IDEO: The Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators

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"This toolkit contains the process and methods of design, adapted specifically for the context of K-12 education. It offers new ways to be intentional and collaborative when designing, and empowers educators to create impactful solutions."

Luke Williams On Disruptive Thinking

This actually made me clap at the end!

In this talk from L2 Innovation Forum 2010 creative director and fellow of the amazing and innovative design consultancy Frog Design Luke Williams (@lukegwilliams), gives great examples of the value of disruptive thinking applied to the creation of products and services. 

He is also the author of Disrupt: Think The Unthinkable To Spark Transformation In Your Business a book full of disruptive thinking goodness and innovation techniques. In his book Williams presents a simple five-step program to facilitate the identification of disruptive opportunities in any industry and a guide to successfully execute them. While his program focuses on integrating design principles and techniques into a business implementation, there are insights of great value that are worth to explore and apply in the social innovation blogosphere.

For more disruptive thoughts visit his site here.

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.

A conversation with design thinker Frank O. Gehry

An intimate conversation with the great architect and design thinker Frank O. Gehry that explores the way thinkers see, work and relate with design projects. He speaks about his design processes and says that what motivates him is the world of possibilities rather finding the right solution.

Specially interesting is his take on how museums deal with art, what he calls the white cube syndrome, how by clearing the space around a piece of art and putting it in a perfectly white space it becomes precious and separates it from the viewer. "If you put a great painting in a garage [...] it is still a great painting", this draws a parallel with the perception of design as a precious thing that occurs in a separate dimension from the viewers/users while in reality they are inherent to the processes and thinking of design. 

Valerie Casey on Design Thinking and Sustainability

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In this video Valerie Casey, IDEO's Digital Design Experience Leader and founder of The Designers Accord, explores three tools to create positive impact through design and change the path of the creative community top to bottom: design thinking, networking and responsibility.

Casey states that the role of designers is not longer conceived as designing objects but to create consequences instead. It is in this grey zone of consequences where the opportunity for designers to make a difference lies. The impact of the design process itself is intrinsically negative since the pure creation of objects generates waste and energy consumption. If we stretch our vision and contemplate not only the beginning of the cycle as our zone of control but the consumption of our designs (distribution/use/end of life) we then can apply a continuous stream of thinking throughout the design process and reduce the negative impact of design.

A very interesting point is that sustainability should not longer be considered as an added element of design but as an integral part of the process along with the human, technological, sustainable, organisational, business and brand factors. Casey defines sustainability as "the marriage between environmental and social impact".

 

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.