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Information is important, the right information - when you need it - is crucial.
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Has innovation been saved by design?
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Blog on business innovation
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Blog on everyday innovation
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Blog on innovation and innovation management, in Asia specifically
Archive for October, 2005
The DMI has created an Innovation Blog, but without some drastic changes and added features I fear it will not become as influential or as useful as it should coming from such a great institution. Here’s a link to the blog: DMI Innovation Blog
IMHO the DMI has an enormous opportunity for influence on the Design blogoshpere, if it can only put the right framework in place to take advantage of its amazingly talented membership. If it could use blogs to facilitate the capture and distribution of it’s communities intellectual capital it has the potential for huge influence in the business arena.
The first problem with the innovation blog is where it lives, it seems to have been created as an adjunct to one of their conferences, it’s breadcrumb illustrates where it lives:
Home > Conferences > DMI International Summit > Innovation Blog. That doesn’t bode well for any permanence, as soon as it gains any sort of popularity they’re going to want to give it a home and detach it from its conference genesis
The second problem with the innovation blog fails to take advantage of many of the features and best practices that makes blogs successful, three major problems IMHO are :
- Commenters don’t get a link back to their own website
- Commenters email addresses are exposed to harvesting
- No permalinks or trackback (imagine how much faster they would see this feedback if they had tracback enabled)
Don’t get me wrong, i love the DMI, I just feel that it squanders opportunities to facilitate the design community, when it could really become a lynchpin.
It was when I threw out a reference to the movie, Rashomon, by Kurosawa, while talking to a young designer at work, only to have him blink at me in response, that I was moved to write this ‘rant’ or ‘view’ or, in my case, ‘informed opinion’. ‘The Rashomon Effect‘, has become a reference for contextual truth or subjective reality, i.e. shared experiences may be interpreted uniquely by each member of the group or team, and for a practicing professional designer, one who deals in the world of interpretation, to be unaware of this seminal piece of creative work, appalled me.
When I asked him what his educational background was, he said it was a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in Visual Communications from a better known school in the USA. This is a four year degree on a university campus, where one assumes, one is exposed to the great works of film, literature and the arts in near human history. How then, can one be ignorant of the influence of Francois Truffaut, Peter Brooks’ 10 hour long epic, The Mahabharata or even Leonardo’s use of The Golden Ratio?
My intention here, today, is to begin a conversation on design education, and to ask all you, a global audience, to share your own experiences in education. Is this issue one that is only faced in the United States, where I’ve met and interviewed hundreds of designers seeking graduate design education, or is it prevalent in Europe, Asia and Oceania? Ian, as an educator based out of Australia with significant Chinese experience, what is your opinion?
In my own experience, I’ve been educated in the British system until the O levels, followed by a year in an american high school, then undergraduate degree in Bangalore and of course, a year at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. From an early age, my schooling was such that I was exposed to world literature and culture, culminating in an intense experience at NID. In the 10 months I was there, I was exposed to Bharata Natyam through the AISEC, French filmography, the Battleship Potemkin, The Caucasian Chalk Circle et al. Every weekend, there was a film festival or a dance recital or an art exhibition. All of these influences, states the philosophy of the design school, written by Charles and Ray Eames, converge to create design professionals who are able to manifest in tangible form, their enhanced aethestic sensibilities.
We – the blogging community – knew that already didn’t we, that Social media introduce new models of value creation? Victor points to MIG who have done a simple but nicely put drawing on the new possibilities.
When talking about social media I think a lot on how exactly this “movement” will design the future for many many companies – what do you think?
Is it possible for an existing company to compete with those disruptive technologies – and how to design you internal innovative capability to cope with this massive movement?
Any ideas?
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By Stefano Marzano, Managing Director, Philips Design (via idpd)
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A contribution to the philosophy of the future by Rein de Wilde (via idpd)
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Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey (12-14 July 2004) via idpd
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By Deana McDonagh-Philp MSc, MIED MDRS, and Anne Bruseberg, PhD (via idpd)
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By Anna Valtonen, University of Art and Design Helsinki (via idpd)
During this spring – when starting the CPH127 community – and early summer when skyping Niti and Ralf - thoughts emerged on how design could apply to how companies organize, develop and survive. How managers turn in to leaders, how marketing research turns into ethnographical user studies, how design is too important to leave to designers…….
I think it was Ralf who first mentioned Design Thinking Institute and today the thought’s came to live through the launch of a sparkling new weblog.
