deeply as they can. This is the approach advocated in Pendleton-Jullian and Brown, Design Unbound. This seems better—perhaps good enough in many cases—but it doesn’t remove the fundamental limit described above. Ultimately, Great creative work is usually the product of a single person. If the designer acts as the orchestrator and synthesizer, the profound creative leap must come from the designer’s mind—that’s the sense in which they “act as leaders.” (Pendleton-Jullian and Brown, 2018. p. 133). So the domain of insight is still limited by the extent of their subject matter understanding.
Pendleton-Jullian, A. M., & Brown, J. S. (2018). Design Unbound (Vol. 1–2). MIT Press. Pendleton-Jullian and Brown, Design Unbound
Matuschak, A., & Nielsen, M. (2019 0). How can we develop transformative tools for thought? https://numinous.productions/ttft