# data[].attributes.body
Here are some things for us to think about. From Kopi Uncle who holds a PhD, Michael Tan (mike):

1. In order to be innovative, one needs to be critical. To be critical, one needs to regularly interrogate one's core beliefs. What core beliefs about teaching the IvP have you recently questioned, or are willing to question?

2. As teachers, do you care more about product (e.g., innovative outcomes for 3M to patent and produce) or do you care that students begin to understand how to be creative?

# data[].attributes.headline
How might we make hawker centre dustbins better smelling?

# data[].attributes.subject
How might we make hawker centre dustbins better smelling?

# data[].attributes.headline
How might CCA players and those who pick up the basketballs during a basketball game pick up basketballs without staying back and leaning forward and without using electronics?

# data[].attributes.subject
How might CCA players and those who pick up the basketballs during a basketball game pick up basketballs without staying back and leaning forward and without using electronics?

# data[].attributes.body
Russian thing. Russian things and ideas are not very sexy these days, but looks intriguing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
TRIZ (; Russian: теория решения изобретательских задач, teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadach, 'theory of inventive problem solving') is an approach that combines an organized and systematic method for problem solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature. The development and improvement of products and technologies in accordance with TRIZ are guided by the objective laws of technical systems evolution, forming the basis for TRIZ problem solving tools and methods. It was developed by Genrich Altshuller, a Soviet inventor, and science-fiction author, along with his colleagues, starting in 1946. In English the name is typically rendered as the theory of inventive problem solving, and occasionally goes by the English acronym TIPS.[citation needed ]

Following Altshuller's insight, the theory developed on a foundation of extensive research covering hundreds of thousands of inventions across many different fields to produce an approach that defines generalizable patterns like inventive solutions and the distinguishing characteristics of the problems these inventions have overcome.

The research has produced three primary findings:

1. Problems and solutions are repeated across industries and sciences

2. Patterns of technical evolution are also replicated across industries and sciences

3. The innovations used scientific effects outside the field in which they were developed

TRIZ practitioners apply all these findings to create and improve products, services, and systems.

TRIZ in its classical form, was developed by the Soviet inventor and science fiction writer Genrich Altshuller and his associates. He started developing TRIZ in 1946 while working in the "Inventions Inspection" department of the Caspian Sea flotilla of the Soviet Navy. His job was to help with the initiation of invention proposals, to rectify and document them, and to prepare applications to the patent office. During this time, he realized that a problem requires an inventive solution if there is an unresolved contradiction in the sense that improving one parameter negatively affects another. He later called these "technical contradictions".

His work on what later resulted in TRIZ was interrupted in 1950 by his arrest and sentencing to 25 years in the Vorkuta Gulag labor camps. The arrest was partially triggered by letters that he and Raphael Shapiro sent to Stalin, ministers, and newspapers about certain decisions made by the Soviet Government, which they believed were erroneous. Altshuller and Shapiro were freed during the Khrushchev Thaw following Stalin's death in 1953 and returned to Baku.

The first paper on TRIZ titled "On the psychology of inventive creation" was published in 1956 in "Issues in Psychology" (Voprosi Psichologii) journal.

Altshuller also observed clever and creative people at work: he uncovered patterns in their thinking and developed thinking tools and techniques to model this "talented thinking". These tools include Smart Little People and Thinking in Time and Scale (or the Screens of Talented Thought).

In 1986, Altshuller switched his attention away from technical TRIZ, and started investigating the development of individual creativity. He also developed a version of TRIZ for children, which was trialed in various schools. In 1989 the TRIZ Association was formed, with Altshuller chosen as president.

Following the end of the Cold War, the waves of emigrants from the former Soviet Union brought TRIZ to other countries. They drew attention to it overseas. In 1995 the Altshuller Institute for TRIZ Studies was established in Boston.

Prism of TRIZ

Contradictions Matrix

40 principles of TRIZ method rendered schematically

One of the tools which evolved as an extension of the 40 principles was a contradiction matrix.

French-English TRIZ principles and English Contradiction Matrix

Ideal final result (IFR) - the ultimate romantic solution of a problem when the desired result is achieved by itself.[15]

Altshuller screened patents to discover what kind of contradictions were resolved or dissolved by the invention and how this had been achieved. From this, he developed a set of 40 inventive principles and later a matrix of contradictions.

Although TRIZ was developed from the analysis of technical systems, it has been used widely to understand and solve complex management problems. Examples include finding additional cost savings for the legal department of a local government body: the inventive solution generated was to generate additional revenue [insert reference to cost-cutting in local government case study]. The results of the TRIZ work are expected to generate £1.7 m in profit in the first 5 years.

Case studies on the use of TRIZ are challenging to acquire as many companies believe TRIZ gives them a competitive advantage and are reluctant to publicize their adoption of the method[citation needed ]. However, some examples are available: Samsung is the most famous success story and has invested heavily in embedding TRIZ use throughout the company, right up to and including the CEO; "In 2003 TRIZ led to 50 new patents for Samsung and in 2004 one project alone, a DVD pick-up innovation, saved Samsung over $100 million. TRIZ is now an obligatory skill set if you want to advance within Samsung".[citation needed ]

Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and GE are all documented users of TRIZ; Mars has documented how applying TRIZ led to a new patent for chocolate packaging.

TRIZ has also been used successfully by Leafield Engineering, Smart Stabilizer Systems, and Buro Happold to solve problems and generate new patents.

The European TRIZ Association is a nonprofit association; based in Germany, founded in 2000. it holds conferences with associated publications.

1. SIT (systematic inventive thinking) & SIT Company - A company developed based on this method

2. USIT (unified structured inventive thinking)

3. TOP-TRIZ (a modern version of further developed and integrated TRIZ methods.) "TOP-TRIZ includes further development of problem formulation and problem modeling, development of Standard Solutions into Standard Techniques, further development of ARIZ and Technology Forecasting. TOP-TRIZ has integrated its methods into a universal and user-friendly system for innovation."

4. In 1992, several TRIZ practitioners fleeing the collapsing Soviet Union relocated and formed a company named Ideation International, Inc. Under the Ideation banner, they continued to develop their version of TRIZ and named it I-TRIZ. I-TRIZ consists of four methodologies: Inventive Problem Solving (IPS), Anticipatory Failure Determination (AFD), Intellectual Property (IP), and Directed Evolution (DE), as well as a knowledge base of over 400 "operators" where each operator is an innovative concept gleaned from the study of international patents stemming from Altshuller's original work.

Royzen, Zinovy (2009), Designing and Manufacturing Better Products Faster Using TRIZ, TRIZ Consulting, Inc.

Royzen, Zinovy (2020). Systematic engineering innovation. Seattle, WA. ISBN 978-0-9728543-4-4. OCLC 1297849736.

Karasik, Yevgeny B. (2021). Duality revolution : discovery of new types and mechanisms of duality that are revolutionizing science and technology as well as our ability to solve problems. [place of publication not identified]. ISBN 979-8-5044-3426-1. OCLC 1363847265.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
TRIZ (; Russian: теория решения изобретательских задач, teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadach, 'theory of inventive problem solving') is an approach that combines an organized and systematic method for problem solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Halstock: Chelsea Penthouse Setting the bar for high-end luxury with our magical project in Chelsea, London! One of our favourite, but also most challenging projects to date, but that didn't stop us from providing an exceptional level of service throughout the project.

