Counterintuitivity: Making Meaningful Innovation Paperback – Import, 15 May 2019

In this world where we are obsessed with production and excessive consumption, Mario offers a fresh way of thinking about how we as designers can create more meaningful experiences for people instead of using design to profit at the cost of human lives. The book is well written and can provide insights for designers just starting their careers as well as for seasoned professionals who want to change existing systems and provide more value. Highly recommend this!

The book looks at the meaning and practice of innovation, drawing on the author’s experience across a long and varied career.It’s both critical of the innovation obsession that grips modern business, but also constructive in sharing perspectives that genuinely lead to new ideas and thinking. It’s a lively read, using stories and ideas from history (ancient and industrial) to illustrate the author’s own thoughts.The book is not a how-to manual with charts and graphs showing you how to ‘do’ innovation. In fact, it’s clear that Mario Van der Meulen is pretty suspicious of uniform, standardised processes that are supposed to churn out business innovation as it’s currently discussed and understood. But it does offer nine principles of counterinuitivity which are useful guidelines and ways of challenging your own perspectives on how to approach or solve a problem.A good read if you want to search for new ideas in your own world and want to push beyond modern management conventions about how to do it.

This is almost two books in one, the first gives a historical perspective on how design and critical thinking has shaped the world around us. The author explores a wide range of examples of how innovation has been achieved and received across many different industries and eras.The second part of the book becomes more practical. Van Der Meulen lays out nine principles that will "allow your craft and your decisions to be guided by the goal of delivering meaning to others".These principles provide tangible advice which I believe are valuable to all designers and design managers as well as inspiration that will spark anyone to think differently about how they make decisions and how they define meaning.I have returned to the book multiple times to help reshape my thinking and challenge my own preconceptions. An easy to read work worthy of any studio library or home bookshelf.