Use our methods. DP0 (Design Project Zero) is a 90-minute (including debrief) fast-paced project though a full design cycle. Students pair up to interview each other, create a point-of-view, ideate, and make a new solution that is “useful and meaningful” to their partner. Two versions of DP0 are “The Wallet Project” and “The Gift-Giving Project”. They have the similar format, only the topic is different. The original DP0 The Wallet Project was created for the d.school’s very first course in 2004 and the project starts with students looking at the content of their partner’s wallet or purse (and goes on to ask every student to design something for their partner).
Another DP0 topic is The Gift-Giving Project where students are asked to redesign how their partner gives gifts. Get the materials to facilitate the activity for a group yourself here. Or play the Crash Course (video facilitation that leads the group) here. A Taxonomy of Innovation. How To Lead With Design Thinking. Brand Manual | We make them talk about you. Design Research. Programme Ashoka Changemakers' City - Documents. C’est avec un immense plaisir qu’Ashoka vous accueille à cette 1 ère édition de l’Ashoka Cha n g e m a kers’ City (16-19 juin), au sein de l’Ashoka Changemakers’ Week (16-23 juin), un événement mondial unique autour des entrepreneurs sociaux les plus innovants!! Il y a 30 ans, l’association Ashoka lançait en Inde son activité de soutien des E n t r e p r e n e u r s S o c i a u x innovants.
Aujourd’hui dans 70 pays (dont 41 en France, Belgique et Suisse où nous n’existons que depuis 2006) à apporter des solutions nouvelles, pragmatiques et efficaces pour résoudre les problèmes sociaux et environnementaux les plus urgents, et bâtir un monde plus solidaire. Partout dans le monde, l’Entrepreneuriat Social se développe, ses acteurs se font de plus en plus nombreux, accélérant ainsi sa diffusion au sein de la société civile, des universités, des médias, et du monde du business. Rejoignez le mouvement! Faisant de Paris la ville des "acteurs de changement", l’Ashoka Changemakers’ City vous fait découvrir des France et ailleurs. Behomm | Get an invitation. Defining a creative agency | Playground Inc. What is a creative agency? If you work in the creative services industry, one of the hardest questions to answer can be, “what does your company do?”. This is especially tough if it’s asked by a friend or family member who knows very little about the world of creative services.
How do you answer that question while balancing the need to be clear and concise with the desire to convey what makes it interesting and challenging? This is the question of identity, and I think it is a central challenge of building a business, particularly if the industry you work in is not well defined. Four factors that I think define an agency: services, employees, business model and values In the process of building our own company, I’ve had to face this challenge numerous times as we have reinvented Playground over the years.
The services The first factor I want to explore is a company’s services. 1. These agencies excel at executing on complex projects where many disciplines are required. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8 Secrets To Creative Thinking (Hint: Steal From Others) In the Fifties, I, together with just about every designer, was preoccupied with aesthetics and fashion. Design was the latest typeface in a modern layout looking like a Mondrian with lots of white space. That’s what I was taught in art school. I don’t remember when I changed. Whether it happened all at once, or gradually. Eventually, inspired by designers Paul Rand, Lou Dorfsman and Helmut Krone, an art director at Doyle Dane Bernbach, along with the surrealist painter, René Magritte, I became less interested in design for its own sake and more interested in design as it communicates an opinion.
That was sixty years ago. And there’s another thing about the situation today that designers must recognize. But that’s not the way it is now. So, if anyone who can type can do much of the work previously done by well-paid specialists, what’s left for the designer? [One of Gill’s signature visual puns: "Smoking a pipe makes you…seem more elegant] Process [The AGM logo that Gill created] Designing With People | Putting people at the heart of the design process.
The User-Centered Design Conundrum. When I mention design research to clients unfamiliar with user–centered design, I am often confronted with a blank stare. At first, I thought that I simply might be doing it wrong: selecting the wrong kinds of clients to work with, or associating myself with the wrong kind of companies—but after attending events and meet-ups frequented by UX professionals, I’ve learned that I’m not alone.
