+ think design change - Filed under 'design'

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On 2nd March the Associate Parliamentary Group, in partnership with the DBA, launched the findings of its 6 month inquiry into procurement of design services with a reception and panel discussion in the House of Lords. Group Officer Barry Sheerman MP called for the design community to be more determined in their lobbying of government, in the mission to bring design to the heart of public life:

‘Through this report we’ve engaged some of the leading people in design, engaged parliamentarians from all parties. But the coming election poses a real challenge. The composition of the house will be changed fundamentally. Design is at the very heart of most of what we do as civilised human beings, and we’ve got to engage the people who run this country in a more meaningful way.

Barry also encouraged the design community to improve their lobbying skills in order to put design at the heart of everything we 'should be doing as a modern, progressive and innovative society'

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Filed under // design innovation UK

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March 1, 2010

Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability

(via @SDGNZ)

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Filed under // design social innovation sustainability video

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February 20, 2010

Roger Martin: Innovation Can't Be Proved

In this short interview Roger Martin from the Rotman School of Management skims through different concepts present in the design process like intuition and rapid prototyping. The latest is a powerful means to generate small series of proofs of the progress of processes throughout the development of projects. It also provides help to figure out some missing pieces of the innovation puzzle.

The implementation of rapid prototyping in the development of products, services or user experiences has a huge impact on the achievement of great and innovative results. Innovation is an essential element that feeds and nurtures the originality levels of any organisation.

Martin also discusses the importance of failure in the design process. There is always great value in the discovery of what does or has not worked along the process, therefore the need of increasing the tolerance to failure in order to learn from it and succeed. Only failing you are able to develop or improve the necessary skills to learn and succeed.

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Filed under // Aha! moments design design process inspiring rapid prototyping Roger Martin

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January 25, 2010

Rethink Scholarship @ Langara 2010

Great and creative call for entries for the 2010 Rethink Scholarship for designers and art directors at Langara College in Vancouver, Canada. A great example of what you can achieve when you only have 69 seconds to stimulate the masses.

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Filed under // design studies

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October 13, 2009

Design Thinkers Network

WENOVSKI is an open platform for sharing ideas and cross-disciplinary collaborations between creative thinkers. It is an initiative of Arne van Oosterom from the Netherlands and is a great source for the latest news in the design sector. It showcases great projects on how design can be used in different disciplines and provides a very interesting network platform to connect with people all over the world and discuss topical issues around design thinking and design impact.

Thumbs up for WENOVSKI!

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Filed under // design design thinking open platform

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October 6, 2009

How do you design?

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This book shows an impressive design process research work.

It is a very interesting experience to flick through its pages and bump into models developed from 1945 until today; from natural sciences models like the Criteria of Validation of Scientific Explanations by Humberto Maturana to Nigel Cross' models in analysis, synthesis & evaluation.

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Filed under // design design process

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September 17, 2009

For Design To Create Change, We Must All Become Designers

(via juzmcmuz)

A very sharp insight of what people perceive from the word design(er) and how it is moving from being a product or an object to a way of thinking and an approach.

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Filed under // design social innovation treehuger

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September 11, 2009

Old goodness

IDesiGN is a site that showcases the work of Dr. Charles Brunette and his learnings on design thiking for the last 20 years. The site also gives a magical user experience with a beautiful and engaging interface designed by Yi Ji Hyun.

Found it thanks to Arne van Oosterom curator of the Design Thinkers blog.

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Filed under // design design thinking made me look made me smile

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August 30, 2009

Innovation Through Design Thinking

via mitworld.mit.edu

In 2006 Tim Brown gave an extended talk in the MITSloan about the meaning, scope, and influence of Design Thinking as an effective tool to facilitate innovation.

As part of my research I have revisited this talk with a social coloured glasses and the intention of extracting the very essential aspects of his perspective and experience scalable to other realities. It is always refreshing to see him talking about what he knows the best and see him selling it without even trying: just telling a story.

The first thing Brown highlights in his presentation is the difference between design and design thinking as "the way designers approach problem solving"; how designers connect with people (users), how we come to a problem from the people's perspective and create meaningful experiences for them.

One of the things I enjoy the most about his talks (apart from his hypnotic and mastered storytelling skills) is his devotion to ideas: where they come from (inspiration), how we have them (ideation) and the useful things we do with them (implementation).

