Who knew?! Designer-founders rock ;) (via Design Staff – Does your startup need a designer co‑founder?)
I like this - some smart people explaining Design Thinking (i love the point about ‘design doing’ which we often make here at Digital Eskimo - being an agency that employs the discipline of Design to create strategies that we then prototype and implement iteratively (with stakeholders) - this is where the greater value from using the discipline of design is derived (as opposed to strategy only approaches) (via Ideas-Innovation: Upcoming Documentary on Design Thinking)
Project Perry, which adds e-ink displays to RFID-based travel fare cards, is the first project from Urbanscale, a studio that explicitly applies interactive UX skills to urban infrastructures.
“The storm is the time to fish.”
Great video - series of interviews with speakers, delegates and attendees from The Redesigning Business Summit, an event that looked in detail at how design can help good ideas get to market.
Some really interesting ideas are explored about the inherent value of design for businesses and innovation… definitely worth a watch (only 8 mins :)
Nice interview with IDEO’s Tim Brown on “Design thinking”…
Design is a “much more complex thing than any single object”, Brown insists. It’s about solving the problem of distributing clean water in poor countries, coming up with more efficient ways to direct human traffic in buildings, realizing untapped channels of communication in trade. Design is huge.”
This came in from an email from Emily …
This past week has been bittersweet for us, as our homebase in rural Bertie County, North Carolina was one of the hardest-hit locations by Tropical Storm Nicole, leaving much of the county underwater. While our Studio H shop and studio, where we teach our high school design/build program, survived major damage, many of our students’ and colleagues’ homes, along with the majority of downtown Windsor, were flooded or destroyed.
Having just finished our first Studio H project, “Design Bootcamp: The Art of Cornhole,” in which our 13 amazing high school students learned all the basics of graphic design, ideation, and woodshop fabrication to build Cornhole (a popular bean bag toss game) board sets, we are moving into our second project, which originally was to be the design and construction of three public chicken coops.
However, given the dire needs of Bertie County’s citizens, we have decided to rethink this project in order to better serve the community and apply our students’ design and construction skills to rebuild with foresight and grace.
My partner Matthew Miller and I, alongside our 13 teenage co-designers, will “problem-find” and “problem-solve” in response to the floods. The mini-zoo downtown was destroyed, and most of the animals drowned: Could we rebuild some of the animal houses and zoo grounds? Hundreds of homes and businesses downtown are left in ruins: Could we design a community preparedness campaign that would help us all safeguard against the next flood? There are families in need of basic food and shelter and clothing: How can we use design to serve their immediate needs?
These are all questions we will be asking this week as we finally get back to school and back into the swing of things. We will keep you posted as this week progresses.
Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
The design of business | Business21C
A must watch eskimos!
Design Ignites Change - Mentoring - School: by Design
like this project that partners designers with school kids to redesign their school. Hmmm i bet they end up like Steiner schools!
interactions magazine | Evolution of the Mind: A Case for Design Literacy
As we come to the end of the first decade of the 21st century and what many consider the end of The Information Age, a recent flurry of books, articles, and initiatives seem to indicate that a new, pervasive mind shift is afoot. It’s called design, and like arithmetic, which was once a peripheral human aptitude until the industrial age forced it to be important for everyone, recent global changes and the heralding of a new age are positioning design as the next human literacy.
