Tackling the Sustainability of Digital Aging Innovations Through Design Thinking and Systems Thinking Perspectives

The digitalization of society brings many opportunities and challenges, especially on how we organize the welfare society in the future. This becomes especially pertinent as we are heading toward a global increase of older people, which will strain healthcare and bring the challenge of building sustainable solutions. In this paper, we argue that the unsustainable solutions within healthcare are due to them being defined and `solved' with a single approach or approaches used in silos. We advocate that a more sustainable solution could be achieved by combining systems thinking and design thinking perspectives throughout the entire process-from problem definition to solution offering. A benefit of such combined perspectives is the ability to develop a shared context among all stakeholders, which helps uncover unique tacit knowledge from their experience. This will serve as a solid foundation to generate unconventional ideas that will lead to sustainable and satisfactory solutions.