Designers or Design Thinkers often like to think that they require a certain level of “freedom” to allow their creativity to flourish. Indeed, the best ideas come when the mind is free from distractions: particularly in places like the shower or when you are just...
How do you identify the best Design Thinkers? Separate the men from the mice? They can fill in the gaps between the steps. Design Thinking has been expressed as codifying how designers think. However, when a process gets codified, the tendency is to simplify it for the purpose of...
I get this question a lot. The next question after that would be: aren't they all the same? I decided to post this question on my twitter feed just to see what you all thought. Thanks for the great replies! Apples and oranges. Lean and agile are methodologies for...
I get this all the time. Whenever we talk about Design Thinking's user-centered approach to finding opportunities and understanding your customer better, someone always reminds me that one of the worlds most successful company (in my humble opinion), Apple, does not do market or user research. Similarly,...
A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister of Singapore, Mr. Lee Hsien Loong said: "Good design thinking was a key reason for Singapore’s successful journey from a third world country to first, and it will be critical in the country's future transformation…” Indeed, Singapore is where...
One of the key activities in Design Thinking is doing design. Hence the irony that Design Thinking actually involves design doing. Not exactly in what designers do, but brainstorming solutions, prototyping them, learning and validating, iterating and improving. Rinse and repeat. I like...
Wouter Scheublin, in cooperation with the Dutch research institute TNO, designed this wonderfully minimal pull back car made through 3D printing. ...
As you may know from our last post, we worked with ETPL (the technology transfer arm of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore) to develop 10 wearable prototypes for the Next to the Skin Technology Showcase.
What was notable...
What a great snippet of a 1996 film by Preston McLanahan. I really like how Paul Rand bridges the gap between art, aesthetics, form, content and ultimately design....
It's not hard to come up with something new. It's hard to come up with something new that people want. I think that is kind of the separation point between having lots of ideas or creating lots of stuff,...
I have always enjoyed discussing Design Methods and frequently use Damien Newman's Squiggle as a means to visually describe the Design or Design Thinking process. But how do you describe the feeling when you are knee deep in the process? How do you sort yourself...
I'm sure we are all familiar with customer journey maps or experience maps. It is a great tool to visually map out the different touch-points a customer experiences when he engages a service or product. The main premise of an experience...
I thought you might like to know that I've been invited by my friends at the Shih Chien University Industrial Design Department to conduct a workshop to explore the future of the Design Practice and the...
Adaptive Path has designed a nice little mini-site to share and showcase their guide to Experience Mapping. Very generous of them and too good not to...
This has to be one of the best definitions of the term "customer touchpoint or touch point" I've seen:
The marketer’s erogenous zone. An interaction between a business and a customer. Executives who walk a mile in customers' shoes before racing to "improve" relationships with big ideas...
The following guest post is written by Maurice McGinley, a friend and former colleague at Philips Design. While some of the points might be a little outdated, this post showcases a methodology of Design Research and Design Led Innovation that is practiced in companies...
1. Ideas don't come from watching television 2. Ideas sometimes come from listening to a lecture 3. Ideas often come while reading a book 4. Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them 5. Ideas hate conference rooms,...
Creativity is relational. Its practice is mostly about casting widely and connecting disparate dots of existing knowledge in new, meaningful ways. To be creative, you’ve got to mine your knowledge. You have to know your dots. - Bruce NussbaumOne of the things that I do...
Journey map by Evan Litvak. A fresh look at a visualization of a circular repeated journey.
Kim Cullen, from Adaptive Path, recently shares their process in teaching Journey Maps at Workshops. Their process was adapted from Jamin Hegman and Jared...
Tucker Marion, Sebastian Fixson and Marc H. Meyer, writes a wonderful piece for the MIT Sloan Management Review on the challenges of Digital Design without good Design Management. Here is an excerpt:
So, what’s the problem? There are potentially two. First, because the technology makes...