I am Pascal Wicht, a strategic designer specializing in tackling complex and ill-defined problems. I am an expert in upstream explorations and discovery research. I am skilled in future-oriented and critical design, harnessing weak signals of change. Advocating for active stakeholder inclusion, I explore, imagine, prototype and co-create sustainable solutions.

Navigating the Anthropocene era

In the seismic shifts of an Anthropocene era, our reality is rife with persisting and multiplying problems. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re grappling with a world where our shared collective futures are collapsing.

The realities of climate change and biodiversity loss have moved from abstract fears about a distant future to tangible experiences in the present. As we face these challenges, as an designer, I focus on applying a mix of methods acquired over the years to make sense and engage with these issues.

Ecological ceiling and social foundations

The Doughnut Economics framework assists me in navigating through the complexity of contemporary challenges. It allows me to envision new paradigms, models and trajectories that are not only innovative but also confined within ecological boundaries and sustained by strong social foundations.

Leveraging system thinking

My strategic design approach is deeply anchored in critical system thinking and informed by social sciences, transcending the limitations of simple, step-by-step and linear technical thinking. My practice is dedicated to understanding the interconnectedness of multiple components, striving to uncover the hidden links that bind different aspects of complex problems.

Harnessing weak signals

Applying principles and methods from strategic foresight, I conduct horizon scanning and identify weak signals both as desk research and in the field. This practice allows me to anticipate change to better detect and imagine discontinuities. My interventions are crafted with multiple long-term perspectives, aligning with future readiness and resilience principles.

Involving stakeholders

Designing interventions requires to understand the profound relationship between stakeholders and the systems they are a part of. Following ethical design principles and actively engaging people in the sense-making allows to benefit form their unique contextual intelligence. Due to their direct interaction with issues, their involvement helps shape interventions that are more relevant, adaptive and responsive.

Iterative prototyping

Prototyping is not about producing an almost finalized solutions; instead, it’s about co-creating and exploring hypotheses that can continually be shaped and refined. This approach invites those deeply engaged in the challenge space to be part of the creation, helping to construct tangible design tracks together. Each track is a learning opportunity, offering immediate and invaluable insights that allow us to adapt and modify our understanding in real-time.

Surface vs Structures

At the core of my practice lies the orientation principle – navigating and engaging with the world in a profoundly attuned and thoughtful way. This orientation requires a willingness to uncover, understand and confront the deeper-seated roots of problems rather than mainly addressing their superficial symptoms.

Moving beyond surface-level and symptom-oriented design methods, my work reaches into the systems of root causes. Rather than applying quick, technical fixes to visible issues, I engage with structure-level design methods that are system-oriented. These methods involve deeply exploring the social, economic, political and cultural systems that give rise to and perpetuate problems.

Finally, at the deepest level, my practice adopts meta-level, paradigm-oriented design methods. These approaches challenge and question the fundamental beliefs, values and paradigms that shape our systems and structures. By reframing the problem space, challenging prevailing assumptions and exploring new ways of perceiving and acting, I invite a radical shift in mindset and behavior, leading to transformative change. This level of design is not about adjustments to the existing system but about reimagining and transforming it completely.

Design ethics

My work towards preferable futures is driven by principles of cooperation, mutualism, economic democracy, sustainability and degrowth. Central to this mission is cultivating a sense of community and shared responsibility, encouraging equitable decision-making in economic systems and prioritizing environmental sustainability and social justice over relentless growth. Informed by a critical awareness of the historical and contemporary North-South injustices, I aim to foster more balanced, reciprocal relationships that respect the Global South’s rights, cultures and aspirations.

Organizations

As an independant consultant, as an member of agencies, schools and research studios, here is a non-exhaustive list of clients and organizations I have worked for.

Industries

Throughout my career, I had the privilege to work and intervene in a large variety of sectors and industries.

Academia

As a clandestine academic, I have been honored to receive invitations from prestigious institutions such as IMD, HEC Lausanne, and ECAL. In these roles, I invite students to engage with the future and question their understanding of the present. I emphasize the importance of developing critical imagination skills, broadening their horizon with the state of the art of sustainable solutions and biomaterials, enabling them to envision and design innovative sustainable and ethical business models. This approach is anchored in the guiding principles of the Doughnut Economics framework, particularly its notions of a social foundation and ecological ceiling.

My academic efforts are dedicated to empowering the next generation of leaders and designers with the knowledge and tools needed to devise sustainable solutions to global challenges, from the D3 and D4 arenas of design, focused on organisational, social and planetary problems.