Design Thinking

Design Thinking About Work

A New York Times article (18-07-11) Beyond the Cubicle discusses the different types of requirement for the modern day working space design. It seems that what people want and need is a focus on quality interactions in preference to the latest office furntiture concpet [be that a cubicle or not!]. This is an interesting article that explores why it's important to meet flexible working needs and effectively apply design thinking to the puzzle of work - what we do, and why and where we do it.

 

Change Your Life with Design Thinking

This is a link to a nice article from Saturday's Guardian on how Design Thinking can improve your quality of life.  The article describes design thinking as "thinking that focuses on creating better things, while analytical thinking, which is standard in business, is choosing between things".  I don't think this quite right, as creating better things clearly involves a process of choosing somewhere along the line.  But the empahsis, indeed, is on creating things.  The concept of 'life kerning' is also an interesting one and the subject of a recent book (see link below).

Read the full article...
Life Kerning: Creative Ways to Fine Tune your Perspective on Career or Life

Paper folding fascination

This series of videos on different paper folding techniques absolutely fascinated me. You can build a great variety of prototypes from paper using these techniques. Different folds give the object different properties, like flexibility or stiffness. My favourite is the crumbling technique, which allows to produce arches and curved forms in no time.

 

Folding Techniques for Designers: Crumpling from Laurence King Publishing on Vimeo.

 

 

This makes sketching really easy and enjoyable

There is an abundance of web drawing tools out there. But I like this one. It offers a limited set of options. You really don't need more. The lines and forms produced look really good and this is probably the essence of the Harmony drawing tool. You just save the picture you draw as png. Very simple.

Design thinking for educators

I stumbled upon a great IDEO initiative that introduces design thinking to schools and educational institutions in the form of a toolkit. How design thinking is used on a social level is demonstrated in many fascinating stories and case studies.

I particularly liked the case study on educational game design. It is very relevant to Block 3 in U101 Design Thinking. A key learning from reading the story is engaging in iterative design in the design process and testing your designs with all stakeholders.

http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com

About being wrong

I just watched this powerful TED talk about the benefits of being wrong. I had to think about how in design thinking we also tend to emphasize when we were right rather than admitting what was wrong about a thought, process, prototype, idea, etc. I like the concept of embracing and hence being able to learn from admitting one was wrong. It could help us to reflect more deeply about design processes and to be more honest about design ideas.

 

Play dough prototyping

There is a wonderful new, short and stunning TED video about prototyping with play dough. If you'd ever thought about using electronic circuits for things to light up, move or do other things, then watch this. This could be particularly interesting when you want to demonstrate or explore how products might respond to user interaction.

 

Prototyping on your iPhone

 I just stumbled upon a very nice web/mobile application called Realizer. It allows you to upload sketches (single screens) of User Interface designs for iPhone or iPad to a web interface. You can then link these single screens by adding interactive areas in your sketch, such as buttons. Having finished your mock-up, you can download an iphone/ipad app to show the prototype to others on your handheld device. 

I think you could not only prototype mobile apps with this tools but possibly also other complex designs, such as Service designs. It's worth exploring further at http://realizerapp.com/

 

Interaction Design Encyclopaedia

 

The area of Interaction Design is relatively new, although its roots can be found in established professional and academic domains, such as Design and Computation or Social Science. Interaction-Design.org is an educational resource that makes knowledge in Interaction Design and related fields available to a wider audience. A new project is the Interaction Design Encyclopaedia, which follows the more traditional example of peer-reviewed articles but brings in audio-visual material as support. 

For example, the entry on Visual representation that is featured today (February 2nd, 2011) beautifully illustrates why there is such a variety of representation styles and what they are good for. 

All inclusive: the russians used a pencil

There is a wonderful story of 2 designers who had an idea of a product, and through social media and clever production and marketing strategies got it on the market within 5 months. It is a very encouraging story, but for me the key is understanding the power of social media in designing. 

If you want to know more read on.