Thinking about "Design Thinking"
Design Thinking sits squarely in a Cartesian world of divided minds and bodies in spite of the fact that recent advances in evolutionary theory and cognitive science point to the inseparability of what is called the "hand-brain complex."
Anne Burdick, Design Without Designers
Posted Thu Jul 9, 2009
Twitter per the McLuhans' Laws of Media
Marshall and Eric McLuhan argued that an emerging medium is best understood by considering four questions or probes. They called these four questions the Laws of Media. Every new medium extends some capability, turns into its opposite if it grows too much, pushes aside other media, and retrieves some long lost activity from humanity's past.
Posted Wed Jun 17, 2009
Lessons Learned -- Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking
"You never learn by doing something right ‘cause you already know how to do it. You only learn from making mistakes and correcting them."
Russell Ackoff
Posted Sun Jun 7, 2009
So You Say You Want a Definition — What is Designing? It is easy to get hung up on the difficulty of defining something as pervasive as designing.
Posted Sun May 3, 2009
As Designers and Managers Think About Each Other — A Provocation I wrote this as a provocation for a workshop that will take place this week-end at the Weatherhead School.To what extent do fourth order design, design thinking, integrative thinking, and similar extensions of the notion of designing represent conceptual mechanisms for managers, management educators, and business consultants to co-opt the design community’s unique position as an innovative force, perhaps the innovative force in businesses?
Posted Thu Mar 26, 2009
Supporting Design and Innovation in a Down Economy
In 2002 Michael Lewis wrote a New York Times Magazine article In Defense of the Boom. In it he observed that a rational stock market “channels less than the socially optimal amounts of capital into innovation.” I came across the article (it’s republished in his new book Panic) while flying back from the 6th European Conference on Design Innovation in Paris yesterday.
Posted Sun Jan 18, 2009
Recycled holiday greeting I just received a holiday greeting from Bruce Mau Design. It is sufficiently stimulating and inspiring that I'd like to share it with all of you. Please consider this the e-quivalent of recycling a nicely done greeting card and accept Mau's wishes as my own for you this holiday season.
Find the greeting here.
Posted Tue Dec 23, 2008
Where is the Auto Industry’s Moore’s Law? In the April 19, 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel made an observation about the development of integrated circuits, which are at the heart of the modern computer's ever improving price-performance.
Posted Mon Dec 8, 2008
Can We Afford Design During a Downturn?
I have been asked several times of late whether managers (and management students) should be expected to invest in design and design thinking during an economic downturn. There are at least two kinds of answers to this question.
Posted Fri Nov 28, 2008
What is a Design Attitude and Why Would a Manager Care?
Becoming a professional includes cultivating certain attitudes. And part of what it means for managers to be designers in addition to being analysts, leaders, and deciders is to cultivate an attitude that complements the attitudes they have developed in those other roles. In the opening chapter of Managing as Designing (Stanford University Press 2004), Dick Boland and I summarized Nobel laureate Herbert Simon’s arguments for cultivating such an attitude.
Posted Fri Oct 24, 2008
