Posts tagged business

In a long paper, Reon Brand of Philips Design presents a holistic approach to systemically transform cities into places that positively contribute to human personal development, social harmony and diversity.

“Urban living is the future of the majority. But although urbanization has brought great progress to human civilization, it is also a key factor in compromising the natural balance of the planet; it has become one of the key threats to loss of biodiversity. There are a number of associated macro level issues such as pollution, decline in natural resource, and numerous current and escalating social issues that will increasingly detract from the benefits brought by urban living if we continue to develop cities in their current format. Many approaches to improve urban development are still driven on an issue-based level rather a systemic approach.

This paper examines the systemic issues and drivers of change associated with urban development. It explores possibilities for a holistic approach to systemically transform cities into places that positively contribute to human personal development, social harmony and diversity, and the environment and health of the planet at large. The paper concludes that we have to think differently about the role and the function of cities, which will inspire us to develop future cities and urban living in a different way.”

> Download paper (pdf)

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Most will agree that good design is timeless; but how about good design advice, or does that get dated? You can be the judge now that Stanford University in partnership with Academic Earth have published a series of 12 lectures called “Principles of Product Design,” put together by IDEO–way back in 2001.

Topics included are:

1. Career Development
2. Building a Personal Gratification Company
3. Follow Your Passion
4. Design is Risk-Taking
5. Hire Great People
6. The Process of Design
7. Product Development Process: Observation
8. Designing Products vs Designing Experiences
9. Design as an Iterative Process
10. Prototyping the Mouse
11. Career Advice
12. How do you pick clients?

Here’s David Kelley with #6, “The Process of Design:”

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Manoj Kothari, who founded [Indian design firm] Onio Design, and others of his ilk are no longer content designing refrigerators, mobile phones and soap wrappers. They now hope to take on a bigger, more serious role in their clients’ businesses–from brand experience and trends research to business process design to re-crafting corporate strategy. In short, they want a seat at the decision-making table.

How? Design thinking is a new philosophy that has helped these firms move into areas traditionally occupied by research houses, advertising agencies and consulting firms.

>> Read article

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Design Observer’s got a great summary up of the past week’s discussions around humanitarian design, touched off by Bruce Nussbaum, responded to by Emily Pilloton, and with Cameron Sinclair, Alex Steffen, Robert Fabricant, Jon Kolko and others chiming in. (Don’t forget about Xanthe Matychak’s post at Core77 back on the 7th.)

Check out the roundup here.

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In the sexily named Ergonomics Today, Ian Chong has posted an article entitled “Design from an Ergonomist’s Perspective; Ergonomics from a Designer’s Perspective – Perhaps It Should be Both.” Chong is a professional hybrid that you’d think would be common, but is actually quite rare: He’s both a professional ergonomicist and an industrial designer. “But currently [in the design industry],” he writes, “the two as far apart as the Twilight characters and daylight…I have a box full of things labeled as ergonomic [and] some of these things are pathetic, most are laughable.”

Chong sounds off on the obvious need for these disciplines to work more closely together, and provides an example of where to start:

When I was teaching grad school I brought two classes together, one from the NYU ergonomics school combined with another from Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute design school. I paired up the students into project teams; each team had at least one from Pratt and one from NYU. The goal was to introduce the disciplines to each other and to expose each of them to each others way of thinking. And guess what? The final projects evolved from the input of each team member and resulted in changing the way of thinking for each of the students. Needless to say that I was pleased with their interaction and found that each student readily accepted another viewpoint and resulting in a final project reflective of appropriate solutions and creative thinking. As I saw some of these students in following years, I was constantly reminded by them what a great class this was, mostly from the varying opinions, input and collaborations. Truly this was successful in combining the two disciplines in a harmonious and creative way.

Give the whole article a read here.

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Core-fave Jan Chiphase, principal researcher at Nokia and roving global thinker on mobile culture, will become frog design’s Executive Creative Director of Global Insights, based in frog’s Shanghai studio. Here’s from the press release:

Chipchase joins frog from Nokia, where as a principal researcher he studied behavioral patterns that informed the development of new products based on emerging consumer trends. With deep experience in running complex, international design research projects, he is widely considered to be the authority on applying human-centered insights to the development process. His extensive research projects have taken him around the world to collect insights into the broader emotional, social, and cultural contexts of the impact of technology. Recent projects include research studies into the design of mobile money services for emerging markets; travel to Uganda to look at shared phone use; trips to India to examine how design can make mobile devices more accessible to people with low or non-existent levels of literacy; and a study in South Korea exploring how early adopters were reacting to the then recently launched mobile TV.

Read more (later today) at janchipchase.com and at frog design.

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To get you in the mood for Milan this month, check out this great profile piece on Marcel Wanders from the TV series Designer People. The short documentary follows his career from the early days with Droog to setting up Moooi, and offers an intimate look into his work and the growth of his studio with insights from people like Renny Ramakers, Ross Lovegrove, and Paola Antonelli. Sorry, no embed available – click here to watch.

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