Dan Norman, the UX guru on Generative AI. It is not about replacing humans but a more tighter collaboration between human and machines. And technology is always a "means" and not an end. It is that scaffolding that we can leverage to do better and more things.

Will Artificial Intelligence replace UX designers? Listen to what Don Norman, the master of UX design himself, had to say about #AI and its impact on the future. Watch the full Master Class on our site, details here: https://bit.ly/4091L1c

To view or add a comment, sign in

Will Artificial Intelligence replace UX designers? Listen to what Don Norman, the master of UX design himself, had to say about #AI and its impact on the future. Watch the full Master Class on our site, details here: https://bit.ly/4091L1c

I love Don's comment on AI, he summaries it so perfectly 🫶

Will Artificial Intelligence replace UX designers? Listen to what Don Norman, the master of UX design himself, had to say about #AI and its impact on the future. Watch the full Master Class on our site, details here: https://bit.ly/4091L1c

To view or add a comment, sign in

Will Artificial Intelligence replace UX designers? Listen to what Don Norman, the master of UX design himself, had to say about #AI and its impact on the future. Watch the full Master Class on our site, details here: https://bit.ly/4091L1c

I'm curious.. What are your top tips for our Masters in UX Design students on how to manage client relationships when working on Industry Projects? Guidance on establishing rapport, building trust, negotiating conflicting views or priorities and communicating effectively would be most welcome.

To view or add a comment, sign in

Our 19-years old article "When Search Engines Become Answer Engines" https://lnkd.in/gmHQGPaF is relevant for this week's announcements by Microsoft, Google, and Baidu that they will prioritize #AI-generated long answers to users' #search queries. Our advice to emphasize loyal users needs to be sharpened, as search services discourage visits to those websites that provided the content they used to train their AI models in the first place. #userexperience #ChatGPT

When Search Engines Become Answer Engines

nngroup.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) on LinkedIn: Measuring Intuitiveness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Halstock: Chelsea Penthouse Setting the bar for high-end luxury with our magical project in Chelsea, London! One of our favourite, but also most challenging projects to date, but that didn't stop us from providing an exceptional level of service throughout the project. Dan Norman, the UX guru on Generative AI.

# data[].attributes.headline
mike: Shouldn't IvP pedagogy be /Innovative/ too?

# data[].attributes.subject
mike: Shouldn't IvP pedagogy be /Innovative/ too?

# data[].attributes.body
What might innovative pedagogy look like in IvP? What kinds of classroom cultures might work better for innovativeness? Why do students have problems finding problems?

How can we get classrooms to become closer to design collectives, where students can help one another, critique one another's ideas, all in mind to improving ideas, and all done without the active direction of teachers?

How might we redesign the (IvP) classroom?

# data[].attributes.body
the ivp comm likes the uncle/auntie granpa/granma stereotypes?
anyway i am michael tan, lecturer at NIE, affiliated with Policy, Curriculum, Leadership AG and the Office of Education Research.

in my former life i was a physics teacher at a JC, and since then I have been interested in science education generally speaking, and makerspaces as a site for interdisciplinary STEM education.

right now i am researching innovative classroom cultures and what teachers do to make it so. The mostest latest finding (not confirmed etc) i am seeing is that wanting to communicate ideas to students can be a hindrance to students' innovativeness. Far better is for teachers to be ignorant (or to approach with ignorance of the students' intention, or ignorance of what the 'right answer' is), and instead query students whether or not they are adequately using the intellectual resources they have to manage the task.

if this seems weird, consider the coaches for many athletes: these coaches cannot run/swim/climb/play tennis/etc better than their athletes. They do not necessarily 'instruct' their athletes on what to do specifically, but instead what they do is to query their athletes if they moving correctly, if they are trying their hardest, if they should be resting, etc.

given this, i have to model the pedagogy—i am certainly ignorant on how to run ivp classrooms; having never done so myself. what i can do is to ask questions: what is happening? why do you think this is happening? what should be happening? why is there a gap? what do you think you need to know/do to close the gap?; and be borderline annoying at it 🤣

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Japanese gadget maker Thanko is our favorite supplier of innovations we never knew we needed until the company invented them. We never would have thought of the Whole Pie Maker or drink-at-home Secret Base on our own, but we're glad Thanko did.

When thinking outside the box is your business model, though, there's always the risk that your designers might think a little too far outside the boundaries of conventional logic, and Thanko recently shared a photo of one of their past products that ended up being a sales failure.

これ、なんだと思いますか🤔 pic.twitter.com/JX1h42GFcf
- サンコーレアモノショップ公式 (@thanko_web) February 9, 2023

So what is it? That's exactly the question Thanko itself posed in its tweet, asking "What do you think this is?" and following up with "Hint: It was a sales dud." After staring at the pronged handle, with its bright green color and techno-insectoid aesthetics, Twitter users' guesses included:

"It's a Power Rangers-type weapon, right? One of the powerful ones that they use for the tough enemy at the end of the episode."
"But only the Green Ranger can use it."
"Probably transforms you into Ultraman."
"Ghostbusters P.K.E. Meter?"
"Is it a fly swatter?"
"Some sort of anti-grasshopper weaponry?"
"Special cockroach killing scissors?"
"Umm, is this something that's appropriate to be showing outside of late-night time slots?"

But no, this isn't tokusatsu hero equipment or ghostbusting gear, and while Thanko has offered some pretty crazy ways to deal with cockroaches before, this isn't one of them. And no, it's not for adult purposes either, unless by "adult purposes" you mean mature and responsible pursuits, such as keeping a tidy home, because this gadget is a dish washer!

"Wait, how are you supposed to load all of your pots, pans, and silverware in that thing?" you might be asking. You don't, because this is a dish washer in the most literal sense of the term...

正解は食洗機でした！ https://t.co/omLMdwZ5bf https://t.co/kqEIFWChwW pic.twitter.com/17HZ7qX8ok
- サンコーレアモノショップ公式 (@thanko_web) February 9, 2023

...in that it's a motorized device specifically engineered to wash a single dish (i.e. plate) at a time.

As the video shows, the prongs fold back inwards to clamp the dish in place, then motors rotate the dish in a counterclockwise motion. The underside of the central tip of the handle has brush bristles, and the automated spinning ostensibly eliminates the need to do any manual scrubbing.

It's definitely an original design, but it's not hard to see why it never became a sales success. It doesn't seem to be any faster than hand-washing would be, and since the brush is stationary, the gadget really only washes the very center of the dish, not the outer edges. It also looks like in order to keep the clamps in place, you have to apply continual pressure on the handle's trigger, which looks like it'd get tiring for your fingers very quickly.

Add up all those inconveniences, and we can understand why Thanko didn't even bother to put one of these dish washers in their Lucky Bag this New Year's Season. Oh well, not every new invention can be a hit, even if, in Thanko's case, they can all be weird.

Source: Twitter/@thanko_web via IT Media
Featured image: Twitter/@thanko_web
● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Japan's craziest gadget maker made this gadget that was too crazy to succeed, but what is it?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Japanese gadget maker Thanko is our favorite supplier of innovations we never knew we needed until the company invented them. We never would have thought of the Whole Pie Maker or drink-at-home Secret Base on our own, but we're glad Thanko did.

