The gap between design theory and practice can be bridged by getting back to the principle of making it accessible. What is design? There are a lot of definitions of what design is and is not from the utterly perplexing to the complicated and technical. It doesn’t have to be that way. Design is something …
Design is far too important not to be shared and made as accessible as possible as our future literally depends on it. Design is not a luxury. Design is what will shape our world to come. Our ‘next’ will be designed by us and those design choices will shape who benefits, how, and what influence …
Innovation means trying new things and that involves overcoming fear by and through design efforts Of the many barriers to successful innovation, the constellation of fears associated with prototyping and evaluation might be the greatest of them all. This is partly due to the high diving board problem, but also because innovation means learning, making, …
Learning in times of turbulence requires much more than lessons or courses – it requires new systems. I’ve long contended that learning is all about systems. I’ve not backed away from that. However, I’ve also been a part of some rather terrible systems. Post-secondary education is definitely one of them. So, too, has most of …
A read through a typical management or personal improvement feed will reveal near infinite recommendations for steps you can take to improve your organization or self. Three words tend to be absent from this content stream and they are what take seemingly simple recommendations and navigate them through complexity: time, care, and attention. Embedded within the torrent …
Designing and thinking
Critics of design thinking suggest that it forgets making while advocates suggest that it extends itself beyond the traditional constraints of design’s focus on the brief. What separates the two is still the implications associated with making something and the question: can we be good designer thinkers without being design makers? This post looks at the relationship between design thinking and making.
