Design & Thinking - a documentary on design thinking

design studies forum › Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I This article originally appeared in Design and Culture, Volume 3, Number 3, November 2011 Abstract The term design thinking has gained considerable attention over the past decade in a wide range of organizations and contexts beyond the traditional preoccupations of designers. The main idea is that the ways professional designers problem solve is of value to firms trying to innovate and to societies trying to make change happen. This paper reviews the origins of the term design thinking in research on designers and its adoption by management educators and consultancies within a dynamic, global mediatized economy. Three main accounts are identified: design thinking as a cognitive style, as a general theory of design, and as a resource for organizations.

Making It Pictures “Making It” is a documentary film that explores the daily struggles of making a living, staying creative, and making it all up as we go along. The film focuses primarily on Eric Fortune, Andrew Bawidamann, and Brian Ewing discussing education, their business model, and the future of Illustration but ultimately asking, what does “Making It” mean to each artist? Andrew Bawidamann, Brian Ewing and Eric Fortune are three excellent artists who are in the middle of their careers. This stage of their journey is the toughest because they’re on the edge of success, “Making IT”.

The UX Series: are UX and design thinking used enough in i-docs? The UX Series is a collaborative research project about UX in i-docs. The point is the following: if we want users to engage in our i-docs we need to work with them from the beginning. This does not mean giving them the full control of our stories, but starting a dialogue that can forge our decisions and design so that the result is inclusive and immersive. With the UX Series I want to question how/if using UX design methodologies could help us produce better interactive factual narratives. I came up with 7 questions that summarise the main issues we are facing when creating an i-doc. Each sets of answers will be released separately, aiming to cover them all by March 20th (the first day the i-Docs 2014 conference that I co-organize with the DCRC).

Remote collaborative sketching, brainstorming and design studio techniques I’ve been facilitating design studios with collocated teams for years. Many, including me, have covered the benefits of collaboratively sketching new ideas and concepts with a cross-functional team. Recently though, I was tasked with bringing this exercise to a distributed team. With the product and user experience team in New York and the development team in Vancouver, it proved to be an interesting challenge. What follows is a play-by-play of how we set up the exercise and executed as well as an analysis of the successes and failures of this first attempt.

20 documentaries every designer should watch — uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design 20 documentaries every designer should watch Some of the documentaries listed below are quite famous, some are completely unknown. More than teaching you anything about Design, these films teach something about people — how they behave, what motivates them and how they shape art and culture at the same time they are shaped by it. Objectified Collaboration: The Narrative Design Canvas A few years ago, I took a master class in Toronto with Alex Osterwalder, the visionary author of Business Model Generation and creator of the the Business Model Canvas, to learn how to apply his canvas to organizational and project design. After the class, I spoke with Alex and with his permission, reimagined the canvas into one with fields particular to the use of social impact media for a campaign, project, or organizational program. The result was the project model canvas for narrative design for social impact below. The canvas is a strategic planning tool that allows you to lay out on one page the internal considerations for the design of your narrative-based project for social impact. True to Alex's spirit, my version of his canvas has been freely available to anyone who requested it, but under the demands of my task list, I had never gotten around to releasing it for direct download.

Scaling Design Thinking — Design Diary The Challenge : There are as yet, very few robust examples of how to scale the culture and mindset of design thinking within a company retrospectively. The examples that exist — Proctor & Gamble under A.G. Lafley, Apple under Steve Jobs, Intuit under Scott Cook are based on the CEO being believers in design and driving it into the deepest levels of their organisations. The nature of changes cover the entire spectrum — structural changes to make designers influential in the organisation (Apple) , designed office spaces to allow for interdisciplinary interactions (Pixar) , designed internal processes to make design an integral part of it ( Intuit ), policy changes and budgetary decisions to ensure design and innovation became accountable within their organisation ( P&G), transformational initiatives that make thinking non-incrementally imperative (P&G) and much more.

How to create a mood board When trying to convey a design idea to win pitches and get an early sign-off, moods, feelings and visions can be difficult to communicate verbally. So designers will often use mood boards: a collection of textures, images and text related to a design theme as a reference point. Mood boards help others to 'get inside our heads' as they show what you're thinking and feeling about a creative idea and your intended vision for a piece of work. Get Adobe Creative Cloud now That said, mood boards can be a pain to create, with many hours spent trawling image galleries, websites, books and magazines looking for that perfect image to sum up your intended feel for the work at hand. The right tools for creating mood boards can help, plus here are a collection of tips to help make your mood board making more effective – and double your chances of winning that pitch.

20 Steps to Better Wireframing Possibly the biggest mistake in any development project is failure to plan. Recently, the owner of a prospective start-up told me that planning was unnecessary and a good developer could just start coding. This, I promise you, will end in tears. Wireframing is one of the first steps in your planning process and arguably it’s one of the most important ones. This is when the idea starts to take shape as an application, becoming boxes and buttons that users will interact with.

Why service design is the next big thing in cultural innovation Here at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, we explore how to best use new thinking and new tools to make the experience of the twelve major Edinburgh festivals even better – for audiences, performers and the festivals organisations themselves. As part of this ongoing work, this week saw the launch of Festivals Design DNA, a project which began life as a simple question: what happens if we approached innovation through the eyes of a designer, and in particular a service designer? Working together with Glasgow-based service design agency Snook, we have created a set of practical tools to help cultural organisations use the principles and approaches of service design to improve the experiences they produce – supporting the innovation process all the way from ideation to delivery. But before I tell you why I think service design is the next big thing in the cultural sector, let's just back up a wee bit and do the definition thing. 1. What people want isn't always what organisations want

Dysfunctional Products Come from Dysfunctional Organizations Producing great products isn’t just about creativity and execution. It’s also about organizational alignment. Let me tell you a quick story. One of my alumni, Eli, recently finished a contract with a government transportation agency. She had been tasked with spending time with the agency’s customers – regular citizens – to identify usability issues in their mobile app. She had quickly discovered that the app was basically a trainwreck.

Tools for Game Design: Game Design Methods Game design method implies an approach to a problem which is likely to lead to a successful solution. It is backed by a certain amount of imagination, creativity and intuition, and a more or less systematic investigation of the problem with the help of techniques, 'best practices', or 'tricks of the trade'. A Brainstorming Toolbox (David Perry)Creativity/ Innovation (Yolanda Verhage)Jumpstarting Your Creativity (Brad Meyer)Visualizing the Creative Process (Daniel Cook) From the Vault – The BioShock PitchHow To Pitch Your GameGame ConceptsHow To Pitch Your Project To PublishersWhat a Pitch!

What does an innovation strategist do? The opportunity to become an “Innovation Strategist” catches people’s attention. Since our initial posting for the role in Toronto, we’ve received over 120 resumes from dynamic, brilliant young individuals all interested in joining the Idea Couture team. From the outside looking in, innovation strategy sounds incredibly sexy (and it certainly looks good on a business card). But if you ask a typical applicant what exactly they think an innovation strategist does, what usually follows is blank stares, buzz words, or my favorite, “They strategize innovation”. None of those are good answers.