April 9, 2010

TED Talks Goodness: What Adults Can Learn From Kids With Adora Svitak

(via @TEDTalks)

One of the best talks in the archives of TED delivered by 12 years old Adora Svitak. A reader since age of three, writer since five and blogger since seven, Svitak is a strong advocate for literacy and the author of Flying Fingers: Master The Tools of Learning Through The Joy Of Writing, who spends her days speaking around the United States to adult as well as children audiences.

March 22, 2010

Douglas Adams & Why 'Saving The World' Is The Wrong Approach

(via @tedtalks)

English writer, dramatist and musician Douglas Adams, best known for his novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy delivers one of the most inspiring talks I have ever seen.

In a clumsy and ludic manner and often cheeky and satiric, Adams engages the audience with his particular perspective or the world. Forget about best-selling novels or hollywood tales, this intimate conversation couldn't be further away from this type of trivialities, yet it's introduced as if it was. Until you realise you are 45 minutes in and there are 40 to go and you wish there were another 90 minutes left instead.

The beauty and value of this piece resides in the fact that it does not intend to change the way you feel or think about a specific topic. It just aims to reach you. And by doing so, it touches you and makes you listen and reflect on whatever it is that we are doing with ourselves in this planet.

And yes, by the end of it you will change the way you feel and think about things...

Beware it is 90' long (but worth every second!)

March 20, 2010

Lessons of Leadership: The role of the followers

(via @juzmcmuz)

"When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in."

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.

September 10, 2009

Southwark Circle has launched!

Southwark Circle is an extraordinary project run by Participle that enables its members to participate in programs to reinforce the community by matching people offering services with those who need them. The project is a great example of the redesign of public services and the application of design thinking in the social sector. It has been recently launched and promises to bring very valuable insights on the shift from 'project' into a financially sustainable and scalable model.

One of the smartest things and a personal favourite about this program is the way they communicate with their stakeholders and target audience. The first thing I realised after reading the project brochure is that there is no mention whatsoever to the age of the members, not even in the website. This is not a random decision but an expression of how they address the real problem: our perception of ageing and its effects on our behaviour towards the elderly people. This project focuses not only in the solution of the sympthoms (the real need of assistance and help) but in educate the younger generations about how to approach the ageing process with more care and respect.

Congratulations to all the team behind this amazing project!

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.