# data[].attributes.body
Guess I will be the outlier among this group. How I came to be involved is courtesy of David Kwek, whom I have had the privilege to work with the past few years.

One of my personal goals is to be able to pay it forward, to inspire the future generation of innovators and thinkers.

Looking forward to having fruitful exchanges with you all soon !

# data[].attributes.body
I struggle with creating an innovative culture in my school and would like to know how.

# data[].attributes.body
Hello everyone. I would like to explore ways to help our students identify and come up with good problems, because I feel that this can then create the scope for innovative solutions that are needed by the users!

It will also be great if we can unpack ways to promote inventive thinking amongst our students, and possibly for these to go beyond the IvP students.

One of my dreams is that we ignite a passion for innovation in our IvP students, and they go on to influence their peers!

# data[].attributes.headline
Wouldn’t be awful if pet owners forget to feed their pets?

# data[].attributes.subject
Wouldn’t be awful if pet owners forget to feed their pets?

# data[].attributes.headline
Wouldn't’ it be nice if Singaporeans take in fewer calories than their daily recommended amount?

# data[].attributes.subject
Wouldn't’ it be nice if Singaporeans take in fewer calories than their daily recommended amount?

# data[].attributes.body
For those who are still standing in the wings or on the edge, thinking if you should take that leap to post, I would like so share an unsolicited email from a participant from the Jan’23 IvP training.
We connected over Zoom to discuss about the IvP program and some of the problem statements that the students have prepared.
The challenge was the quality of the statements. The teachers seem to have trouble getting through to the students to refine the statements. Some of the statements have been posted here, so you can get an idea of what we are up against.
We chatted and role played. And the light bulb went off.
So for this school, I’ll be meeting them again next week.
The teacher now have more ideas on how to coach & guide the students.

So it’s not that scary after all. I won’t bite….

And like innovating, it’s a case of “Never try, never know.”

# data[].attributes.body
The Japanese have always loved fresh fish. But the waters close to Japan have not held many fish for decades. So to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever.

The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring in the fish. If the return trip took more than a few days, the fish were not fresh. The Japanese did not like the taste.

To solve this problem, fishing companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer. however, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen and they did not like frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price.

So fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little thrashing around, the fish stopped moving. They were tired and dull, but alive.

Unfortunately, the Japanese could still taste the difference. Because the fish did not move for days, they lost their fresh-fish taste. The Japanese preferred the lively taste of fresh fish, not sluggish fish.

So how did Japanese fishing companies solve this problem? How do they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan?

To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks. But now they add a small shark to each tank. The shark eats a few fish, but most of the fish arrive in a very lively state. The fish are challenged.

As soon as you reach your goals, such as finding a wonderful mate, starting a successful company, paying off your debts or whatever, you might lose your passion. You don't need to work so hard so you relax.

Like the Japanese fish problem, the best solution is simple. As someone observed years ago: "Humans thrive, oddly enough, only in the presence of a challenging environment."

Put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go!

# data[].attributes.headline
mike: another cute story (draw your own conclusions, maybe discuss in comments?)

# data[].attributes.subject
mike: another cute story (draw your own conclusions, maybe discuss in comments?)

# data[].attributes.body
Once a saint along with his follower travelling together and were passing through a village. There lived a family headed by Mr. John. They were having with big peace of barren land & a cow. The Saint asked Mr. John if they can stay with them. Mr. John agreed and told that his family is fully dependent on the cow's milk & he can only share that as food to them. The saint agreed. The follower said they have big barren land, they must work on it and can get crop from it. The saint kept quite. In the evening Mr. John gave the saint & his follower their share of milk. Mr. Johns family somehow adjusted with little left milk.

In the night the Saint woke up and asked his follower to get up. He then asked him to untie the cow. the follower said that if he'll untie it then it will ran away to the jungle. But the saint asked him to do so. The follower did what the saint has told him & the Cow ran away towards jungle. The Saint & follower also left the place in the night.

On the way the follower was very upset. He told Saint that Mr. John's family gave us whatever they had. They have not only Cow to feed them & we have done wrong to the family. We must not do that to them what we did. The Saint kept quite & asked his follower to wait for right time for his reply.

After a few year passed, the Saint asked his follower to again company him to Mr. john's village. When they visited the place, they found that there was now a big house, many cows, crops all over the land, happily living Mr. john's family. The follower was very surprised and also was very happy to see the present situation of the family that shared their part for them. He asked to the Saint what made all this possible.

The Saint replied that they were having one cow & that land. They were getting the required food from the cow and were living a comfortable life. They have no challenge and were living in the Comfort Zone. When their only source of food left then they strived for a few days and this made them to work on the available land. They have to come out of there comfort zone to live and resulted in good crop and later loads of wealth & prosperity. So in life also, if you don't feel challenged & sitting in your comfortable Zone then you can't get what you are eligible to get. So for that you have to kill your cow i.e. you have to come out of the comfortable zone & face the challenges to succeed in the life.

# data[].attributes.body
Would like to know how to better mentor the student-innovators?

Two areas that I find it most challenging are guiding students to a Good Problem to solve and prototyping and creating a working prototype.

Happy to be in a community that I can learn from Michael, Pang, David and all IvP teachers here.

# data[].attributes.headline
mike: should you allow/encourage access to AI tools?

# data[].attributes.subject
mike: should you allow/encourage access to AI tools?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since the introduction of DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT, there has been a fair amount of hand-wringing about AI technology-some of it justified.

It's true that the technology's future is unclear. There is great debate about the ethics of using existing artwork, images and content to train these AI products, and concern about what industries it will displace or change. And it seems as if an AI arms race between companies like Microsoft and Google is already underway.

And yet as an industrial designer and professor, I've found AI image generation programs to be a fantastic way to improve the design process.

They don't replace the valuable insights and critical thinking skills I've accumulated from years of experience. But they do spark creativity and expand the range of what's possible with the products my students and I design.

A peek behind the design curtain

Industrial design involves creating everyday objects, with a particular focus on their form and function. Industrial designers have a hand in anything from furniture and consumer electronics to accessories and apparel.

A typical design process involves lots of research and talking to consumers about their needs. From there, designers brainstorm ideas and sketch them out, followed by the prototyping and fabrication stage. Finally, the objects get refined and manufactured.

During the early stages of brainstorming, designers spend a lot of time with their sketchbooks, getting inspired by their immediate environment, by history books and by their own experiences. The Internet also plays a big role-it's where designers collect many of the images they use to create inspiration boards. Famously, Jonathan Ive, who designed many iconic Apple products, looked at luxury watches as inspiration for the Apple Watch, using the " crown "-normally used to wind a mechanical watch and set the time-as an input device to allow users to scroll through content.

AI has given designers like myself the ability to generate images just based on a simple text prompt. Tools like DALL-E or Midjourney let us input abstract concepts and turn them into a flood of images.

Enter any sentence-no matter how crazy-and you'll receive a set of unique images generated just for you. Want to design a teapot? Here, have 1,000 of them. Some may have a dinosaur shape; others may be made of mashed potatoes.

While only a small subset of them may be usable as a teapot, they provide a seed of inspiration that the designer can nurture and refine into a finished product.

