design

This article has actually been sitting as a draft for a few months now. I knew I wanted to write a follow up to the popular (49 comments at the time of writing!) Design Thinking is Killing Creativity, however I held off, as I wanted to have some time to hear your feedback as well as look at the fall out of Design Thinking all over the Internet.

You probably would have read a very rare Jonathan Ive interview on Core 77 by now. If you have not, do check it out? I would say a lot of the interview was generally not surprising, however the last few paragraphs jumped out at me. What I noticed was that despite Apple’s very digital playing field, their industrial design process was, and is, still very old school analogue.

Ariane Prin, a Masters student at RCA, shares her thinking and conceptual process behind her Air Hair Project: hair dryer for hairdressers.

Looks like China is getting it when it comes to design.

In a recent interview on the local Chinese CCTV, Chen Dongliang, Director of the Beijing Industrial Design Center, has highlighted the tremendous economic value of Industrial Design to China’s economy.

What is design research? It is generally refer to the upfront contextual inquiry work that designers perform before they start ideation. Sometimes it involves some light ethnographic work and some interviews, but it is primarily not structured as comprehensive or rigor. Design research emerged only in the late 60’s with the goal to improve seeing how consumers use the product and looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of a product. Pretty much a human factor investigation, but it is now widely practiced but facing a few serious challenges.

With a cheeky little link to Tom Kelly’s The Art of Innovation, Roberto Verganti (author of Design Driven Innovation) suggests in not so many words that User Centered Innovation, IDEO’s claim to fame, is dead.

Ever wondered what design thinking is all about? The Stanford d.school has shared, with the world, the basics of design thinking as taught in their introductory class called the “design thinking bootcamp”.