The problem—willful ignorance to the benefits of design research—is a pervasive one. Interestingly, the conundrum always starts the same way: those who budget a project’s time, materials, etc. believe that incorporating user research into the design process could potentially add to the project’s overall scope. These stakeholders, project managers, whathaveyou are concerned with making things work for themselves or their superiors within a specific time frame. Of course, the answer can go both ways. Designers win Let’s assume the answer is yes. Designers lose It’s how you play the game.
The Design of Information » Information Design. The work I enjoy most is divided pretty evenly between two things: visualizing complex data and visualizing complex systems. Both are trying to get at truth through some degree of abstraction. Choosing the right type of chart for your data should be a thoughtful process and may, at times, requires some creative thinking, but choosing the right format for showing a system can be a lot less straightforward. There is seldom just one right way to depict a system. I find myself grappling with how position, shape, size and color might give meaning to different viewers in different contexts – not to mention line weight, arrow style, iconography, etc.
Developing a consistent visual language can be a challenge, but it pays dividends, especially in a series of related diagrams. Despite the complexity, or maybe because of it, I find great satisfaction in discovering simple solutions that are true and understandable. Their large scale VPN technology: And their Panorama technology: Design Kit. Method Cards. IDEO Method Cards is a collection of 51 cards representing diverse ways that design teams can understand the people they are designing for. They are used to make a number of different methods accessible to all members of a design team, to explain how and when the methods are best used, and to demonstrate how they have been applied to real design projects.
IDEO’s human factors specialists conceived the deck as a design research tool for its staff and clients, to be used by researchers, designers, and engineers to evaluate and select the empathic research methods that best inform specific design initiatives. The tool can be used in various ways—sorted, browsed, searched, spread out, pinned up—as both information and inspiration to human-centered design teams and individuals at various stages to support planning and execution of design programs.
In its first year, the Method Cards appeared to have unexpected relevance to groups that are not necessarily engaged in design initiatives. When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods. Consulting firms wrap themselves in 'innovation' International consulting firm Deloitte LLP saw an opportunity when the public and its clients started throwing around the word “innovation” with abandon in recent years. Deloitte joined several other consulting firms with offices in Chicago and varying interests in innovation and the so-called “emerging growth companies,” or startups, to which more and more of Big Consulting’s clients are looking for inspiration, solutions and partnerships.
Regardless of what innovation means to people — and the word has been applied with remarkable flexibility — it’s important enough to invest in, Chicago consultancies say. The Chicago office of EY, formerly Ernst & Young, continues to invest in strategic partnerships locally and in its Entrepreneur of the Year contest. Accenture takes advantage of its Customer Innovation Network, which it has operated since 2006 and which includes a 5,000-square-foot consumer-behavior lab in Chicago.
Innovation marches on Importance grows Accenture uses its site at 161 N. Designresearchtechniques. The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities. By Jared M. Spool Originally published: May 11, 2004 Back in the late 1970’s, the US government commissioned a study to look at effective group decision making. In the study, they asked 30 military experts to study intelligence data and try to construct the enemy’s troop movements.
Each expert analyzed the data and compiled a report. The commission then “scored” each report on how well it reported the actual troop movements. Each expert then reviewed all of the other experts’ reports and rewrote their initial assessment. What was different between the first report and the second? Deriving Priorities When Resources are Limited In design, our resources are limited. In our consulting work, we’ve found that, like the military experts, our clients usually have most of the answers already in their own organization. For this, we’ve turned to a group consensus technique we’ve been using for years, called a KJ-Method (also sometimes referred to as an “affinity diagram”). The KJ-Method: Step By Step. Focus Groups Are Worthless — Research Things. If I achieve one thing with my time here on earth, I might be content if that one thing could be burning to the ground the practice of running focus groups in place of actual user research.
