Designers are always prototyping, whether it’s moving things around in their imagination, building a reverse income statement in Excel, or hacking something out of wood using a sidewalk as sandpaper. The notion that a designer waits until it’s “prototyping time” to start messing around with stuff is just wrong. Prototyping starts when the design process begins, and it never stops. We build to understand. We observe for generative insight but we also observe to gather data regarding the hack we just whipped up ten minutes ago. We ideate with our gut and our hands as much as with our brains.
Design firm Continuum and the AIGA design association convened a group of top business leaders and innovators from a variety of backgrounds and industries, including Disney, Facebook and Zipcar, to discuss how designing a service experience with purpose can transform a company’s image and make people’s lives better.
This weekend we attended the first Leancamp Barcelona, and we really enjoyed it.
Leancamp is an unconference – an open, interactive, multi-track event – which brings together the world’s Lean, Agile and Design-led business leaders, and practitioners from different disciplines. It’s a high-energy day focused on learning and knowledge transfer.
No es fácil encontrar información sobre Design Thinking en español, así que cuando hemos leido el artículo publicado en Open Circle, nos hemos puesto muy contentos. entre otros, el Design Thinking abarca las siguientes características:
Empatía: capacidad de imaginar el mundo desde distintas perspectivas
Integrative thinking: habilidad de ver los aspectos sobresalientes de un problema complejo y crear soluciones novedosas
Optimismo: una posible solución siempre será mejor que nada
Experimentación: planteando preguntas y explorando las limitaciones del problema de forma creativa
Colaboración: equipos interdisciplinarios que trabajan colaborativamente
Steve Bishop is global lead of environmental impact at the design and business innovation firm IDEO:
There’s a need for making sustainability compelling to people in ways other than adhering to policies, avoiding regulatory encounters. This is an opportunity for growth in business, and an opportunity for positive impact. Ideas flow in a generative nature, building on one another.
The term kaleidoscope is Greek and is loosely interpreted as “an observer of beautiful forms.” So what, then, is a kaleidoscope mind? A type of mind that is agile, flexible, self-aware, and informed by a diversity of experiences. It’s a mind that is able to perceive any given situation from a multitude of perspectives at will, selecting from a rich repertoire of lenses or frameworks. A kaleidoscope mind is playful, and it must be able to see patterns, connections, and relationships that more rigid minds miss. A kaleidoscope mind can be taught.
Now it’s the turn of Bruce Nussbaum, one of Design Thinking’s biggest advocates known for his Business Week articles on the subject. On an article at FastCompany, argues about Design thinking being a failed experiment and introduces the concept of “creative quotient”. Few days later, Grant Mccracken replied that design thinking has still lots to offer.
Get started by meeting real people and exploring a range of activities of daily living. On this site you can review design methods, develop protocols for ethical practice and contribute your own ideas.
The book In Studio: Recipes for Systematic Change, explores the Helsinki Design Lab Studio Model, a unique way of bringing together the right people, a carefully framed problem, a supportive place, and an open-ended process to craft an integrated vision and sketch the pathway towards strategic improvement. It’s particularly geared towards problems that have no single owner. Currently HDL is working on the themes: aging, extended well-being, and sustainability.
Today we learned about Nodstrom Innovation Lab, a lean startup within the Fortune 500 company Nodstrom (fashion & apparel retail).
In this video, you can see how the Nodstrom Innovation Lab team performs a so-called “Flash Build”; similar to a flash mob but in this case they arrive to a retail without prior notice, deploy their material and aim to build a working app within 5 days, constantly iterating with the customers.
While thinking how to introduce alternative methods for the analytical ones that often dominate the business arena, MIND research group and Connecting Brains put together the concept of BICHO RARO. It is a series of experimental exhibitions that promote a creative problem solving attitude in the world of business. The goal is to familiarize managers and business students to methods from other disciplines than their own, to bring people out from their comfort zone, in order to spread interest and curiosity in alternative working and problem solving methods.
The first experimental exhibition was set up in ESADE Creapolis, in Sant Cugat. In this first BICHO RARO, the participants played a problem solving game, where each “stopping point” of the game was a different painting. The paintings acted as a source of inspiration and as means to identify solutions to a given problem. The associations and solutions that emerged through this visual approach, are different than those emerging from mere words.
From July to October, the visitors and people working at Creapolis were invited to take part in the experiment. BICHO RARO raised curiosity, even beyond the original target groups. It may well be, that the next form of BICHO RARO takes place in a primary school.
Licence to Slow Down: An Unhurried Checkout Experience
MIND-research group of Aalto University works together with the Finnish Service Foundation for People with an Intellectual Disability on a research project that looks into the every day needs of intellectually disabled youngsters. One early finding has been the contradictory feelings associated with grocery shopping; on one hand the trip to the supermarket was a highlight of the week, but on the other hand, the youngsters found the experience very stressful - both physically and cognitively. This shopping experience was just one example of the generally hectic pace of everyday activities at large, which is threatening to become a barrier to many.
This is how the idea of an unhurried checkout at a Finnish supermarket was born. The project is now in pilot test stage, and for one week, from 10am to 8pm one checkout at the supermarket is reserved for the unhurried experience. The cashier serves each customer according to their individual needs, and help is provided from placing the purchases on the checkout belt, to the payment, and finally to the packing. The social needs of the youngsters were taken as the starting point, and the service was designed to assist the everyday chores and to support the independence of the intellectually disabled. For example a relaxed waiting area was set up next to the check out, which turns the queuing into a chance to sit, relax, and socialize.
The experiment has received plenty of interest and positive attention. The users and the supermarket have provided feedback for improvements. Interestingly, the unhurried checkout cashier is now the most popular among the supermarket employees. It has also turned out that an unhurried checkout service has been a secret wish of a larger target group than initially imagined - e.g. the elderly. This new and socially active operating model seems to have a rather large clientele.
In South-Korea, grocery chain Tesco has recently been re-branded to Home Plus. Moreover, they were looking for ways to increase market share, and they did by bringing the store where the consumer is and where there’s idle time: subway stations.
Great example of how user observation can untap new opportunities.
