Now online are the presentation visuals from the recent Design Strategy conference at the Institute of Design.
Category: Design
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The importance of being silly
I recently had a good conversation with Sara Beckman of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Comparing what MBA students do in relation to designers, it’s hard to identify what skills they’re missing — other than hard skills like illustration — that designers have. What business students learn in courses like product development is surprisingly similar to product development that designers learn. Sara’s students even do ethnographic studies and build personas.
And in my experience, it’s easier for business people to make the leap into business design activities than designers. Maybe it’s because business is a broader base of training, or because it doesn’t focus on the design of artifacts.
But, business people sometimes have deficiencies in two areas: empathy and abductive thinking. Some designers also lack empathy, unfortunately. But designers can’t get far without the ability to create new ideas. I think designers (and other creative people) are good at generating ideas because they’re allowed to be silly (not because they have a monopoly on the right side of the brain). Silliness leads to new ideas, whether the goal is silly ideas or just new ideas. It’s hard for business people to be simultaneously silly and fiscally responsible; we traditionally view these qualities in opposition. This is a fundamental challenge in business design: how to help clients perceive the potential benefits when they’re used to looking for business rigor or creativity, not both together?
In design language, silliness is often termed play. In Managing as Designing Boland and Collopy describe play:
An open, liquid design process involves playing with ideas, alternatives, and elements of the design. The design emerges through playful interaction with materials, models, and alternatives being considered. Playing with meanings, implications, and purposes of a design project can lead to emergence of unexpected insights or discoveries that can be opportunistically included in the project.
Augusto Grillo writes,
It is play that sparks creativity, creating contexts in which freedom, gratuitousness and passion produce their fecundating action.
Play fascinates and absorbs to the point of making us infinitely repeat our attempts to improve our performance, to create new paths, new ways to arrive, in our case, to the ‘right’ product, the most suitable solutions.
It is in this sense that play can enrich the design process, and that the concept of playfulness in design may justify more exhaustive study in this research area.
We may conclude that ‘play’, so necessary in that it precedes and gives rise to the creative act, like beauty, will save the world.
When Grillo says play compels us to “infinitely repeat our attempts to improve our performance” I’m reminded of the instructional power of play.
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Martin Fisher is my new hero
Martin is co-founder of Kickstart (formerly Approtec), an organization designing products for the bottom of the pyramid. As opposed to C.K. Prahalad who tends to describe the poor as consumers (see sachet marketing), Martin views the poor as investors. I met him at the ID Design Strategy conference this past week where he told me, “everyone has the same basic need: a way to make money.” So Kickstart researches what the poor in Africa need to make money. Because subsistence farming is common, Kickstart designed a pump that allows farmers to irrigate crops using nearby streams or wells, dramatically increasing crop output and helping the poor enter the middle class. They’ve created other products to help the poor create bricks, hay bales, cooking oil, and so on. By designing inexpensive products and selling them, it ensures the technology finds its way into the hands of people who will use it, a model sustainable beyond charity.
If design is our attempt to ‘change existing situations into preferred ones‘ then Martin was the best designer at the conference.
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What is design thinking?
I’m hesitant to offer a definition of design thinking because there’s probably no one definition everyone could agree on, as with design and its many sub-genres. But after hearing more and more people having trouble referencing it I figured a half-baked blog post couldn’t hurt. I’m reminded of how Lao Tzu said “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao” yet still managed to write a book about it.
Design thinking is…
- Collaborative, especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement
- Abductive, inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems
- Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk
- Personal, considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved
- Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages
- Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions
I’m sure one could play with the language and categorization to find more or less characteristics, but I’m happy with just those six.
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Niti Bhan
I finally met the lovely and vivacious Niti Bhan at the ID Design Strategy conference. She gave me one of her hilarious business cards and I discovered she has a blog, check it out.
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Stephen Johnson & flow
Stephen Johnson’s new book, Everything Bad is Good for You is getting warm reviews, particularly from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. Listening to him tonight, I particularly liked his comparison of video game levels to the concept of flow (though he didn’t use that term). Games progressively get harder, so we’re always challenged just beyond the point of our abilities, a brilliant way to structure an educational experience.
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Aromatherapy tipping point
I knew scented candles are incredibly popular because I have trouble finding the unscented variety, but it turns out scented pencils are also quite popular, based on some sales data I’ve seen.
I wonder if the flower trade is worried?
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Manufacturing crisis
Innovation sometimes springs from crisis: a company sees a dire threat and takes drastic steps to recover. But what if one person perceives this threat before it becomes obvious to the organization? Can this person manufacturer crisis to initiate change?
