I had a chance to attend HOW Design Conference in Denver, Colorado, where over 2,500 designers gathered to be inspired by their peers, play with new tools and techniques, and network in some unusual ways—such as Neenah Paper's closing party, where everyone wore white. (Have you ever seen a room with a thousand people all wearing white?) My contribution to the event was a session on how graphic designers can brainstorm more effectively.
I was running a seminar on design and creativity at the 2010 RGK Center Institute on Social Entrepreneurship, discussing the basics of design process and talking about how qualitative research helps drive insights, which in turn evolve into design ideas.
Peter Frumkin, a Professor of Public Affairs and Director of the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community, organized the seminar; we had talked before in some depth, and he had told me he was interested in learning more about design thinking. He had been carefully listening to the lecture, and he approached me at a break to discuss the role of sample size – “how can you be sure your sample isn’t biased?” he asked. Of course, it’s entirely biased; I described how design is provocative instead of predictive, and how marketing focuses on making sure a small insight represents a larger behavior, while design explores the possibility of what might be. Peter’s response was that it seemed like design is about supply, while marketing is about demand. Design, he said, looks at what they can best supply to a given market, while marketing judges what the market demands.
Notes from Nikkei's Universal Design Symposium in Tokyo.
I was recently a guest speaker at Nikkei's Universal Design Business Symposium, sponsored by Toyota, in Tokyo, Japan on June 18, 2010. The theme of this forum was universal design, that is, "design that brings happiness to every corner of the earth," a more endearing description than the too often used "design for the 90%."
Last night, during SF Design Week’s studio crawl, frog opened its doors to let the local design community get a flavor of the projects we do and, equally as important, the fun that we have here.
Matteo Penzo is Associate Technology Director at frog in Milan. Long before he joined frog, he initiated the Frontiers of Interaction conference. This year the conference will take place on June 3-4 in Rome, and frog Fellow Luke Williams will be one of the keynote speakers. In this blog post, Matteo explains what moved him to set up and drive this conference.
Nowadays we’re living on a planet where almost everyone, everywhere, can follow lessons from more than 300 top universities through iTunes U. A planet where, given all the constraints we are confronted with, the adoption of Open Source and Creative Commons is spreading like wildfire. Institutions like the Singularity University and events like TED, Lift Conference, or the World Science Festival are doing a great job at spreading (good) ideas and democratizing the access to knowledge.
Children's education disguised as building code, interactive art, and online games.
Forty six percent of kids are playing games with their phones as well as sending on average 50 texts each day. With such a high rate of adoption and the ability to access online games virtually anywhere, it is no wonder that that video game producers and marketers seek to create games that give kids twitching fingers something to “obsess” over.
Toy action figures, transmedia and the future of play.
Make no mistake: The Sandbox Summit at MIT this week is not just child’s play. An exploration for youngsters disguised as grown up product designers, creatives, and academics, the Summit is a collaborative event focused on how media and design influence children’s education and perspectives of society.
Principal Designer Laura Seargeant Richardson will give the keynote “The Medium Doesn’t Matter” at the Sandbox Summit at MIT next week. The focus of her talk is on the increasing importance of involving play across all platforms as an important training ground for kids to understand greater complexity and introduce new ways of seeing. Laura explores how the medium won’t matter for this; it will simply be another toy waiting for interpretation, manipulation and imagination by the child.
The children in the video are creating their own ways of seeing by identifying design solutions using their most sophisticated tool: their imagination.
