U101: The Design Thinking Blog

Innovation from within

Lately I' been listening and reading about stories of 'innovation from within' emerging markets. The role of women was always key to those innovations. Women have a crucial role in homework, buying food and household items. Especially in one project in Africa, women were key figures to implementing an innovation of a solar cooker and spreading the word of how to cook with it.

http://journeytoforever.org/sc.html

The fascinating issue is that not the 'design' alone is the innovation here, but the way it is disseminated among potential users through key stakeholders. Women meet up and informally exchange the way the cooker works among each other. Some are evangelize the use others learn from them in 'workshops'. The cooker itself is a departure form the old wood fire, which is more expensive and contributes to really bad air quality and health problems in many areas in Africa. The difficulty to promote this cooker is the different cooking method. The food cooks much slower, traditional practices of cooking are undermined. Therefore, identifying key-evangelists' to promote the benefits of this cooking method was key for this innovation.

I think this is a great case study for Block 4.

In addition, Tim Brown from IDEO mentioned in his blog a book that just came out. Its about bridging the world of rich and poor. Its currently out of stock, but surely an interesting topic for global design thinking.

http://designthinking.ideo.com/?p=252

Design and the Future of Agriculture

I saw 'Natural World: A Farm for the Future' on BBC2 last night (it's on iPlayer for 7 days) and was drawn into its intelligent exposition of modern agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels.  The programme, with the premise that this was unsustainable, looked to find different ways of producing food, and it was fascinating.  The examination of the roots of the problems we are facing threw up some surprising ideas.  One was not to plough fields! The reasoning being that each time they are ploughed and exposed to the sun, the fertility of the soil is slowly lessened, over decades you end up with dead soil and a reliance on artificial (fossil-fuel derived) fertilizer.  It's well worth watching, with 'Design' being mentioned many times.  I've transcribed a little sample below.

[Narrative] "I can see how you can grow cattle without ploughing and with natural fertility, but how do you grow everything else we need? Well, it seems that there are a number of people around the world who've already grappled with this problem.  They've developed a system known as permaculture.  Britain's leading expert is Patrick Whitefield.  Permaculture seems to challenge all the normal approaches to farming."

PW: You know people often think that there are two ways of doing things, one is by drudgery, and the other is by chucking fossil fuel at it. Now permaculture is about a third way of doing things, and that is by design, by conscious design.

Presenter: So you're designing the labour out, or you're designing the need for that energy out?

PW: Both.

See the Programme

Block 4 Global

Here are some thoughts about Block 4. I've chosen food as an overarching context for this Block - it transcends from the personal to the global very well ... and I think will provide a great source of exploration as we challenge/inspire the students' own design thinking in this last block.

Noticing the world around us.

On my search for inspiration for rewriting the design observation element, I found this article. I once met Steve Portigal in Hong Kong, he might be a good person to interview. In the article he writes:

"This process of noticing once and then noticing again is how you start finding patterns and uncovering themes. For example, in the throbbing Shibuya skyline we noticed enormous video billboards for a new album by Ayumi Hamasaki (who we’d obviously never heard of). Then we saw trucks driving through the streets with billboards on the side promoting the same album. A few days later we passed the stadium and there was a huge crowd going to see her in concert. And along the street were dozens of vans that Ayumi Hamasaki fans had customized with pictures of her face. It’s not that we wouldn’t have walked past all these things, but that the activity of noticing the first one, and documenting it, meant that I was ready to notice and document the second, and beyond. So when we saw the concert crowd and the vans, we were able to connect it: “Oh, this is the performer that we’ve been seeing all the ads for.” This process of trying to figure out what’s going on in a new place, of finding and understanding patterns and themes, is exactly what we do in our user research."

I was thinking of an activity that draws on this repetition of noticing. You condition yourself to notice again because you became interested but your interest for knowing was not entirely satisfied the first time. He also wrote, noticing is a conversation with the world around us, and our inner ‘ego’. I don't want this skill to be an outburst of developing a self-concept but truth is, in order to understand others we have to understand us (our self) first.

They mention 2 activities to train your noticing-skills. One technique is reporting about what you have experienced between a certain time frame (we do this already in compendium 1) and the other is uploading a daily picture to flickr with annotation or making a blog entry. This reminded me somehow of Peter’s ‘What is design’ article. Maybe we can draw connections between quite and designer design and noticing for design observation.

Interactions mag

There are a few interesting articles (and relevant to U101) in this month's ACM Interactions magazine. One article argues that true value of future social networking applications could be establishing awareness, trust and direct relations among global producers and consumers to promote sustainable development through design. I think this article might be a good reading for our GLOBAL level.

Other articles are also interesting. The issue is called changing energy use through design. You can access the magazine via OU Library>ACM Portal.

Download p26-matychak.pdf

Music 2.0 is Design 2.0?

I don't like the term [something] 2.0. Nevertheless, the keynote I heard on the Futuresonic conference last week was inspiring. When you think about new models of engaging with music online, it might be a direction for how to engage with design online, too.

Gerd Leonhard talked about 2.0-way of engaging with (not distributing or selling) content online. Part of his presentation is posted on his blog, which I found inspiring to apply it to the future of design entrepreneurship. I think that entrepreneurship is related to emphatic design thinking. Think about the "pay as much or less as you want" for your music [design] (Radiohead, Nine inch nails). Gerd Leaonhard says that customer don't pay with cash anymore but with attention to get what they want. This would have large implications for designing. Moreover, the speaker said that attention can be maintained by gaining trust of the customer/user. This does not mean attention yielding designs have to be "loud", superficial or distracting, but convincing, deep and trust creating.

There were more interesting talks and exhibitions on Futuresonic conference. I will post some during the next days.

Nicole

'Global' taster on Universal Communication

I have shamelessly borrowed Steve's ppt style to create something on Universal Communication for the 'Global' level module/block/space.

Nigel

Download u101_B4Cross.ppt

Design in the Media

A few articles over the past few days about Design and Designing. James Dyson has got planning permission for a new school of design in bath: The Bath School of Design Innovation which will teach 2500 14-18 year olds. Maybe the OU could cut a deal to take care of their design education after that?

Dyson Design School Article

A new car-share lane has been launched on the M62. An example of Design Thinking at the social level?

Car-share Scheme Article

Architects are being urged to design terror-proof buildings in City Centres "each window to be no larger than three square meters..." Design Thinking at the global level?

Terror-proof Building Design Article

Design Museum Design Awards

The winner of the Inaugural Brit Insurance Design Award ("intended as Design world's answer to the Turner prize") was announced last night: A hand powered laptop for developing countries, developed by MIT for the One Laptop Per Child initiative. The judges commented that it was "a feat beyond the design itself".

It's interesting to consider what the stronger part of the design is, the laptop itself, or the innovation and organisation surrounding the OLPC initiative. Could we categorise the laptop at the individual level, and the initiative at the global level?

It might also be a useful exercise to pick through the 100 shortlisted designs and categorise them at the different levels.

Read the original article
See the shortlisted designs

Sustainable Design and IDEO

I received an email shot from HBRGreen today, there is some interesting stuff on their site, found this article with an 11 minute piece of audio from IDEO talking about ways to green products by understanding the way in which the non-green consumer thinks.
Georgy

Don't bother with the green con...