Design thinking Design thinking stands for design-specific cognitive activities that designers apply during the process of designing.[1] Overview[edit] Design thinking has come to be defined as combining empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality in analyzing and fitting various solutions to the problem context.[2] According to Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, the goal of Design Thinking is "matching people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and viable as a business strategy" [3] The premise of teaching Design Thinking is that by knowing about how designers approach problems and the methods which they use to ideate, select and execute solutions, individuals and businesses will be better able to improve their own problem solving processes and take innovation to a higher level. Origins of the term[edit] (For a detailed evolution, see History, below.) Solution-based thinking[edit] Bryan Lawson Architects vs. Lawson found that:
Use design thinking for the fuzzy front end of organizational change | Designing Change [Design thinking] is the ability to create new options and build new products, services and experiences that gives design so much power. It is the ability to understand deeply cultures from digital social media networks to small villages in southern India that gives design its power. – Bruce Nussbaum I first came across the term design thinking a several years ago, through the writing of Tim Brown and Bruce Nussbaum, two early champions of the approach. A designer by background, a former boss nudged me towards buyer personas, which started me on an exploration of the world of sales and marketing. This broadened my view into one that didn’t just focus on “user” but on the messy organizational context in which that person worked, the business problems faced by those organizations, and the challenges of balancing the needs of an organization, its customers, and its employees. Empathy, as Bruna Martinuzzi argues, is missing: Source: The Process of Design Squiggle, Damien Newman
The State of Information Visualization, 2013 Well, the world hasn’t ended, so here’s a look back at what happened in visualization in 2012, and a look ahead in case the world is still around a year from now. 2012: What Was Last year was an exciting one, at least for me. First I started my sabbatical year at Tableau, then I decided to stay there. I went to SxSW and Malofiej. 2012 was the year visualization in the news took off. And you know who called it a year ago? If you don’t believe that data journalism will be big in 2012, I have one word for you: U.S. The New York Times, which used to hide its interactive pieces online, has posted a collection of the amazing work they did in 2012, including such pieces as 512 Paths to the White House. This marks a sea change not only in terms of interactivity on the web, but in how newspapers are starting to approach the issue of browser support. 2013: What Will Be My predictions have at times been self-serving. In less self-centric future developments, Many Eyes is coming back! Beyond 2013
From Google Ventures: 4 Steps For Combining The Hacker Way With Design Thinking Jake Knapp is like the middle-school teacher everyone should have had. Tall, with clear blue plastic glasses, he holds a classroom-clock-sized timer like a football while explaining the first activity of the day: an exercise called "Crazy 8s" that involves drawing eight different solutions, with 40 seconds for each, to address one design challenge. On a whiteboard nearby, he’s sketched out a five-step game plan for redesigning the Blue Bottle Coffee website. Below the first box in the schedule, labeled “Understand,” there’s an unsure emoticon. It turns to a smiley face by the next step, “Diverge," sticks its tongue out for “Decide,” sports a toothy grin under “Prototype," and alternates between despair and glee under “Validate.” Blue Bottle, I am told, is currently somewhere between the number two and number three emotional states. “Yeah, yeah, that was years ago,” Knapp responds. They’re not. 1. “You can talk about, ‘Ooh, should we do a scrolling page or a step-by-step?’ 2. 3. 4.
Patrick Whitney on Reframing Design Thinking -- and Beyond By Reena Jana - April 11, 2013 Patrick Whitney is dean of Chicago’s Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology a graduate school focusing on researching and teaching design methods. He is a luminary in the ever-growing field of design strategy. RJ: "Reframing" seems to be a theme at the conference and also in the innovation landscape in general. Patrick Whitney: The conference is a strategy conference. They seek to produce new things that are acceptable and reframing the conventional view of their current offering seems to be one of the key ways to do that. So businesses are turning to designers when they want to find something new. At the conference we’ll hear from Carl Bass, the CEO of Autodesk, about learning from crafts to reframe software. RJ: There is so much pressure to be a "visionary" and a "game changer" in the business and design fields. PW: Most projects should not need visionaries or game changers. On the other end are real breakthrough products. PW: Yes!
Top trends in Data Visualization 2013: Visually Meetup With 2012 behind us — and having discussed our favorite infographics, interactive visualizations and motion graphics of the year — it was only natural that the topic of our first meetup for 2013 would be Top Trends in Data Visualization. Nearly 100 people came to the Trulia offices in SOMA, San Francisco (many thanks for being our host!) and we kicked off the evening with beer, pizza (and even some ping pong). Of course, we weren’t there just to have fun, but also hear two very smart and talented people talk about what they think are the top trends in interactive visualizations and motion graphics. Scott Murray, a code artist, and Assistant Professor of Design at University of San Francisco, gave a presentation on the top trends in interactive visualization. You can watch his talk (and presentation) here: Technical Director of a reputed Indian software Company Syspen, shared his ideas about Data Visualization. The importance of storytelling The importance of sharing
IDEO: Big Innovation Lives Right on the Edge of Ridiculous Ideas Imagine for a second if you could somehow wrap up the creative chaos of a kindergartner’s life and apply it at work. You’d go on field trips, make stuff, hatch crazy ideas, and be awed by the world on a daily basis. Sound ridiculous? Psychologists tell us that as we age, we become self-conscious in classroom and other public settings, and quietly begin to suppress our playful tendencies for fear of being childish or breaking with social norms. Boyle, who teaches a course at Stanford’s d.school called “From Play to Innovation,” is a partner at IDEO and heads up the Toy Lab in addition to promoting entrepreneurial thinking throughout its locations worldwide. Wilcox, a toy inventor at IDEO, is a former circus performer and kinetic sculptor turned industrial designer and founder of Sway Motorsports, an electric tilting trike project based in Palo Alto, California. I spoke with Boyle and Wilcox by phone about how they integrate play into their work lives, and culture – and how you can, too.
How To Do Design Thinking — What I Learned Building… David Kelley: The first step in the Design Thinking process is what we call the Understand phase: if you’re going to work in a certain area you really need to talk to experts. We’re generalists, we’re expert at process but if you really want to do something, if you’re going to design a new medical device, you have to really immerse yourself in it. So in the first step you end up studying the state of the art, going and talking to experts, doing research to bring yourself up to speed. Then there’s the Observation phase. If we’re going to design a new gas station we’ll go and see how they pump gas in Japan. If you see somebody having trouble using something, or that they grimace or they’re unhappy or they’re scared, that’s a place that we could really do innovation because we can fix that. At some point by observing these people and building empathy for them you start to have insights about them. Because this thing’s a team sport you have all these different eyes watching.
Infographic: The 550,000 Miles Of Undersea Cabling That Powers The Internet They seem so brittle. Cables that are a little more than two inches thick line our ocean floors, culminating in over half a million miles in length, transmitting terabytes of data across the globe every second. What about satellites? Click to enlarge. The Submarine Cable Map, by telecom research firm TeleGeography, is a vintage rendition of the worldwide network that drives our communications infrastructure today. "The beautiful hand-drawn details found on old maps have always fascinated me and are sorely missing from contemporary cartography,” designer Markus Krisetya explains. The result is gorgeous, like some combination of classic cartography and a modern tube map, or maybe a circuit board diagram. Interestingly enough, the map hides some other big pieces of data near the bottom of the print. If you’d like a map of your own, 36-by-50-inch prints are available now for $250. Buy one here.
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