By Erin Malone (check out the excellent series on working with patterns and the equally interesting book)

You don’t have to watch it all the way through as it is pretty long, but after about 10 minutes you can tell that their definition of Design Thinking is, for lack of a better phrase, all over the place. It is clear that the panel members all have different opinions, influenced by their background and motivations, of what Design Thinking is.

Video and snippet found in DesignSojourn, whose critique hasn’t turned me off – but rather by asking good questions reminded me about how fascinating this topic can be. (Proposed) solutions included too:

So How Can We Fix the Problems of Design Thinking? [...]

1) Teach Design Thinking with Design Doing.
2) Anchor Design Thinking as part of a larger holistic process.
3) Leave Design Thinking and managing the design process to the experts. Accept that, just like accounting, not everyone can do it.
4) Finally, call Design Thinking something else.

I am not sure if naming is important, as the object of the discussion is moving and evolving so quickly it may be fine with having a common language and “mental shortcut” to design thinking, whatever it may be?

[...] a project giving students an opportunity to experience aspects of the design process first-hand through a collaboration with design students

Four videos and an extensive outline of the collaboration process and its outcomes at Lucy Kimbell’s Design leads us where exactly, including business model modelling et al.

MBA-designer collaboration: Discussion (4 of 4) from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

After a day of collaborative prototyping exploring a new post-operative medical sensor, MBA students from Said Business School, University of Oxford, and students taking the MDes from London College of Communication reflect on their work together. The discussion ranges from the detail of some of the ideas the teams came up with, as well as the value of early prototyping in a complex project such as this.

Via Monoscope via Core 77 via …

The new space, which is intended to be a longer-term home, draws on five years of prototyping concepts for how collaborative teams might work together in four very different buildings.

“A few years ago (in the Sweet Hall days) we were trying to design our spaces to encourage students to move and change things,” Scott Witthoft said. “Now we find that those lessons have been learned – d.schoolers do all kinds of crazy things with the tools we give them – and we have had to design in a few more constraints to make Buiding 550 work well.”

Sounds very interesting – creativity needing bounds to flourish? And what frameworks (that structure the complex social settings of people collaborating) make sense? Can they be designed or do they emerge over time? Looks like some basic rules and defined infrastructure emerged as smart ways to go in the design of their new offices creativity spaces …

One day around the tower (Zaha Hadid – Marseilles) from Exmagina on Vimeo. Via Glaserei

Tokyo realtime – it’s plain beautiful …

and it deals with things that matter (giving me inspiration):

During most of the twentieth century, corporations and cultural institutions asked designers to play a focused and limited role in product and service development. Today, that role is expanding and the core of the field, design thinking, must expand with it. Design thinking has a rich history, and it is important to trace how it evolved to help understand why design is now so valued.

Ein Podcast des DRadio Kultur – zu einer Retrospektive über Dieter Rams in London – u.a. mit Sir Jonathan Ives und dem Schneewittchensarg – das mp3 ist hier. Und bei der Suche nach einem passenden Symbolbild (ja, ja) habe ich u.a. auch das hier gefunden: Braun vs. Apple: Inspiration Or Peculation? von David Grizzard. Jeder bilde sich die eigene Meinung …