Congrats Ralf – I’m sure the rest of the CPH127 community will looooove to join the conversation here as well 
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By e-Strategic Inc.
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Book from the conference available online as PDF
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From Rotman, seems like it’s the new hotspot for design management and thinking?
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Design, communications design in particular, can create significant value for any organization. But if communications design is to deliver the highest possible value, the prevailing model of design needs to be re-envisioned. (via idpd)
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The goal of mucking about with type, color, imagery, space, and time, is to tell stories—to connect “teller” to “listener” in a dialogue that builds comprehension, commitment, participation, loyalty, and trust. (via idpd)
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Presentation suggesting that in the most compelling information design, the expression of an idea should form a map to its meaning. (via idpd)
The 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded Robert J. Aumann, Center for Rationality, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel and Thomas C. Schelling, Department of Economics and School of Public Policy, University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis".
Game theory in this particular case is related to analyses of conflict and cooperation, developing non-cooperative game theory to work on major questions in the social sciences. Although game theory in its original form is a highly mathematical exercise, "game theory provides a better framework for assessing the risks and opportunities involved in any major strategic move" as McKinsey Quarterly so business-like puts it.
I would say that innovation and especially innovation strategy could be labelled a "major strategic move" so can the work of innovation learn anything from or even better include tools and methods within it´s process of game theory? When deciding what innovation strategy to embark on (or frame to create) the study of "choice of optimal behavior when costs and benefits of each option are not fixed, but depend upon the choices of other individuals (or corporations)" as noted on wikipedia could mean the difference, i guess.
As the McKinsey Quarterly also points out, the game does not have to be played to the (bitter) end with all the alternatives calculated in detail to make sense in a business environment. The mere discussion and the options/challenges/scenarios that it presents, creates a shared view of the potential futures so that the company can include these scenarios in the innovation work .
Have you used game theory in practise in your innovation work? What is your experiences with it?
The thing about innovation and setting out to create one is that you - as a leader - cannot tell the people you want to work on that particular innovation product what you want out of their effort, not in detail anyway. If you could - it wouldnt be an innovation, now would it? So instead, leaders need to create the boundaries within which the team can explore and create. Leaders need to set the stage, to frame the work.
Once the frame is set, the leader must (a) continuesly re-evalute and possible adjust the frame to its environment, (b) introduce a direction for the frame, tell the involved people where the company wants to go over time with this particular area/frame and where external circumstances might move it in the future - I guess this would be the strategy part of the innovation project - and (c) possibly - if its hands-on leadership we are talking about - facilitate the work inside the frame.
To facilitate a teams work it´s a good idea to create a common view of the process that the team shall follow along with defining roles for the involved so that they now what is expected of them. In this sense - although quite abstract - facilitating is also creating new frames inside the overall frame.
Based on my learnings from Index:Views Summit and other places in the past I would say that facilitation is about details. The details and how you as a leader handles them, is what makes or brakes a fruitful process. Its how you choose to intervene when you decide to do so or how you effect the group when you don´t. How you direct energy, focus, discussions within the group for different purposes in different stages of the process.
I guess its like riding a race horse. Although I never tried myself, I understand that while the jockeys go neck-to-neck, standing up, at mindblowing speed (if you take the safety conditions into consideration) they steer the animal with very, very subtile moves of their hands since to big gestures might drive them of the field.
Having read some business pshycology myself in the past on this particular subject I believe leaders of tomorrow - should they lead design/innovation processes themselves - have a lot to learn from this discipline, regardless if they are business scholars or designers by education.
What is your experiences with facilitation of collaborative creative work processes? How do you see the need for facilitation skills play out in innovation projects?
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Report of the workshop and three papers from the 2nd Nordcode Seminar (University of Art and Design Helsinki & Helsinki University of Technology)
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Seems like a good book by Peter G. Rowe, anyone here read it?
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Article by Craig Vogel, Peter Boatwright and Jonathan Cagan, not quite new but I just found out it had not been posted before.
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Presentation at IVREA by John Thackara on new business concepts for interactive products and services
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Excerpt from Chapter 1, “Design Matters for Management”
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“How can design thinking reform education?” by Dr Janis Norman, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, USA
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“How design guru David Kelley is bringing fresh thinking to big business”
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A few years old but not irrelevant
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Seems like the UK response to Richard Florida theory (via idpd.blogspot.com)