CPH127

Hans-Henrik, Jacob and myself will be involved in Index and especially in Index:Views - the summit for creative leaders - next week. This is hardly anything new for our regular readers However, this is far from the only global design event in Copenhagen next week!

Era 05: World Design Congress will also open its doors and although almost every session is sold out, I was asked by the project manager Marc (and by his colleauge Marie) to post a small advertisment for an interesting session on Intellectual Property. If your intersted in this topic and you are in or around Copenhagen next week, this is worth checking out!

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• Bad Designs - Table of Contents
  (tags: jacob design hci usability ux experience productdesign)

I’ve just been blogging on my own site about a paper by Kathia Castro Laszlo and Alexander Laszlo, The Conditions for Thriving Conversations (pdf). It’s a good read, and I wanted to highlight one section in particular for CPH passengers and crew. Here it is.

We draw the analogy between generations of designers and of conversations facilitators. In social systems design we differentiate among five generations of designers (Laszlo, 1992). The first generation designer is consider an expert and specialist in the design process. She studies the situation of the group and decides which is the best solution for them. The second generation designer is akin to the classical consultant who asks for information from the members of the group, and then analyses it and gives them a solution according to her perception of their needs. These two first generations design for others. In contrast, the last three generations of designers design with others. The third generation designer gets the group involved in the creation of alternative solutions, but at the end of the process, she nevertheless selects the best alternative for them. The fourth generation designer works to create an adequate group environment that facilitates the processes of generating alternatives and selecting solutions. The newest generation, the fifth generation, not only involves the group in the design process, but also helps the group to learn how to learn to facilitate. A group that does so can sustain the continued design process by themselves (Banathy, 1996.) 

• Social Design Notes: Design + Activism
  (tags: jacob blog blogs design social)

Is it possible to hire a consultant telling you what you should do, how you should do it when the talk is about innovation?

Sure, YES, of course it is!

But how do you make sure that the innovation isn’t only deploying the next generation of an inferior product in your product portfolio? And the knowledge created in the process isn’t drifting away with the external consultant moving along to his next project, customer?

I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately – to many consultants, to many “design”-firms is only pointing towards what to do, but doing it, implementing the important shift, maybe rock the boat and changing the company culture – that’s a complete different ballgame, isn’t it?

Changing a culture from being technocratic, focused on own technological capability, towards a more usercentric organization isn’t – as I see it – not only about putting different design-tools and methods in place. It’s also about creating a mindshift in each and everyone in the organization.

The good news is that it’s feasible, the bad news is that it takes time.

I had the opportunity to join a workshop this week with one of the American-CPH127-pilots, Chris Conley.

He gave me some fresh perspectives on what he sees as crucial for creating a more Sustainable Innovation Capability.

He points to two important aspects:

Mindset

•     Amibguous
•     Cross-diciplinary
•     Collaborative
•     Tangible
•     Iterative
•     Fast

Methodology - very "DESIGN-Thinking"…..

•     Immerse, discover & reframe
•     Create many alternative ideas
•     Evaluate to identify value
•     Refine Through iteration
•     Develop offering holistically

Methodology is “easy” to implement. You could hire a consultant teaching you that. But what about Mindset? How do you cope with a management layer in organizations who – in many cases -have proven success with control, oldfashioned market-segmentation strategies and telling and educating the customer how they should use the product properly?

Any ideas? I think the right answer to that question could be the foundation of a new start-up, so please share :-)…..or just tell ME…;-)

• This Is Broken
  I just found out we never linked to TIB, it’s one of the best examples of bad user/customer experiences
  (tags: jacob ux experience design blog usability)

bplusd is Jess McMullin’s new blog on the intersection of business and design. Nice to see the conversation gaining momentum from a variety of fronts (and countries). It’s starting to feel like a real community, and pretty quickly (compared to the years I’ve felt out in the cold as "an ethnographer").

When we first started CPH127 I thought our main interestbase would be in Denmark, USA and maybe to some extent Asia. I had never imagined that people would be visiting from Cote D’Ivore in Africa for example. In order to visualize this we installed a gVisit map, which displays our visitors on a Google Map. I tried integrating the map on our site, but it doesn’t seems to be possible. If someone can help me, please let me know. Until then you can go to gVsisit and look at our map yourself.

During the past weeks and months the CPH127-cockpit have been trying to spot destinations worth visiting. In fact we have been helping the good friends from INDEX2005 creating a digital presence, a beautiful destination, not yet spoiled

–definitely worth visiting during the next weeks.

Magnus, Jacob and I have been busy creating their weblog, and copied a few posts from CPH127 just to getting the conversation started.

Between 25-28 of September you will see a lot happening there. There will be live coverage from the summit and we will bring interviews with some of the creative leaders and trying to catch the atmosphere during the days.

Please feel free to also join the conversation over there about “Design – how to improve life?”

UPDATE: You can subscribe to the feed - the URL is http://connecta.typepad.com/indexviews/index.rdf

We are having a great time in Copenhagen right now. I am at the middle of a conference on productdevelopment with design, and fellow CPH127 pilot Chris Conley is sitting right next to me!

I will not have time to do live blogging right now, but I have made a set at Flickr which will be updated somewhat live.