#designthinkingtools

[laurennbradford-blog]

Since taking Design Thinking at Georgetown and now Design Leadership, I’ve been thinking of how to easily (and with the least amount of conflict) to add design thinking tools to our workflow. On our dry erase board, I write a topic at the beginning of the week. While people come in and out of the office, they are encouraged to place a sticky next to the topic with their opinion. At the end of the week, the post-its are categorized and I attempt to come up with a solution to the small design problem. While the topic is never anything serious, it is a way to introduce some of the cross-collaboration innovation techniques. 

[interobservers]

Design Thinking: A New Road Map in Business

Design Thinking is Business thinking

In recent years, this innovative thinking process has been applied to issues related to product design, process optimization, business process management, product life cycle management, manufacturing efficiency, etc. The primary objective of Design Thinking in Business is to generate new and innovative solutions to potential problems. These innovative solutions are generally not visible to the product owner or the business analyst at the early stages. Read the full article

[the-urbanfairy]

I’ve been doing a little more research into why sketching is beneficial to the design process.  It turns out it also has significant benefits for health and well-being, cognitive processing and creative thinking. Who knew? 

I didn’t actually realise how much I use sketching through out my day to day processing until I read some of the articles I found. I’m always sketching out layouts before pulling together information. I doodle prolifically during lectures and meetings, often times noting key information and sense making complex ideas.  I often copy shapes that I see in lectures and books to act as prompters, markers and explain ideas simply. Interesting. I never considered this sketching. 

This article on design tuts+ inparticular got me thinking about the sketching I do. It suggests that sketching is critical in communicating ideas, useful for developing lay out and handy to explore concepts. 

[the-urbanfairy]

Sketching

Watching the Ted Talk featuring Tim Brown talking about creativity and play was very enlightening. In it he talks about the importance of practising creativity. He demonstrates a simple exercise known as 30 circles and pushes his audience to sketch as many different things those circles could be in 1 minute. 

I tried this exercise and initially froze, as I always do when pushed to be creative, but after a little while, I let go. I made a pair of glasses from two circles, a snowman out of another three, a frisbee, plate, pizza, apple pie, blueberry, out of others. 

I realised two things: 

1. I really enjoy sketching, I always have. I’ve always been someone that doodles when someone talks to me. I can’t take in information properly if I’m not doing it.

2. The more of these activities I do, the better I will become, at both sketching and creative thinking.

I’ve been practising both regularly in my journal. Trying to push my boundaries of creativity and stop the critic in me yelling out too loudly. 

[the-urbanfairy]

What is the difference?

Between God and a Designer? 

God doesn’t think he is a designer. 

When I started reading about Hilary Cottom, a UK based social scientist who was the 2005 Designer of the Year, I had a huge ‘Aha’ moment. Hilary was award the honour despite not being a trained designer. She used a design approach to social policy and pulled together teams of designers to implement changes. She received hate mail from designers. Design media criticised the British Design Council for their decision. It took fortitude and guts but is a true demonstration of how good design thinking can be used to create great social change not just small things.