U101: The Design Thinking Blog

Design and Business

Here is an article (culled from a link in the Design Thinking blog Nicole found below) about how Design Thinking is permeating the business world.

Business Week Article

And this itself seems to stem from this book: The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida (I hope the book is better than the author's name!).

Le Corbusier and Scale

I've never read Le Corbusier's Le Modular, although I've often flicked through it's pages. Has anybody read it? It strikes me that Le Corbusier, as a designer who thought at many levels - furniture, interior, building, environment, and city planning - might provide a good little text / case study for the course. It would introduce a little bit of design history by stealth. And also the driving force of the modernists, to improve people by design, is as relevant now as it was then.

Designing for Boys

I was browsing in an Oxfam shop at the weekend and came across this book for £1.99. Attitudes in Design Education (1969), a survey of design in the secondary school curriculum edited by Ken Baynes. It begins:

"Modern education is seeking ways of coming to terms with the dramatic social, technological and cultural changes of the contemporary world. The key questions are: How can individual development be fostered? How can the complex needs of society be met?"

On reading this book one is reminded how much of it is still just as relevant today as it was in 1969. What's striking is that it is all about teaching 'boys'. Almost every photo has a picture of 'boys' designing! There are some nice little assignments. Talking about 'the hand' as the first unit of scale that we might focus on:

"The aim was to produce a hand-held device which incorporated at least three control mechanisms to be operated by one hand ... a bi-product of this problem is the increased awareness of the exact nature of the human form - those who were involved stated that they had discovered more about the hand through solving this simple problem than in many hours of conventional drawing."

Intentional / Unintentional

There are few novels that I've come across about design that I'd really recommend but one, The Mezzanine by Nicolson Baker, is an excellent read. It takes the thoughts of an office worker as he ascends an escalator at the end of his lunch hour and examines every interaction with the physical world - real and remembered - in detail. So the texture of the rubber that runs up an escalator, the brilliance of a milk carton, watching people shaking sugar sachets, etc., By focusing on one person's experience, it focuses on the unintentional consequences of design rather than the intended consequences. It basically gets you into thinking about the designed world in a different (and enjoyable) way - would it be useful as a set text as an inspiration to go out experience design I wonder?

Reference Books

Off the top of my head some books that we might use or draw on, all to do with a more general approach to describing and thinking about design:

Heskett, J. (1999) Toothpicks & Logos: Design in Everyday Life
Norman, D. (2002) The Design of Everyday Things (2nd edition)
Caplan, R. (1983) By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV, and Other Object Lessons (2nd edition)
Lawson, B. (2005) How Designer’s Think (4th edition)
Tufte, E (2001) Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

Visual Essay

Pocket Story: a way of communicating who you are. Interesting task for students (and staff) to introduce their way of life and communicate it online. Take out what’s in your pocket (or your wallet or your bag) and tell a story with it using photos, video, etc. A kind of visual essay about who you are. Ah actually that’s a good idea to get across – the visual essay. The other idea is to have a metre square and fill it with a number of things that matter to you, take a photo of it, post it online, and have other students comment. Reference for this is: Gruson, E., & Staal, G. (2002) Copy Proof: a New Method for Design Education.