From nostalgia to a tissue box

Perhaps a handful of those 1,000 teapot images allow a designer to conceive of a new, unexpected shape that is easier to hold, more economical to manufacture or more beautiful to look at. Generative AI can facilitate the brainstorming process, but it's still the designer's responsibility to make the choices that ultimately lead to products that enrich people's lives.

Recently, I have found myself using AI image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney to explore complex ideas that might be difficult or time-consuming to articulate and channel into a physical product. For example, for one project, I wanted to create objects that really connected people, in a deep way, to a place they had visited or lived in-as opposed to the refrigerator magnet souvenirs that tourists often end up buying.

So I decided to design a set of small household objects to be sold to tourists visiting the small colonial town of Antigua, Guatemala, just a few miles from where I grew up. I wanted the objects to elicit nostalgia about the town-and perhaps inspire those who purchased them to want to return.

I began by prompting DALL-E for tabletop objects that were nostalgic. The results were hilarious and unexpected. I received images of objects that looked sad, like erasers and a tissue box with a frown. It had taken my prompt very literally.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
DALL-E 2 and Midjourney can be a boon for industrial designers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since the introduction of DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT, there has been a fair amount of hand-wringing about AI technology-some of it justified. It's true that the technology's future is unclear. There is great debate about the ethics of using existing artwork, images and content to train these AI products, and concern about what industries it will displace or change.

# data[].attributes.body
I'm from a primary school (Edgefield Pri) so getting students to be excited and creative is not a problem.

Getting them to see that their prototypes do not work and require improvements is the real challenge.

The students are very attached to their prototypes.  Their prototypes are perfect so getting them to improve is like a personal attack on their creations.

It might sound exaggerated but it is a very real challenge.  Did I mention that our students go through innovation projects from P3 to P5?

The challenge mentioned above improves as we move up the levels but the interest levels drop as well.

Could it be a case of priority as they prepare for the PSLE or our school-based innovation programme is not engaging enough to sustain them?

# data[].attributes.body
Hi Lixun here,

The problem I face is getting students to be innovative, creative and an active problem solver.

Trying to put myself in the shoes of my target audience - my pri sch students:
- often do not commit enough, given they have multiple other commitments and priorities
- have never had a true problem to solve before because they live in sanitized environs and adults are there to solve their problems and pave the way for them
- have no clue as to what they are doing

My personal thoughts:
- being innovative, creative and a problem solver is like honing a skill and developing a muscle. Just like learning any skill, e.g. cooking, swimming, flying a plane, the children need to see demonstration of the entire process of innovating, exercising creativity, problem-solving followed by being guided through to gain the skill, confidence and hone the skill (muscle). This may require a scaffolded approach without becoming a cookie-cutter factory.
- Plasticity and fluidity is critical, but I find our current approach cumbersome (I may be wrong here). This does not conflict with the previous point - we can exercise the plasticity and fluidity within the scaffolded approach.

More thoughts:
- teachers are critical mentors to this imparting of skill... but we aren't exactly experts in this... we are also at the same time honing the skills (of becoming more innovative, creative and problem-solver) as we guide the students along.

# data[].attributes.body
Finally found time to sit down and write something... because it's LJ week!!
Problems:
1. Finding the "right" problem - that's the problem...
2. My students are fixated with their first and only idea...
3. Finding suitable target audiences to get feedback from

Issues:
1. Creativity requires a bit of exploration and tinkering and day-dreaming. It does not come "on-demand". Yes, we have a very structured programme - do this by this time, finish this by that time... Was wondering whether some unstructuredness might help... Notice that when I tell the students a deadline and that it is assessed, they immediately go for the conventional/convenient option and stop exploring. How might we create an environment (not just physical, but psychological) that encourages students to explore, to consider breaking boundaries...
2. Creativity is hard work. There's a pile of discarded ideas behind every unique idea. But students are reluctant to generate many ideas, perhaps due to the heavy academic load and multiple demands made on their time. Students don't do the IvP homework (eg. research, ideation, etc) assigned to them. They only do it when they come for IvP, as they say it's difficult to come up with ideas alone. Was thinking whether flipped classroom would work here. They watch videos introducing, say, SCAMPER, and then come to class and apply it with their partners or in a group, under teacher's guidance...

# data[].attributes.body
Idea B
How might we enable the blind and disabled to use everyday showering appliances with ease?

# data[].attributes.body
Idea C
How might we help the forgetful(and/or those with dementia) to turn off their stove to prevent kitchen fires?

# data[].attributes.body
Idea A
How might we assist the elderly in reaching objects from the high shelves in order to achieve a smoother shopping experience?

# data[].attributes.body
Shuttlecock collector: How might we build a machine to help badminton coaches and students save time so they can maximize their efficiency during their lessons.

# data[].attributes.body
Team 3:
How might we allow the same clothes hangers to be used by both children and adults, and also improve on the functions of the existing clothes hanger.

# data[].attributes.body
Team 4 First Draft - Not Good Problem Statement Yet:
How might we extend the lifetime for shoes using strap on soles?
How might we reduce electricity usage by using more energy efficient appliances?
How might we increase the mobility of wheelchairs by decreasing the bulkiness of wheelchairs?

# data[].attributes.body
Sharing a photo of my 1st batch of IvP students in Nan Chiau Primary School.

Super privileged to be the solo teacher mentor last year. It was a super steep learning curve for our cosy team of 6 students, my HoD (as the IvP coordinator) and I!

We could not have done it without our Innovation mentor (hero!), Chee Yong. David's prompt replies helped so much too!

What I am most excited about IvP right now, is the expansion of our team in our 2nd year.

1. I am keen to know how I can contribute to the team as the IvP coordinator.

2. What mode of operation would be more effective for a larger team as I work closely with the 3 other teacher mentors, 30 students and more Innovation mentors this year?

Needless to say, this newbie appreciates the opportunity to be part of IvP NLC.

It's Monday of Term 1 Week 10. What are all of you most excited about right now?  :)

# data[].attributes.body
A huge shout out to those who have posted. No Right or Wrong, just how can it be Better... and so, please respond and continue the exchange.
And to those standing in the wings, what are you waiting for ?
Like the uncles would say : Bien pai seh one ! Come, just share. And we can all progress together !
Lai lah !! Mai tu liao !!

# data[].attributes.headline
the FISH! Philosophy way - Pang: "WTF??!!"

# data[].attributes.subject
the FISH! Philosophy way - Pang: "WTF??!!"

# data[].attributes.body
Five keys to boost fun at work (and when innovating)—the FISH! Philosophy way

1. It starts with relationships. Most people in the survey defined fun at work as “having great colleagues they enjoy spending time with.” ...

2. Be yourself. ...

3. Trust is key. ...

4. A sense of control. ...

5. Fun is the future.

# data[].attributes.headline
mike: photo/video food. simple right? nooooo

# data[].attributes.subject
mike: photo/video food. simple right? nooooo

# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/FBP-DxfZCgo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Food Commercials Cost Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars | Big Business | Business Insider

# data[].attributes.body
Innovation requires not knowing long enough to learn new things. How can you build something new, if you aren’t okay with not already knowing the answer? The future is not created; it’s co-created. Leaders need to build teams that can both define the right questions, and then discover new answers.