It seems that’s what Thomas Friedman is doing with his book The World is Flat, changing the conversation about offshoring to one about fixing our national innovation capabilities…
And it is our ability to constantly innovate new products, services and companies that has been the source of America’s horn of plenty and steadily widening middle class for the last two centuries. This quiet crisis is a product of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ”ambition gap.” Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have gotten too lazy… Second, we have a serious numbers gap building. We are not producing enough engineers and scientists… And finally we are developing an education gap. Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers.
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Simplicity and discipline
“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.” — Douglas Adams
It’s ironic that making simple products is difficult, but it is. It requires discipline to design simple products, discipline to focus on real-world use and experience of a product rather than guesses about use, and discipline to market the real value versus the sheen of extra features.
John Maeda’s seventh law of simplicity expresses a similar idea with an interesting phrasing, suggesting that the simpler thing becomes cognitively more…
The more care, attention, and effort applied
to that which is less, the more it shall be perceived
as more than it really is.
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User-centered automobile
This year’s Rinspeed concept car — the Senso — takes user-centered to the next level…
The “Senso”, which runs on environmentally friendly natural gas, has, not without reason, been labeled the most sensuous car in the world. The “Senso” actually “senses” the driver by measuring his (or her) biometric data, and then exerts a positive effect on him with the help of patterns, colors, music and fragrances. A person who is relaxed and wide-awake simply drives better and more safely.
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Farm Style
WNYC’s Studio 360 on graffiti barns and beautiful orange tractors. Farmers like to be sexy too.
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Conley’s new kind of professional
Chris Conley’s A New Kind of Professional declares
There is a need for professionals skilled in navigating innovative work
No specific professional discipline owns this space
There is a lack of professionals who do this well
In my mind I see a castle surrounded by a moat. On each side are designers, engineers and business people. Those willing to leave the comfort of their present situation and explore the castle could leap over the moat, but only if they leave their baggage behind. Doing so means living with others that think and work very differently, and working together to find common ways of working. That’s the place the new kind of professional is creating.
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Strengthen your right brain
In the April issue of Scientific American Mind, Ulrich Kraft’s Unleashing Creativity ($*) investigates the physical and behavioral evidence for our creativity, still of course a mostly mysterious thing. One fascinating finding is how the left brain’s convergent thinking can inhibit the right brain’s divergent thinking.
The neurologist Bruce Miller studied patients with dementia that resulted from damage to their left brain. The common immediate symptoms were loss of speech and learned social behavior, typical left brain functions. Some of these patients also exhibited a simultaneous burst in creativity in activities from art to music to invention, activities new to them. Kraft makes the argument that we are born with this creativity — young children are invention machines — but 20 years of convergent-thinking education strengthens the left brain’s domination over the right brain.
So how do we become more creative? There’s no easy fix. To be creative, new neural pathways need to be constructed by, well, being creative. Kraft suggests four steps for doing that:
- Wonderment: Try to retain a spirit of discovery, a childlike curiousity about the world. And question understandings that others consider obvious
- Motivation: As soon as a spark of interest arises in something, follow it
- Intellectual courage: Strive to think outside accepted principles and habitual perspectives such as “We’ve always done it that way.”
- Relaxation: Take the time to day dream and ponder, because that is often when the best ideas arise. Look for ways to relax and consciously put the ideas into practice.
I can now justify all that childhood time spent lying in the grass staring up at the clouds.
* Thanks to James for the article heads up. If you’re considering buying it, the online version is cheaper than the dead tree version.
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Bruce Nussbaum, design thinking champion
Bruce Nussbaum, editorial page editor for BusinessWeek, continues his crusade to spread the good word of design thinking to the business community. In The Empathy Economy he quotes GE Healthcare Technologies (GE ) CEO Joseph M. Hogan as saying,
Today, when we think about designing, say, a new MRI system, we don’t just think about designing the product, we think about designing the whole radiology suite. Design in the next 10 years will move beyond the product. It will move beyond workflow. Hospitals in the future…will have different ways of interacting with the patient. We have to think about setting the course for how design can affect the whole health-care experience.
And with Rachel Tiplady he reports Insead has joined with the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., to offer a joint program that teaches the role of creativity in business decisions.
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Same product, new attitude
Irreverent online outfitter Moosejaw Mountaineering‘s homepage currently reads: “The person who wrote this text just started at Moosejaw. He is not funny. But we’ve got softball season coming up and he’s a ringer.” NYT Magazine says,
This is not your standard outdoor-brand message, which tends to go something like this: Our stuff is strictly for the hard-core, not for the poseur (so never mind that you keep seeing our logo on people loading their S.U.V.’s in mall parking lots). Wolfe, however, says he has learned that the ”hard-core user” has no problem with Moosejaw’s approach — and not because it’s subtle or sneaky but because it’s so over the top.
They managed to keep the traditional audience and add a new audience by deviating from the usual way of doing business, in this case altering their identity. Small Dog is another example of same product, new attitude.