TEDxStanford - Tina Seelig - A crash course in creativity

What Successful People Do With The First Hour Of Their Work Day Remember when you used to have a period at the beginning of every day to think about your schedule, catch up with friends, maybe knock out a few tasks? It was called home room, and it went away after high school. But many successful people schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room every day. You should too. The first hour of the workday goes a bit differently for Craig Newmark of Craigslist, David Karp of Tumblr, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, career writer (and Fast Company blogger) Brian Tracy, and others, and they’ll tell you it makes a big difference. Don’t Check Your Email for the First Hour. Tumblr founder David Karp will "try hard" not to check his email until 9:30 or 10 a.m., according to an Inc. profile of him. Not all of us can roll into the office whenever our Vespa happens to get us there, but most of us with jobs that don’t require constant on-call awareness can trade e-mail for organization and single-focus work. Gain Awareness, Be Grateful Choose Your Frog

Hacking the Classroom: Beyond Design Thinking Design Thinking is trending is some educational circles. Edutopia recently ran a design thinking for educators workshop and I attended two great workshops at SXSWedu 2013 on Design Thinking: Design Thinking is a great skill for students to acquire as part of their education. But it is one process like the problem-solving model or the scientific method. Design Thinking Design thinking is an approach to learning that includes considering real-world problems, research, analysis, conceiving original ideas, lots of experimentation, and sometimes building things by hand ( As a further explanation of this process, here is an exercise by the d.School about how to re-design a wallet using the design process. Here is another take on the design thinking process as applied to learning within a community setting: “What does it take to create education in this age of imagination?” Problems with Design Thinking

Play Ethic Book: Pat Kane. The Play Ethic. A MANIFESTO FOR A DIFFERENT WAY OF LIVING. (Macmillan, Sep 2004) URL = From the Publisher: "The Play Ethic explores the real meaning of play and shows how a more playful society would revolutionize and liberate our daily lives. Using wide and varied sources – from the Enlightenment to Eminem, Socrates to Chaos theory, Kierkegaard to Karaoke – The Play Ethic shows how play is fundamental to both society and to the individual, and how the work ethic that has dominated the last three centuries is ill-equipped to deal with the modern world. The Play Ethic seeks to change the way you look at your daily life, how you interact with others, how you view the world. Shocking, controversial, yet magnificently argued, The Play Ethic is a book no one who works, or has ever worked, can afford to be without." Conducted by Daphne Dragona for the Greek culture magazine Konteiner (#11) Simply put, the play ethic is what comes after the work ethic.

5 | Frog Creates An Open-Source Guide To Design Thinking Brainstorming, whether you believe in it or shun it, is a fantastic neologism. But as Frog Principal Designer David Sherwin has found, it’s also a very American word--one that doesn’t exist in every language. “We were in Bangladesh, trying to translate the idea into Bengali,” says Sherwin, remembering a recent trip his team spent working with teenage girls on community issues. “One of the translators on our team wrote up on the board, brain + storm. It couldn’t be translated.” Sherwin’s experience touches on a crucial problem for many NGOs and foundations attempting to transpose Western methods of social innovation to other cultures. Today, Frog will release the Collective Action Toolkit, a free, 72-page booklet that seeks to develop a universal framework for people of all ages and cultural backgrounds to tackle big problems in their communities. Check out the Collective Action Toolkit for yourself here.

8 Tips and Tricks to Redesign Your Classroom Remake Your Class is a 3-part video series that covers how one educator transformed his classroom with the help of his students, some community volunteers, and design experts. Editor's Note: Author David Bill is a designer and educator who consulted with The Third Teacher+ on the Remake Your Class project highlighted in the videos below. The tips in this post go along with the companion video. We are excited by the simplicity (and low price tag!) If you're thinking of completing your own classroom remake project, good for you. The tips below can be used for smaller scale remakes right way. Whether you are looking to reorganize one corner or redesign the entire room, here are eight tips that may help you throughout the process. 1. Students are your primary users and should be at the center of such a remake process. Create Visual Inspiration Ask parents, colleagues or friends to donate a variety of appropriate magazines. Students Define Pain Points 10x10x10 Student Helpers 2. Word Association

32 of the Most Popular Toys From the Last 145 Years | Wired Design Zoetrope reel, 1870s — Before there was Pixar, there was the Zoetrope. The optical illusion was first demonstrated in 1836, over a hundred years before the first Saturday morning cartoons. The device was patented in 1867 by Milton Bradley, the man, not the company, and in many ways can be considered one of the first mass-market toys. Marbles, 1880s Photo: Andy BrownCare Bear, 1980s. Zoetrope reel, 1870s — Before there was Pixar, there was the Zoetrope. For a child, the only thing worse than a broken bone is a seemingly interminable wait in an emergency room. Brown had previously shot portraits of children undergoing chemotherapy or spending time in the neonatal intensive care unit, so he had an understanding of the challenges young patients face while receiving care. “The Rubik’s Cube is the most ‘forensically’ shot of all the toys,” says Brown. Brown wanted to present the toys that were the best sellers for each decade.

