Rimjhim Agarwal

Talk

If It Takes a Crisis, It’s Too Late: Can Design Act Before Systems Break?

Crisis has a way of forcing organisations to adopt the very innovations they resisted. Rimjhim frames systemic problems as unfolding in three stages — micro-frictions, structural discomfort, then crisis-level suffering — and argues designers should intervene at stage two, before collapse. Drawing on examples from Japan and Denmark, she shares frameworks that use speculative design, foresight and game-based experimentation to catch early signals and shift systems holistically.