Inspiration is the first step of this process and the key stage for any creative process. It starts with empathy, looking at people and see the world from their eyes. Inspiration is the fuel for creativity and innovation and for designers the world is our source of inspiration. That is why we should spend more time in this phase trying to understand the environment to be able to discover the real opportunities/challenges that the culture has to offer.

The role of designers is to understand the users on multiple levels: cognitive, emotional and physical (what they feel, how they feel it, when they feel it, etc). Also the environment where these experiences happen, the social and cultural level: how groups act and interact between them.

Brown illustrates their innovative approach to research with two examples: the use of analogous situations and focusing on the insights that come from the extreme users.

Ideation is the ability to build to think: prototyping. In the traditional (old school) school of design we build things to show what we've done, to show advance or progress and get approval instead of building to learn about our ideas. Design is a constant process of learning, design thinking proposes learning by prototyping. This bit has a tremendous potential since we associate a prototype with a mock-up, a physical model of what we have achieved. Brown explains that this prototyping phase doesn't need to be physical but tangible in order to allow you to build the picture and come to sense of what you have learnt in different stages of the design process.

Prototypes have three main objectives in the design process: inspiring, you design as you build; developing, evolve ideas to make them better; and at the end is about validating the ideas, how good they are or how they work.

Implementation

Contrary to what we understand traditionally by this concept (distribuition system, engineer, cost/profit analysis) implementation is the way we ensure that the products/services get to the market engaging all the stakeholders in the process. A mechanism to help with this is storytelling. Brown says that "the more powerfully and the best you can construct a story around the ideas; the better you communicate them to colleagues, users, stakeholders, the more likely your ideas will succeed and become real products"

Implementation is not only at the end of the design process but since the beginning, telling a story about the whole experience is a way to detect problems and opportunities. This makes clearer the real scope of the design problem/opportunity to scale and frame the problem. Storytelling connects the stakeholders with the spaces, tools, roles and processes. It helps to joing the dots and bring people together, it can be tangible and physical and experiential.

Brown points out that design thinking is about methodology as much about culture. As designers we have to make sense of the place we are in the world in order to discover opportunities and be inspired by them. Culture connects us with new ideas.

During his presentation Brown refers constantly to the increasingly stronger link between design and business strategy; how design thinking is used to tackle a whole range of creative and business issues leaving the social enterprise practically out of his discourse.

Last May I had the opportunity to attend his talk at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and noticed that even when his speech continues to be the one from the design agency pioneering in service and business strategy he mentioned in more than one occasion the social projects IDEO has been involved with and the potential of design thinking to enable social innovation.

It has been three years down the road from this 2006 talk at the MIT and the discourse seems to move faster and faster towards social innovation and the need of a methodology as rich and well articulated as design thinking to engage people around the challenges of our communities and effective ways to tackle those challenges.

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Filed under // design design thinking IDEO innovation inspiring Tim Brown

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August 10, 2009

think + design + change

think + design + change
When I decided to start a blog as part as the research for my thesis in design thinking + social change I spent a couple of days deciding on the name it would have.

I tried different combinations but none of them work completely. thinksocial, we think social, social thinking, design change, we think, social think, think design, thinks social, think social change, think change, design change, think think think….

Cogito, ergo sum
The very first instance of any project in any field comes when we think and realise about the existence of an issue, an idea that inspires us to take action, a motivation, a problem to solve, an opportunity that challenges our imagination… When we think is when the magic starts…

‘Planning is everything, the plan is nothing’
Once we have chosen our opportunity or challenge we need to define how we are going to reach our target, who are the best people to team up with, the best tools to use… we need to design our strategy, to create a plan that will allow us to achieve our goals and discover the most effective way to do it and when. We need to design…

Change is inevitable
Whenever we discover an opportunity that challenges and puts us in motion the most obvious consequence is to change. Whether it is the situation or ourselves but once we have opened our eyes and the curtain has been unveiled there is an inevitable change in the course of the facts originated by ourselves.

These are the three words that resonated the most in my head. They work back and forwards because the only way to reach the change we look for is to design the solution for the problem we think there is. In today’s world we need to design to change no longer the situation but ourselves.

Design is the bridge between the ideas and change and think + design + change is a brief statement that presents the main points of my thinking and what I am aiming to achieve in a concise form.

ditto

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Filed under // design social change

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