# data[].attributes.headline
Hey like this message if you've read this (curious how many people participating)

# data[].attributes.subject
Hey like this message if you've read this (curious how many people participating)

# data[].attributes.headline
What kind of creative thinking do you do most?

# data[].attributes.subject
What kind of creative thinking do you do most?

# data[].attributes.body
https://hbr.org/2023/01/cultivating-the-four-kinds-of-creativity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One island of stability in the sea of conversation about the future of work is the conviction that our jobs will become increasingly creative. The World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and nearly every major think tank seem aligned around this hypothesis, offering heaps of data to support it. The trend is not just about the delegation of rote tasks to automation; it's also about the accelerating pace of change and the increasing complexity of business, which demand original responses to novel challenges far more frequently than ever before.

Many companies now include creativity as a core competency for employees at all levels-especially those on the front lines-and across all functions, from sales and marketing to accounting and operations to customer service. Individuals and talent managers must therefore get smart about what it takes to foster and manage this skill. Although the science of creativity is young compared with other areas of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, our growing understanding of it points to new directions for creative development. In this article we offer a typology that breaks creative thinking into four types: integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; splitting, or seeing how things that look the same are actually different or more usefully divided into parts; figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and distal thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different from the here and now.

Most of us tend to think in just one of these four ways, and we benefit from knowing which one comes naturally to us. We can also learn to hone our creativity in the other dimensions. Managers need to understand both their own strengths and how to balance the types of thinking across their teams to execute creative projects. And organizations can use this typology to increase innovation across the workforce.

Integration

Integration may be local-stitching together a few concepts-or sweeping: a grand unifying theory.

The 17th-century mathematician Isaac Newton was a genius at integration. After coinventing calculus, itself enormously integrative, he happened upon the idea that would make him even more famous. The story does involve an apple, but it didn't fall on his head. Instead, looking out a window one night, he noticed that a two-inch piece of fruit on the ground 20 feet from him occupied the same amount of visual space as did the faraway moon. He wondered not about the trick of perspective but whether the force drawing the apple to the ground was the same as what held the moon in orbit-an idea that gave rise to his inverse square law: that the gravitational attraction between two bodies is inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. Integration is often at the heart of scientific discovery.

It's also a key form of corporate innovation today. Consider the Apple iPhone. Its designers' success lay in recognizing that when tools such as cameras, phones, and music players are digitized, they are all capturing, storing, retrieving, and transmitting data in the same way, through semiconductors and liquid crystal displays; therefore, they could be combined in a single device-perhaps the most powerful tool now at our disposal. Four decades ago the phone hanging on your wall had nothing to do with the boom box sitting on your console or the camera filled with film you'd soon drop off for developing.

How does integrative creativity show up in everyday work? Let's consider a hypothetical office-supply retailer, Capella Paper, that wants to attract more Millennial customers. Jerome, an email marketer, is an employee working on the problem. He finds several studies showing that professionals in their twenties and thirties are vocal advocates of preserving hybrid or remote working arrangements postpandemic. He hypothesizes that two groups Capella treats as distinct-Millennials and remote workers-may in fact align as buyers of office supplies. Jerome retrieves an analysis by his team on a spike in home-office purchases in the spring of 2020 and looks to see which email promotions-all targeting newly remote workers-were most successful in that period. He selects an old promotion offering free printer-toner refills with bulk paper purchases and makes a few tweaks for the new target demographic, resulting in a 35% higher click-through rate compared with the company's average for Millennial customers.

Splitting

The opposite kind of creative thinking is splitting, and the history of science is full of examples. The periodic table of the elements splits earth, air, fire, and water into 118 parts. Medical breakthroughs regularly result from the separation of what was thought to be a single disease into several, each of which can be more precisely treated. One of the greatest manufacturing innovations of all time-the assembly line-involved splitting. Before the Industrial Revolution, one craftsperson might oversee the production of a good from start to finish. Guns, for example, were made by individuals skilled in both woodworking and metalwork; the same was true of steamer trunks and clocks. But then the Swedish inventor Christopher Polhem introduced the concept of interchangeable parts, which could be made separate from a whole and used for a wide variety of products. At first many people were skeptical: When, in 1785, the Frenchman Honoré Blanc publicly demonstrated that he could assemble a working gun by selecting components from a large pile of interchangeable parts, audience members were shocked. This idea led to further division-of human labor-allowing for faster, more consistent, and scalable manufacturing that is still in use today.

A more recent application is quantum computing, an important application of particle physics, which breaks matter down into its smallest components. Whereas in classical computing a bit can occupy only a single position, quantum computing's qubit can occupy multiple positions simultaneously, exponentially increasing computing power. In 2019 Google's quantum processor Sycamore took 200 seconds to finish a task that would take a classical computer 10,000 years to complete.

This type of creativity can be useful in many professional scenarios. Back at Capella, for example, a product manager, Carmen, has been studying which of the company's offerings are most popular with Millennials. She first separates consumer buyers from business buyers; the latter typically purchase for their small companies. Business buyers can be further divided into people who order a variety of supplies and whose purchases are waning, and those who buy just one or two products in large amounts and whose orders are holding steady or even increasing. Focusing on this second group, Carmen arrives at her "aha" by zeroing in on the product most frequently purchased by 30-something business buyers: Capella's trademark 6″ x 8″ grass-cloth-bound notebook. Through interviews she learns that people buy this item for two reasons: for note-taking by employees and for client gifts. Because Capella sells the notebooks only in bulk to businesses, they have become coveted. With that insight Carmen pitches a new line of luxury notebooks in a wider range of sizes and colors, available to both individual and commercial buyers with an option to emboss initials or a corporate logo on the cover. Thus a single product is split into several lines for distinct purposes.

Figure-Ground Reversal

The term "figure-ground reversal" comes from the study of vision and refers to our ability to shift focus from the foreground to the background to produce a radically different picture. The well-known black-and-white silhouette of two faces in profile-or a vase in the middle-demonstrates how our minds can toggle back and forth between the two.

One of the most important neuroscientific discoveries of our lifetime was the default mode network, a set of brain regions involved in our mental downtime, and it happened owing to an accident of figure-ground reversal. Functional-imaging researchers were mapping the brain's "task positive" networks-the regions that light up when we engage in focused activities such as solving anagrams and listening to lectures. In most of those experiments a control condition consisted of rest periods, during which the brain might be expected to go dark and quiet. Instead, scientists across numerous studies found that certain midline and medial-temporal-lobe brain structures consistently lit up during rest, suggesting not stasis but vibrant activity. We have since learned that the same thing happens when we daydream, and what we do during those periods is imagine and plan. Researchers weren't trying to find the state in which we do some of our best thinking, but they did.

Here's another example of figure-ground reversal: In 1957, when the Soviet space program launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit Earth, the U.S. military used two widely separated points on Earth to track Sputnik 's speed and position by means of the Doppler effect. But only in 1958 did it become clear that the far more profound application of the technology was for the exact opposite purpose: using points in space to track objects on Earth. In that year the Advanced Research Projects Agency developed Transit to calculate the position and speed of any moving object using two widely separated satellites in space. Today we know this technology as the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

We see figure-ground reversal all the time in industry, too. Amazon Web Services was developed in response to Amazon's need to scale up its infrastructure. The software developers Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black, who led the work, realized that others would want the solution they were envisioning-that it could be a compelling product to offer externally. Today AWS is a foreground business for the company, accounting for $45 billion in revenue in 2020. Similarly, Slack, the ubiquitous messaging platform, started as an internal product to help Stewart Butterfield's company Tiny Speck develop a video game. That business fizzled out, but the team pivoted to the messaging app, and Slack went public in 2019. In 2021 Salesforce bought it for close to $28 billion.

