I’m all about space. A space does encourage or inhibit what takes place in it. I wasn’t aware until today that there was an actual Allen curve that “reveals the exponential drop of frequency of communication between engineers as the distance between them increases.” I’m sure if I had read David’s doctoral thesis on collaborative design teams, he probably cites Allen’s curve.

In an article from The Irish Times about Tom Allen’s upcoming presentation at the Innovation in Complex Social Systems conference at UCD, the benefit of having functional areas where people can meet to exchange information is discussed. Perhaps tea time is a gateway to innovation?

I suppose it’s time to put The Organization and Architecture of Innovation on the reading list.

My favorite definition of “play” came from my days at Crayola, where after exhaustive research and expert opinion, we landed on: “It’s what kids do.” That’s how kids learn about the world around them.

Play provides a safe environment for experimentation and (*gasp*) failure. Games offer the ability to role-play or introduce healthy competition.

Jess McMullin and others (Luke Hohmann, Serious Games, LEGO, Pat Kane) are using games and play within product, software, service and even policy development. This article via boxesandarrows describes why we use games, core game principles, how to apply games, and how to sell design games to your organization or client. There’s also some good links and great commentary.

Go play.

I’ll be straightforward here. I am one of those who believes this to be true; that we have gone well beyond the “sole genius working in a dark room” model of design. The future is collaborative, disbursed and networked and the design process provides a wonderful means of addressing otherwise intractable business and social issues.

David Burney at RedHat writes eloquently about the democratisation of design.

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.

Designers draw. It is the most expressive way we know of communicating ideas succinctly and freeing up imagination. We wish everyone drew more (hence the doodles that make up our corporate identity).

Here is a wonderful little tool from General Electric that I found whilst browsing their site for the previous entry. I have already used it to send an image to an old friend who edited it whilst we were talking on the phone; it is a breeze to use and can help anyone draw and communicate their ideas. It is addictive and, I reckon, pretty useful.

via Creative Generalist …

An interview with Jane Fulton Suri, Chief Creative Officer at IDEO. Jane discusses a number of things related to design innovation and expands the definition of user-centered design to the idea of the “empathic economy”.

This is no longer a very new idea; at least in progressive companies, it’s a fairly widely accepted and well-established approach to innovation. When I refer to “the empathic economy” I’m talking about a future possibility – about a huge opportunity for innovation in which a similar level of empathy and imagination might be applied to the many different kinds of people who populate the business ecology of a particular industry, not just customers/end-users/consumers. In an empathic economy the provider/supplier of goods and services would be keen to reach an empathic understanding not just of consumers, but also of many other people within the business network upon whom business success depends…

Read the interview