The Four Phases of Design Thinking

Accord­ing to War­ren Berg­er, author of GLIMMER: How design can trans­form, busi­ness, your life, and maybe even the world, The four phas­es of design think­ing are:

Ques­tion.

Care.

Con­nect.

Com­mit.

Read more about it via The Four Phas­es of Design Think­ing — War­ren Berg­er — The Con­ver­sa­tion — Har­vard Busi­ness Review.

Inspiration, Brainstorming and the Creative Process

This week I was just too tired to read or write much of any­thing. I only have three weeks left of work and each day seems to drag on slow­er than the last. I’m tak­ing this oppor­tu­ni­ty to post links to some inter­est­ing arti­cles and videos I have col­lect­ed over the past few weeks, cov­er­ing the top­ics of inspi­ra­tion, brain­storm­ing and the cre­ative process. Read More

The Design Imperialism Debate

As soon as I wrote my post about Emi­ly Pilloton’s Design Rev­o­lu­tion Road­show, my hus­band was quick to show me this arti­cle writ­ten by Bruce Nuss­baum over at Fast Com­pa­ny: Is Human­i­tar­i­an Design the New Impe­ri­al­ism?

This arti­cle has caused quite a stir in the design com­mu­ni­ty. At first glance, I found the arti­cle to be over­ly crit­i­cal and I didn’t like how Nuss­baum lumped Emi­ly Pil­lo­ton, Project H and every sin­gle human­i­tar­i­an design effort togeth­er and labeled it as one big flawed move­ment. Admit­ted­ly, I was also a lit­tle annoyed with my hus­band for giv­ing me such a buzz kill after I was all excit­ed about Design Rev­o­lu­tion and Project H’s work, but I decid­ed to save the link to the arti­cle for lat­er any­way.

Today I had time to revis­it the arti­cle and read it more thor­ough­ly. I also had the chance to look at sev­er­al respons­es from oth­er design­ers. This is when it became more inter­est­ing and post-wor­thy to me. Read More

A Map of My Work Life

Since it has been a very slow day at work, I decid­ed to kill some time by map­ping out my work his­to­ry just like Adam Richard­son did in his post “Map­ping My Work Life” on frog design’s design mind blog. His map is a lot more inter­est­ing than mine since it spans almost 20 years.I chose to start in 2003 since that is when I took my first Graph­ic Design class. It’s inter­est­ing to look back and think about how and when I start­ed branch­ing off into dif­fer­ent areas like web design, inter­ac­tiv­i­ty and pack­ag­ing graph­ics. Just like Adam Richard­son, I had a spike in writ­ing when I was in school, and it also esca­lat­ed this past year when I was writ­ing for admis­sion into grad­u­ate school as well as start­ing this blog. I antic­i­pate the time I spend writ­ing to go way up next year!As I look into the future, I see myself adding a few new cat­e­gories and I will prob­a­bly see a com­plete drop off in some of the cat­e­gories that cur­rent­ly take up the bulk of my time. I real­ly think I might keep chart­ing this as time goes by so I can have an inter­est­ing visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of my life’s work.

Design Revolution Roadshow: Changing the World by Design

Emi­ly Pil­lo­ton is the Founder and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Project H, a non-prof­it com­pa­ny she launched in Jan­u­ary of 2008 at the age of 26. Pil­lo­ton decid­ed to start the com­pa­ny after feel­ing as though her skills as a design­er were mis­di­rect­ed. She want­ed to become a change mak­er instead of a stuff cre­ator.

What began as a tour for her book, “Design Rev­o­lu­tion: 100 Prod­ucts that Empow­er Peo­ple,” end­ed up becom­ing much more. Pil­lo­ton used her 2009 Sap­pi Ideas that Mat­ter Grant to turn the book tour into a mobile exhi­bi­tion with work­shops and lec­tures geared towards inspir­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of young design­ers and pro­mot­ing the idea that design can have a pos­i­tive social impact. Read More