I haven’t spent a lot of time on the blog, Education Futures, but I stumbled upon the site through the following post (bordering on rant) around designing curriculum (and “design is mentioned 14 times) to be more relevant to students, as well as the use of games for teaching. You may recall another post on this blog about using games.

Games create challenge, purpose, skill implementation, and reading and acting with purpose. If it is a good game, they will play it. And the actions are the assessments. Games assess and evaluate by their very nature. If you do not have mastery, you do not move forward. But the game will also give you help if you need it—no one designs a game that is too hard. So, maybe we should be thinking about games and how we might begin to design and structure instruction and content. We are at risk of losing our kids to disinterest because we are becoming irrelevant in teaching to the minimum standard. We can do better for them.

The world of knowledge and information is at our fingertips and it will be creative skills that are needed to synthesise this information in meaningful ways. We need to create the next generation of design thinkers.

Taking an “outside in” approach that starts with your user mitigates risk. Period. Why would you want to do anything that didn’t meet the needs of your user? Why would you want to waste any of your valuable business resources on untested ideas? All new business launches come with a degree of risk and design thinking improves on those ideas by better meeting user needs and then testing those ideas through prototyping before launch.

This idea is echoed in the idea sirkus post, “To seek out ‘zero risk’ is to commit to doing nothing.“

One exercise that we have done in workshops is to take a service or product and imagine how a “best practice” company might redesign that experience. How would Ryan Air sell automobiles or Google run a bank. You can examine your own organisation through the lens of another organisation. The idea as the following blog post states, is not “to follow each … specific policy but instead to understand the philosophy behind their practices then apply those philosophies in your specific context.”

In specific, Google makes everyone responsible for innovation and hires to bring idea generators into its organisation. It also gives these people a creative outlet in the form of free time. Google looks for good ideas outside its four walls as well as inside. The also consistently challenge pre-existing expectations and norms in all the products they release.

Bruce Nussbaum is at it again with a compelling speech naming the two greatest barriers to innovation as ignorant CEOs and ignorant designers.

Cost and quality are commoditized today, merely the price of entry to the competitive game. Design and design thinking—or innovation if you like–are the fresh, new variables that can bring advantage and fat profit margins to global corporations. In today’s global marketplace, being able to understand the consumer, prototype possible new products, services and experiences, quickly filter the good, the bad and the ugly and deliver them to people who want them—well, that is an attractive management methodology. Beats the heck out of squeezing yet one more penny out of your Chinese supply-chain, doesn’t it? Let me emphasize this. I think managers have to BECOME designers, not just hire them. I think CEOs have to embrace design thinking, not just hire someone who gets it. I think many business schools have to merge with design schools, not just play poke and tickle with them.

via How to Change the World

Threadless is a great success story of a business model built entirely on co-creation. The idea is fairly simple; users create a tee shirt design and the community votes on whether it should be produced. If your design is selected, you get paid. Co-creation is as close as you can get to involving your user in the design process. Allowing the community to decide whether a product is produced or not certainly lowers the risk of new product launches. Also consider the benefits of a global R&D department that only gets paid when they produce.

Guy Kawasaki posted this short interview with their Chief Creative Officer.

via Work Matters

Bob Sutton uses Guy Kawasaki’s latest project, Truemors, as an illustration of the shift between the first dotcom boom where VCs opened up their wallets for a great idea in a Powerpoint, to today, where even the smallest team with an idea can launch an idea on the web to the masses. The big idea here is certainly real-time prototyping, done cheaply, and evolving quickly with user feedback online.

Read the post

via futuramb …

As we have been developing the Innovation by Design programme, we have purposely taken a user-centered approach to innovation. If you look at the classic venn diagram around design innovation, human values, or user needs, are external to the organisation. Technology and business are very internally focused. P A Martin Börjesson argues that a technology focus operates from a convergent mindset and is less successful at generating innovative solutions. Apparently some research was done at Karlstad University that proves the point:

… a group of users was invited to participate in an innovation process for end user services for mobile phones. During two weeks a large number people divided in test groups were provided with new mobile phones and notebooks to write down ideas about possible new services for that phone that pop up in their daily life. An interesting result was that the test group without technical knowledge outscored the group with technical knowledge both from a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. An even more interesting result came from another group consisting of non-technical people, who half-way through the experiment received some education about technical possibilities. After they received their mid-experiment lecture, i.e. learned more about the inner workings, their innovation score dropped.

Read the entire post

I was reading John Maeda’s Simplicity blog and struck by a post he did on diverge vs. converge. Though he appears to be speaking more about management issues, his thought speaks to an underlying benefit to collaborative work around innovation.

The successful soloist is likely to realize the more creative outcome, whereas the successful team is likely to realize the more meaningful outcome.

I may be reading too much into this, but one of the tenets of design thinking is around collaboration. Although an insanely creative solution has benefits, it is worthless without meaning to the end user. Solo creativity begins to become more about art, whereas successful design innovation is about the user.

via Design Directory …

There a great review of a presentation from the Shimano marketing team at the National Bike Summit, where they detailed the background of their Coasting program. Shimano worked with IDEO to develop a strategy to get more of the 161 million Americans who don’t ride back onto bikes. This research led to a revisiting of cruiser bikes, and subsequently to a series of new bikes from Trek (the Lime is shown above), Raleigh and Giant.The original post goes over some of the findings that IDEO uncovered, and the resulting product strategy. But the comments, from bike mechanics, enthusiasts, lawyers and others, are the best part. The only thing missing from the conversation are the designers and product strategists. A great product design conversation, from a group of ‘non-designers’.

via Expedition …

What follows is an exploration of the way in which we might structure ourselves to survive the new century beautifully. It considers what we can do to engineer structures for the world in which we are to live, not simply as steel and concrete, but structures for work, learning, social structures and structures for thinking. It takes as its central theme the notion that as technology opens more and more doors, there will be a gathering need for people with ideas to direct it toward the common good. Although this sounds pious, it could be incredibly fertile territory for broad-minded engineers and specialists alike, a maturing of our role on the planet.

Read the whole post