Imagine that Robert, a manager at Capella's Chicago store, has just returned from a leadership meeting where he learned about the company's push to attract Millennial customers. Over the next several weeks he spends time observing patrons' shopping habits in the store. He focuses on customers in professional attire who appear to be in their late twenties or early thirties, but he sees very few of them, and he can't identify any particular patterns in what they're buying. Though Robert normally works weekdays, he's called in one Saturday to cover for a colleague and continues his observations. At first he doesn't see anyone in his target demographic, but then he recognizes a repeat customer from earlier in the week, this time not in business casual but dressed down and shopping with what appears to be his school-age daughter. Robert realizes that he's overlooked a half dozen other Millennials that day alone because they were shopping not as professionals but as parents and were consistently looking for art and school supplies. He decides to stock those items in the middle aisles, with office supplies flanking them, and within a few months his store leads the region in sales to the target demographic. Robert explains to Capella's leaders that it came down to focusing on the broader, whole-person context of Millennials' lives.

Distal Thinking

Finally, distal thinking involves imagining things as very different from the present. Many a creative genius has been characterized as someone who envisioned a radically new future that the rest of us initially couldn't see. The inventor Nikola Tesla, for example, once described his process as building and refining an object entirely in his imagination-even operating it in his mind. His distal brainchildren included the radio, the neon lamp, AC power, and hydroelectric power.

Sometimes innovators think so far ahead that the market isn't ready for their ideas. The computer scientist and cryptographer David Chaum invented anonymous digital cash in a 1983 paper, just as personal computers were coming into vogue, and well before access to the internet was ubiquitous. In 1994 his company, DigiCash, sent the first electronic payment. But the economic and technological ecosystem needed to support widespread adoption of digital currency did not yet exist, and DigiCash folded in 1998. Like many other first movers, Chaum paved the way for followers but benefited from only a small fraction of his invention's success.

More-successful distal innovators bridge the gap between the present and the future in one of two ways. The first is by accelerating market maturity, through promotions, partnerships, and focused launches. An example of this is another digital-payments company, PayPal. When it launched, in 1999, adoption of its full slate of intended uses was low. So rather than try to advance an ambitious vision before consumers were ready, the company focused on developing its user base through eBay, a platform where such payments were becoming the norm. The symbiosis was so perfect that eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, but within a decade, as PayPal usage expanded well beyond its parent company, the entities split. Today PayPal is used in 200 countries, and its 2021 revenue topped $25 billion.

A second way distal innovators help their radical vision ultimately become reality is with "backward" innovation-developing intermediary technologies that are immediately marketable and will move stakeholders along the maturity curve toward readiness for the actual invention. Take self-driving cars, which exist but aren't yet prevalent for many reasons, including technological, infrastructure, and regulatory barriers. Another obstacle is consumer mistrust: Drivers are not yet ready to hand over the wheel. Thus we see stepping-stone products such as cruise control and automatic parking. These are incremental offerings that people will use and that should make them more comfortable with a driverless future.

The electric car company Tesla logged a distal win by selling EVs as luxury purchases before the economics worked to make more-mainstream models. It is now trying to pave the way for fully autonomous vehicles by offering precursors: both traditional autopilot and something called "full self-driving capability," which gives the car even more control. Led by its creative founder, Elon Musk, Tesla is training us to eventually embrace a previously unpalatable vision.

Even in organizations where innovation is more incremental, distal thinkers can often find big challenges that offer them a chance to shine. Piper, a Capella designer, has for years been asking her managers how the company will operate when offices are entirely paperless. Encouraged by the new mandate to attract Millennials, she describes her vision of this future: eco-conscious digital natives operating in a fast-paced, mostly virtual work environment who will eschew office supplies for fully online tools. And yet, Piper says, many will still want physical products that link to the digital world for promotional or commemorative purposes. She describes a new line of memorabilia to honor project progress: commercial-real-estate "deal toys" with screens that change as the building is constructed, or customer-appreciation plaques with displays that show up-to-date utilization metrics of marquee software products the customer has purchased. Piper's pitches make Capella think bigger and more boldly about what this demographic needs and demonstrate her unique ability to help the company get ahead of industry trends.

How to Proceed

Which type of creativity do you use the most? Each one offers a unique advantage-and potential blind spots. Integrators may try to see synergies where they don't exist, while splitters may overcomplicate a simple solution.

Understanding your strengths as an individual is the first step. Look for places to apply them and watch out for overuse. At your next opportunity to innovate, push yourself to think in the styles that come less naturally to you. Before you settle on a path forward, challenge yourself to define at least one option for each of the four styles.

If you lead a team, how do you complement your skill set with other types of creative thinkers? When receiving proposals from your team, do you get options that explore all four forms of innovation? If not, ask for them.

At the organizational level, reflect on your business's recent innovations, both internal and external. Do any patterns emerge? Are your products typically the result of splitting, for example? Or integration? When was the last time you capitalized on a figure-ground reversal? Do you have enough distal thinkers in your midst who are pushing others to expand their thinking? How often are hiring managers considering the mix of innovation types on teams as they grow?

Creativity is an imperative for our new world of work. Cultivating all four types of divergent thinking at every level will afford greater odds of converting each new challenge into successful innovation.
Editor's note: Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin E.P. Seligman are the authors of Tomorrowmind (Simon & Schuster, 2023), from which this article is adapted.
A version of this article appeared in the January-February 2023 issue of Harvard Business Review.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ajjames_smart-and-super-efficient-not-all-innovation-activity-7037745998487560192-wUd2?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

# data[].attributes.body
But in recent years, for a number of reasons, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics have argued that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. And they have maintained that by centering designers—mainly practitioners of corporate design within agencies—it has reinforced existing inequities rather than challenging them. Years in, “innovation theater”— checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts—had become endemic in corporate settings, while a number of social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skip to Content

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

When Kyle Cornforth first walked into IDEO's San Francisco offices in 2011, she felt she had entered a whole new world. At the time, Cornforth was a director at the Edible Schoolyard Project, a nonprofit that uses gardening and cooking in schools to teach and to provide nutritious food. She was there to meet with IDEO.org, a new social-impact spinoff of the design consulting firm, which was exploring how to reimagine school lunch, a mission that the Edible Schoolyard Project has been working toward since 2004. But Cornforth was new to IDEO's way of working: a six-step methodology for innovation called design thinking, which had emerged in the 1990s but had started reaching the height of its popularity in the tech, business, and social-impact sectors.

Key to design thinking's spread was its replicable aesthetic, represented by the Post-it note: a humble square that anyone can use in infinite ways. Not too precious, not too permanent, the ubiquitous Post-it promises a fast-moving, cooperative, egalitarian process for getting things done. When Cornforth arrived at IDEO for a workshop, "it was Post-its everywhere, prototypes everywhere," she says. "What I really liked was that they offered a framework for collaboration and creation."

