This month’s Harvard Business Review is focusing on failure, showcasing a concept that was once avoided at all costs. But is this new lexicon of success by failure really helpful? The global design firm IDEO has a mantra that caught my attention when it was first shown to me many years ago. Fail often to […]
Failure Fetishism and the Language of Success Read More »
Poverty, racism, access to health services, mental health and wellness, and education are all issues that are complex. They cannot or will not allow themselves to be understood in simple terms, yet are issues that speak to the wellbeing of society. Slutwalk was about rights and freedoms for more than one half of our population. It was about respecting people for who they are, honouring their sexuality, and educating everyone about the prevalence, consequences and risks associated with unwanted sexual advancement and assault. When it becomes a Rebecca Black Friday issue, it is about things like the salacious use of risque’ language and when it is a McLuhan issue, it takes a library to understand it.
Surely with our amazing tools we can find some middle ground to make the complex accessible, and the simple more sophisticated.
What the Slutwalk, Marshall McLuhan and Rebecca Black Have in Common Read More »
Technology may aid in our strategy development, implementation of certain tactics for teaching, but it will not provide the grist for improving the social component of learning. Just as Facebook friends are (mostly) extensions of the friendships we create in everyday life without technology, so is learning. Technology is an aid, not the purpose and thus, focusing on the aids as the means for reinvention sidesteps whether we’re educating effectively in the first place and risks us doing what Russell Ackoff calls doing the wrongs righter.
Asking if Technology Can Reinvent Education is the Wrong Question Read More »
Empathy and compassion involve using your heart. Critical inquiry about empathy means using your brain to see the concept more clearly in terms of its purpose. Having the courage to put these into practice in a professional realm and the optimistic hope that we can do this to make things better for everyone is not just a fantasy, but a possibility. In doing so, we can make these real, important concepts more meaningful in a real sense, not in some marketing, feel-good speak that we have now. By being much more authentic, we’ll also help build the credibility of these methods and ideas beyond design and beyond health.
Building Empathy and Other Odd Concepts Read More »
Bringing design and health promotion closer together has the potential to do women and everyone better by considering the locations — social and physical — in which sex influences health and wellbeing and consciously designing situations that improve it. As we celebrate this International Women’s Day, it is worth considering ways to make sex and gender more conscious in our work and how we might design for both at a foundational level.
Design for Sex, Gender and Health (Celebrating International Women’s Day) Read More »
Complex problems like chronic disease, health inequity, access to health care, civic engagement, global migration, and food security are ones that require a diverse set of perspectives, abductive (design) thinking, systems perspectives and ways to bring them all together. Design is a way to do that. Health promotion, rather than health care is the focus that will get us from treating problems to developing solutions.
Design and Health Promotion Read More »
Applying developmental design may get us past the inevitable square-peg-round-hole problem that many evaluators, program planners and policy makers find themselves in as they seek to get greater value from their programs and demand more return on their investments. Evaluation and research is sought as the means to do it and with programs designed for evolution from the start, perhaps we won’t be surprised when the metaphorical ice sheets start to fall apart (as seen above) and see it as a developmental step to a new reality.
Developmental Design and Human Services Read More »
The language of design is geared towards birthing products and services, but rarely about their sustainability and life over time. What else might move the dialogue from studio to ecosystem?
Designing for Innovation: The Role of Time and Space Read More »
Knowledge translation models, such as the widely cited one conceived of by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, are both process and outcome oriented; ideal for designers. KT is a designed process and the more it is approached through the lens of design thinking, the greater likelihood we’ll get a system that reflects its intentions better than what we currently have.
Design and Science: An Opportunity for Knowledge Translation and Exchange?? Read More »
Social media, like all human activities, involves designed interactions in a complex environment. How we design for this space is as much about the social as it is the media.
Complexity, Interaction Design and Social Media Read More »