Sociology is the scientific study of social behavior. Focus groups were created by American Sociologist Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) as a way to better understand that behavior. Yet, Merton himself deplored how focus groups came to be misused. “Even when the subjects are well selected, focus groups are supposed to be merely the source of ideas that need to be researched.” I wish Robert K. Even the author of a piece assertively titled Why Focus Groups Kill Innovation, couldn’t help including a little hedge, “Focus groups aren’t useless. No, no, no. User research is hard — not because recruiting participants and conducting interviews are difficult, the logistics have never been easier or less expensive.
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. You Might As Well Hold a Tea Party. The 7 Deadly Sins of User Research. It's fashionable to blame poor usability on firms not doing enough customer research. On the face of it, this seems like the obvious cause of poor usability. If firms only did the research, they would realise their product was a dud. But, like all obvious reasons, it's wrong. In reality, there's never been a better time to be a purveyor of customer research tools. The problem isn't with the quantity of user research. Organisations struggle to distinguish good user research from bad user research. Here are 7 examples of poor user research practice that I've come across in my work with clients — along with some ideas on how to fix them.
Credulity Dogmatism Bias Obscurantism Laziness Vagueness Hubris Credulity The dictionary defines credulity as a state of willingness to believe something without proper proof. A couple of months ago I was attending a usability study on behalf of a client. Asking people what they want is very tempting. But it's also wrong. Here's why. But there's a twist. Bias. Designresearchtechniques. Researchers.io. 5 Things You'll Learn In Ideo's New Online Innovation Class. Think you're not creative? The innovation gurus at Ideo beg to differ. The design firm argues that anyone can unleash an inner creative genius through certain methods—the same methods that Ideo uses on its own projects. A new series of online classes called Ideo U shares those techniques with the world.
The classes, at $399 each, are meant for anyone who wants to solve a problem, whether they're leaders building a startup or tackling an issue like homelessness at a nonprofit. First up is a course in how to gather insights. "We started with a course on insights because this is the very foundation of Ideo’s approach to creativity and innovation," says Suzanne Gibbs Howard, the firm partner leading the initiative. "At Ideo, every time we design, we gather insights about what people say, do, think and feel to motivate us in fruitful directions. Here are five skills the class teaches: 1: Observing without judging 2: Learning from extremes 3: How to conduct a great interview. Groups. Tim Brown: Designers -- think big! The Virtues, and Perils, of Design Thinking | Architect Magazine | Business, Designers, Architects, Tim Brown, Bruce Mau, Frank Gehry, Design Management Institute, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, Six Sigma, Gehry Partners.
Earlier this year, an episode of the sitcom 30 Rock made great work of parodying Six Sigma, the business-management system developed by Motorola. With its penchant for pseudoscientific jargon and karate-inspired hierarchies, it makes for a ripe target, but it’s hardly a unique phenomenon. Every few years, the business world latches onto some new management paradigm that promises to reinvigorate corporate America and—perhaps more critically—maintain liquidity in the highly lucrative business-consultancy sector. The latest panacea offered by the management-industrial complex, as you may have noted, is “design thinking.” A whole raft of books on this subject has hit stores over the past year.
For the practicing architect, this new trend (fad?) It is more than a bit ironic, then, that architects, the standard-bearers of professional design, are virtually nonexistent in discussions about design thinking. Perhaps there’s some justification in this affront. Think Big Factory | product and strategic design consultancy. Architecture design thinking « Thinkbig Lab. The rise of design thinking has to do with the grater understanding of the methods and process developed in the design. Processes have been established (analysis -> ideation -> prototype -> iteration -> implementation), and tools have been defined (brainstorming, rapid prototyping, body storming, storytelling, what if …, role-play, desktop walkthrough, service safaris …) in order to transmit and generate truly collective process.
This deeper understanding has led to an explosion of applications in and out of design: business, management, services, science, politics, organization … and is supported by the following principles: + An holistic resolution of the problems. An approach to the problem from all possible angles. Do not break a problem into parts, but try to cover everything at once. + The user is the center of the process (user centered design) . + It is a participatory and collaborative process (co-creation). 1. 2. “Maybe, architecture doesn’t have to be stupid after all.