But when she looked at the ideas themselves, Cornforth had questions: "I was like, 'You didn't talk to anyone who works in a school, did you?' They were not contextualized in the problem at all." The deep expertise in the communities of educators and administrators she worked with, Cornforth saw, was in tension with the disruptive, startup-flavored creativity of the design thinking process at consultancies like IDEO.org. "I felt like a stick in the mud to them," she recalls. "And I felt they were out of touch with reality."

That tension would resurface a couple of years later, in 2013, when IDEO was hired by the San Francisco Unified School District to redesign the school cafeteria, with funding from Twitter cofounder Ev Williams's family foundation. Ten years on, the SFUSD program has had a big impact-but that may have as much to do with the slow and integrated work inside the district as with that first push of design-focused energy from outside.

Founded in the 1990s, IDEO was instrumental in evangelizing the design thinking process throughout the '00s and '10s, alongside Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design or "d.school" (which IDEO's founder David Kelley also cofounded). While the methodology's focus on collaboration and research can be traced back to human-factors engineering, a movement popular decades earlier, design thinking took hold of the collective imagination during the Obama years, a time when American culture was riding high on the potential of a bunch of smart people in a hope-filled room to bend history's arc toward progress. Its influence stretched across health-care giants in the American heartland, government agencies in DC, big tech companies in Silicon Valley, and beyond. City governments brought in design thinking agencies to solve their economic woes and take on challenges ranging from transportation to housing. Institutions like MIT and Harvard and boot camps like General Assembly stood up courses and degree programs, suggesting that teaching design thinking could be as lucrative as selling it to corporations and foundations.

Design thinking also broadened the very idea of "design," elevating the designer to a kind of spiritual medium who didn't just construct spaces, physical products, or experiences on screen but was uniquely able to reinvent systems to better meet the desires of the people within them. It gave designers permission to take on any big, knotty problem by applying their own empathy to users' pain points-the first step in that six-step innovation process filled with Post-its.

We are all creatives, design thinking promised, and we can solve any problem if we empathize hard enough.

The next steps were to reframe the problem ("How might we ...?"), brainstorm potential solutions, prototype options, test those options with end users, and-finally-implement. Design thinking agencies usually didn't take on this last step themselves; consultants often delivered a set of "recommendations" to the organizations that hired them.

At the same time, consultancies like IDEO, Frog, Smart Design, and others were also promoting the idea that anyone (including the executives paying their fees) could be a designer by just following the process. Perhaps design had become "too important to leave to designers," as IDEO's then CEO, Tim Brown, wrote in his 2009 book Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. Brown even touted as a selling point his firm's utter absence of expertise in any particular industry: "We come with what we call a beginner's mind," he told the Yale School of Management.

This was a savvy strategy for selling design thinking to the business world: instead of hiring their own team of design professionals, companies could bring on an agency temporarily to learn the methodology themselves. The approach also felt empowering to many who spent time with it. We are all creatives, design thinking promised, and we can solve any problem if we empathize hard enough.

But in recent years, for a number of reasons, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics have argued that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. And they have maintained that by centering designers-mainly practitioners of corporate design within agencies-it has reinforced existing inequities rather than challenging them. Years in, "innovation theater"- checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts-had become endemic in corporate settings, while a number of social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects. Meanwhile, the #MeToo and BLM movements, along with the political turmoil of the Trump administration, have demonstrated that many big problems are rooted in centuries of dark history, too deeply entrenched to be obliterated with a touch of design thinking's magic wand.

Today, innovation agencies and educational institutions still continue to sell design thinking to individuals, corporations, and organizations. In 2015, IDEO even created its own "online school," IDEO U, with a bank of design thinking courses. But some groups-including the d.school and IDEO itself-are working to reform both its principles and its methodologies. These new efforts seek a set of design tools capable of equitably serving diverse communities and solving diverse problems well into the future. It's a much more daunting-and crucial-task than design thinking's original remit.

The magical promise of design thinking

When design thinking emerged in the '90s and '00s, workplaces were made up of cubicles and closed doors, and the term "user experience" had only just been coined at Apple. Despite convincing research on collaboration tracing back to the 1960s, work was still mainly a solo endeavor in many industries, including design. Design thinking injected new and collaborative energy into both design and the corporate world more broadly; it suggested that work could look and feel more hopeful and be more fun, and that design could take the lead in making it that way.

When author and startup advisor Jake Knapp was working as a designer at Microsoft in the 2000s, he visited IDEO's offices in Palo Alto for a potential project. He was struck by how inspiring the space was: "Everything is white, and there's sunlight coming in the windows. There's an open floor plan. I had never seen [work] done like that." When he started at Google a few years later, he learned how to run design thinking workshops from a colleague who had worked at IDEO, and then he began running his own workshops on the approach within Google.

Knapp's attraction was due in part to the "radical collaboration" that design thinking espoused. In what was a first for many, colleagues came together across disciplines at the very start of a project to discuss how to solve problems. "Facilitating the exchange of information, ideas, and research with product, engineering, and design teams more fluidly is really the unlock," says Enrique Allen, cofounder of Designer Fund, which supports startups seeking to harness the unique business value of design in industries from health care to construction. Design thinking offered a structure for those cross-disciplinary conversations and a way to articulate design's value within them. "It gave [your ideas] so much more weight for people who didn't have the language to understand creative work," says Erica Eden, who worked as a designer at the innovation firm Smart Design.

It makes a good story to say there's a foolproof process that will lead to results no matter who runs it.

For Angela McKee Brown, who was hired by SFUSD to help bring the work IDEO had done on improving the school cafeteria to reality, the design thinking process was a language that bureaucracy could understand. In a district that had suffered from an overall lack of infrastructure investment since the 1970s, she watched as IDEO's recommendations ignited a new will to improvement that continues today. "The biggest role that process played for us was it told a story that showed people the value of the work," McKee Brown says. "That allowed me to have a much easier job, because people believed."

The enthusiasm that surrounded design thinking did have much to offer the public sector, says Cyd Harrell, San Francisco's chief digital services officer, who has worked as a design leader in civic technology for over a decade. Decades of budget cuts and a lack of civic investment have made it difficult for public servants to feel that change is possible. "For a lot of those often really wonderful people who've chosen service as a career, and who have had to go through times where things seem really bleak," she says, "the infusion of optimism-whether it comes in the guise of some of these techniques that are a little bit shady or not-is really valuable." And it makes a good story to say there's a foolproof process that will lead to results no matter who runs it.

Ideas over implementation

Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking. Some versions of the codified six-step process even omit that crucial final step of implementation. Its roots in the agency world, where a firm steps in on a set timeline with an established budget and leaves before or shortly after the pilot stage, dictated that the tools of design thinking would be aimed at the start of the product development process but not its conclusion-or, even more to the point, its aftermath.

When Jake Knapp was running those design thinking workshops at Google, he saw that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn't usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind. When he followed up with teams to learn which workshop ideas had made it to production, he heard decisions happening "in the old way," with a few lone geniuses working separately and then selling their almost fully realized ideas to top stakeholders.

Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking.

In the government and social-impact sectors, though, design thinking's focus on ideas over implementation had bigger ramifications than a lack of efficiency.

