Design For Action – design thinking, in it’s murky, undefinable glory, is on the cover of Harvard Business Review.
As design has moved further from the world of products, its tools have been adapted and extended into a distinct new discipline: design thinking. Arguably, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon got the ball rolling with the 1969 classic The Sciences of the Artificial, which characterized design not so much as a physical process as a way of thinking. And Richard Buchanan made a seminal advance in his 1992 article “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” in which he proposed using design to solve extraordinarily persistent and difficult challenges.
But as the complexity of the design process increases, a new hurdle arises: the acceptance of what we might call “the designed artifact”—whether product, user experience, strategy, or complex system—by stakeholders. In the following pages we’ll explain this new challenge and demonstrate how design thinking can help strategic and system innovators make the new worlds they’ve imagined come to pass. In fact, we’d argue that with very complex artifacts, the design of their “intervention”—their introduction and integration into the status quo—is even more critical to success than the design of the artifacts themselves.
I saw David Kelley speak in Grand Rapids in 2012, and he was fascinating. Also, wicked problems are something I’ve written about before.
Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace – as a journalist, I’m fascinated by the response that this article has garnered. People are questioning if the sources represent common experiences at Amazon, they’re questioning if other companies treat their employees the same way, and what should be done about it. The New York Times published a few follow-up articles, Jeff Bezos and Amazon Employees Join Debate Over Its Culture and Was Portrayl of Amazon’s Brutal Workplace On Target? As a public relations student, I’m watching closely to see how Amazon handles this, and how the situation plays out. Amazon has a history of being harsh toward businesses in a way that completely upends norms. Will the competitive edge gained by being harsh toward their employees become the new norm? If things are so bad at Amazon, why do smart, talented people keep working there? I have a feeling this will come up in one of my PR classes this fall.
Can You Design Innovation? – We know that cities foster innovation, through a sort of interpersonal friction, but is there a way that you can engineer that effect?
An innovation district can be planned from the ground up or areas within cities can evolve into one. At its broadest, an innovation district is composed of cutting-edge research (usually from of a major academic institution), business incubators, startups, advanced technical networking, commercial spaces, housing, transit accessibility, social spaces, and amenities. It goes beyond generic “mixed use” construction to embody a recipe of specific attributes that, in theory, fuel innovation. Moreover, everything is packed into a dense area. The idea is that when you mix all these things together, people, who in the old model of city building might remain siloed, have the opportunity to mingle. And being the social creatures that they are, then spark conversations with those outside of their direct discipline and potentially come up with incredible new ideas. In theory, innovation districts are the antithesis of the isolated business parks and corporate campuses that define Silicon Valley.
Lawn Order – the most recent episode of 99% Invisible is about the strange obsession that we have with lawns. I hate lawns and because they’re a waste of space and terrible for the environment, and I felt like my beliefs were vindicated by this podcast.
Building a Chair Simple Enough for a Pope – I’m fascinated by the way furniture design and ornamentation intersect with the structures in which people practice their faith, and how the built world influences the way that faith is practiced. After all, is a church service different in a cathedral with a massive pipe organ than it is outdoors in the woods? Of course it is, but how and why? I can’t wait to see the finished chair.