Make Space Make Space (John Wiley & Sons, 2012) is a new book based on the work at the Stanford University d.school and its Environments Collaborative Initiative. It is a tool for helping people intentionally manipulate space to ignite creativity. Appropriate for designers charged with creating new spaces or anyone interested in revamping an existing space, this guide offers novel and non-obvious strategies for changing surroundings specifically to enhance the ways in which teams and individuals communicate, work, play—and innovate. This work is based on years of classes and programs at the d.school including countless prototypes and iterations with d.school students and spaces. CLICK BELOW TO DOWNLOAD THREE HOW TO SPREADS FROM THE BOOKZ-RackT-WallFoam CubesHiding Place Make Space breaks down content into 5 buckets: Tools—tips on how to build everything from furniture, to wall-treatments, and rigging Situations—scenarios, and layouts for sparking creative activities

Design Thinking – John Spencer Every day, I ask my kids, “What did you make in school today?” Too often, they can’t give me an answer. But on the days that they do, their eyes light up and they passionately describe their projects. I want to see schools transform into bastions of creativity and wonder. But here’s the thing: this is hard to pull off. This is what I love about design thinking. This is why A.J. Every Child Is a Maker I believe that every classroom should be filled with creativity and wonder. I realize that school can be busy. We can do better. I am convinced that creative thinking is as vital as math or reading or writing. I believe all students deserve the opportunity to be their best creative selves, both in and out of school. I have a crazy belief that all people are naturally creative. What Is Design Thinking? The term “design thinking” is often attached to maker spaces and STEM labs. Design thinking is a flexible process for getting the most out of the creative process. A.J. Part Two: The LAUNCH Cycle

The Overprotected Kid A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers. “The Land! It opens in half an hour.” Down a path and across a grassy square, 5-year-old Dylan can hear them through the window of his nana’s front room. It’s still morning, but someone has already started a fire in the tin drum in the corner, perhaps because it’s late fall and wet-cold, or more likely because the kids here love to start fires. Other than some walls lit up with graffiti, there are no bright colors, or anything else that belongs to the usual playground landscape: no shiny metal slide topped by a red steering wheel or a tic-tac-toe board; no yellow seesaw with a central ballast to make sure no one falls off; no rubber bucket swing for babies. The Land is an “adventure playground,” although that term is maybe a little too reminiscent of theme parks to capture the vibe. “I’m gonna put this cardboard box in the fire,” one of the boys says. Do accidents happen anymore?

How to Apply Design Thinking in Class, Step By Step By Anne Stevens For educators ready to try the idea of design thinking, you’ll be glad to know it does not require extensive transformation of your classroom. That said, it can be a transformative experience for all involved. Here, we try to answer your questions about integrating different components of a design learning experience into familiar, pre-existing scenarios that play out in every school. Can my classroom become a space of possibility? For students, the best classroom experience is a space of possibility. It can be challenging to transition a traditional classroom into a space of possibility. But in a classroom that is a space of possibility, the students have agency, and the products and processes can be moving targets. Can I run a design thinking classroom on Tuesdays from 1-3pm? You can run a flexible studio space in your classroom for a certain part of the day. I am not a designer. The first place to seek the curriculum is in your classroom’s daily activities.

An Exercise in Design Thinking: Step 1: Discovery Browsing the “printable backpacking checklist” search results, I ran into two common themes: They’re either all super rigid, bloated and overly exhaustive, or they’re not actually printable. For example, many are weighed down with various bright colors/artwork (increased ink usage) or they’re not formatted to print in any sort of logical/economical way. The top Google result features a tiny text link to a downloadable PDF, but you’d have to adhere to one person’s specific packing ideology, i.e. a somehow vague, yet specific “2/2.5 lbs of food per day”. Addressing the Problems: Taking a page from IDEO’s Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, I framed out my design challenge. Considering My Packing Method: In thinking about what I usually pack, and how, I noted that we keep all of our supplies in organized bins. I began to flesh out the concept, affixing my four core challenge components, with possible solutions. Step 2: Content Creating the actual List (component 1.)

Design Thinking – The New Innovation Strategy – Leader In U Today we are living and doing business in complex modern technology driven environment. There are various types of complexities, in different forms and faces, and in this volatile environment, business need to experiment with different approaches to thrive. They not only need to understand the complex technologies but also make sense to start using the same for their benefit. We are seeing a massive transformation across the business world – where they are applying the principles of design to the way people work. They are investing in design to get to the top of the trend to deliver more value to their customers. How Design is playing a critical role in modern business environment? Although Design is most often used to describe an object or end result, Design in its most effective form is a process, an action, a verb not a noun. Have you seen your newspaper? Let’s talk little more about the foundation of Design Thinking: Integrate your thinking – think ‘HOW’ Be ready for some bumps