Making Sense of Change and Innovation
Censemaking helps you to learn how to change and innovate by design.
creativity
Developing Our Language of Design
Design has its own distinct language, which is tied to how it’s organized. What does it mean to talk about design, do design, and speak about design products? In today’s post, we speak to the language of design. Every field of practice has its own language. Within the field are disciplines and sub-disciplines, and they …
Your Introduction to the Field of Design
Design is a field that brings together creation, imagination, and thinking about people and situations. When we learn how this field is organized, we’re better prepared for making things better. Design’s a funny word. As a verb, it describes an action of planning and creation. As a noun, it points to an entire field of …
What Do We Mean When We Talk Design?
The word design is all over the place; what does it mean? In this new series, I walk you through what design is, how it works, how to do it, and explain why you’re already a designer and how to become better at it. My mother recently told me that every time she hears the …
Our Living Disruption Experiment
Disruption is often described in abstract terms with time horizons that look long enough to act on. What we see now is far different from that — faster and more intense. You might have had relatively few ideas of what artificial intelligence looked like until last week. That was when the news of ChatGPT made …
Improving Our Innovation Definitions
It’s remarkable how a term can grow and change over time and that is no less true for the term innovation. What innovation is now is not what I used to and that’s probably as innovative of an idea as it gets. Just as nature’s seasons change, it’s time to update that definition. I’ve been …
Innovation and Maintenance: A Book Review
Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell are leading voices in arguing for a bigger place for maintaining things in this world in our culture, not just for creating or innovating. In The Innovation Delusion what could have been a powerful charge to embrace maintainer culture and thinking is drown out by a poorly organized and researched …
Time and the Linear Bend of Innovation Expectations
Among the two greatest constraints for innovation is time and the expectations we have attached to it. If only we could adapt, create and implement an innovation at the drop of a hat. Wouldn’t that be nice? Most innovation work isn’t like that. That’s a frustration for many of the clients I work with and …
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Simplifying Design
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 …
Designing for Humans’ Diversity
Designing for humans means recognizing our distinctions and commonalities at the same time. Human-centred design suggests that we design for individuals’ needs and wants. As the theory goes, once we empathize with our intended users by doing some background research or even involving them in the creation of the ‘thing’ we are designing for, we …