The "biggest piece of the design problem" in civic tech, says Harrell, is not generating new ideas but figuring out how to implement and pay for them. What's more, success sometimes can't be evaluated until years later, so the time-constrained workshops typical of the design thinking approach may not be appropriate. "There's a mismatch between the short-cycle evaluations [in commercial design] and the long-cycle evaluations for policy," she says. For longtime public servants, seeing a project through-past implementation and into iteration-is crucial for learning and improving how infrastructure functions.

In a 2021 piece on the evolution of their practices, Brown, along with Shauna Carey and Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO.org, cited the Diva Centres project in Lusaka, Zambia, where they worked to help teens access contraception and learn about reproductive health. Through the design thinking methodology, the team came up with the idea of creating nail salons where the teens could get guidance in a low-pressure environment. The team built three model sites, declaring the work a success; the Diva Centres project won a Core77 Service Design Award in 2016, and the case study is still posted on IDEO.org's website. But while the process focused on generating the most exciting user experience within the nail salons, it neglected to consider the world outside their walls-a complex network of public health funding and service channels that made scaling the pilot "prohibitively expensive and complicated," as the IDEO.org leaders later wrote. Though IDEO intended to build 10 centers by 2017, neither IDEO nor the partner organization ever reported reaching that milestone. The article does not say how much money or time went into realizing the Diva Centres pilot before it ended, so it's not clear if the lessons learned were worth the failure. (IDEO.org declined to be interviewed for this story.)

IDEO's 2013 work for SFUSD-the project that McKee Brown later worked on from the school system's side-has a more complicated legacy. After five months, IDEO delivered 10 recommendations, including communal dining tables, vending machines with meals to grab on the go, community food partnerships for fresher produce, and an app and interactive web portal to give students and families more opportunities to participate in lunch choices. (The food itself was a different issue that the district was working on with its vendors.) On IDEO's website today, the story concludes with SFUSD's "unanimous enthusiasm" for the recommendations-a consultancy happy ending. Indeed, the project was met with a flurry of fawning press coverage. But with hindsight, it's clear that only after IDEO left the project did the real work begin.

At SFUSD, McKee Brown saw instances in which IDEO's recommendations did not take into account the complexities of the district's operations and the effort it could take to even drill a hole in a wall in accordance with asbestos abatement rules. The vending machines the team proposed, for instance, would need a stable internet connection, which many target locations didn't have. And the app never came to fruition, McKee Brown says, as it would have required a whole new department to continually update the software and content.

An analysis a few years after IDEO's 2013 engagement showed that about the same number of kids or even fewer were choosing to eat school lunch, despite a continuous increase in enrollment. This may have had several reasons, including that the quality of the food itself did not significantly improve. The original goal of getting more kids to eat at school would eventually be met by an entirely different effort: California's universal school meal program, implemented in 2022.

Nevertheless, IDEO's SFUSD project has had a lasting impact, thanks to the work the district itself put into transforming blue-sky ideas into real change. While few of the recommendations ended up being widely implemented in schools exactly as IDEO envisioned them, the district has been redesigning its cafeterias to make the spaces more welcoming and social for students-after sometimes decades of disrepair. Today more than 70 school cafeterias out of 114 sites in the city have been renovated. The design thinking process helped sell the value of improving school cafeterias to the decision makers. But the in-house team at SFUSD charted the way forward after many of IDEO's initial ideas couldn't make it past the drawing board.

Empathy over expertise

The first step of the design thinking process is for the designer to empathize with the end user through close observation of the problem. While this step involves asking questions of the individuals and communities affected, the designer's eye frames any insights that emerge. This puts the designer's honed sense of empathy at the center of both the problem and the solution.

In 2018, researcher Lilly Irani, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, wrote a piece titled "Design Thinking: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies" for the peer-reviewed journal Catalyst. She criticized the new framing of the designer as an empathetic "divining rod leading to new markets or domains of life ripe for intervention," maintaining that it reinforced traditional hierarchies of labor.

Irani argued that as an outgrowth of Silicon Valley business interests and culture, design thinking situated Western-and often white-designers at a higher level of labor, treating them as mystics who could translate the efforts and experiences of lower-level workers into capitalistic opportunity.

Former IDEO designer George Aye has seen Irani's concerns play out firsthand, particularly in settings with entrenched systemic problems. He and his colleagues would use the language of a "beginner's mindset" with the clients, he says, but what he saw in practice was more an attitude that "we're going to fumble our way through and by the time we're done, we're on to the next project." In Aye's view, these consulting engagements made tourists of commercial designers, who-however sincerely they wanted to help-made sure to "get some good pictures standing next to typically dark-skinned people with brightly colored clothes" so they could produce evidence for the consultancy.

Today in his own studio, which works only with nonprofit organizations, Aye tries to elevate what's already being created by a local community, advocate for its members to get the resources they need, and then "get out of the way." If designers are not centering the people on the ground, then "it's profit-centered design," he says. "There's no other way of putting it."

McKee Brown considers one of the greatest successes of the San Francisco cafeteria redesign project to be the School Food Advisory (SFA), a district-wide program in which high schoolers continually inform and direct changes to meal programs and cafeteria updates. But the group wasn't a result of IDEO's recommendations; the SFA was formed to ensure that SFUSD students would continue to have a voice in the district and a chance to collaborate often on how to redesign their spaces. Nearly a decade after IDEO completed its work, the best results have been due to the expertise of the district's own team and its generations of students, not the empathy that went into the initial short-term consulting project.

As she's continued to work on food and education, McKee Brown has adapted the process of design thinking to her experiences and team leadership needs. At SFUSD and later at Edible Schoolyard, where she became executive director, she developed three questions she and her team should always make sure to ask: "Who have you talked to? Have you tried it out before we spend all this money? And then how are you telling the story of the work?"

What's next for design thinking?

Almost two decades after design thinking rose to prominence, the world still has no shortage of problems that need addressing. Design leadership and design processes themselves need to evolve beyond design thinking, and that's an arena where designers may actually be uniquely skilled. Stanford's d.school, which was instrumental in the growth of design thinking in the first place, is one institution pushing the conversation forward by reshaping its influential design programs. Within the physical walls of the school, the design thinking aesthetic-whiteboards, cardboard furniture, Post-its-is still evident on most surfaces, but the ideas stirring inside sound new.

In fact, the phrase "design thinking" does not appear in any materials for the d.school's revamped undergraduate or graduate programs-although it still shows up in electives in which any Stanford student can enroll (and a representative from the d.school claims the terms "design" and "design thinking" are used interchangeably). Instead of "empathy," "make" and "care" are the concepts that program leaders hope will shape the design education across all offerings.

In contrast with empathy, care demands a shift in who is centered in these processes-sometimes meaning people in generations other than our own. "How are we thinking about our ancestors? What is the legacy that this is going to leave? What are all the intended and unintended consequences?" says academic director Carissa Carter. "There are implications no matter where you work-second-, third-order consequences of what we put out. This is where we are pulling in elements of equity and inclusion. Not just in a single course, but how we approach the design of this curriculum."

The d.school's creative director, Scott Doorley, who has been with the school for over 15 years, has begun to hear the students themselves ask for fundamental shifts like these. They're entering the programs saying, "I want to make something that not only changes things, but changes things without screwing everything else up," Doorley says: "It's this really great combination of excitement and humility at the same time." The d.school has also made specific changes in curriculum and tools; an ethics course that was previously required at the end of the undergraduate degree program now appears toward the beginning, and the school is providing new frameworks to help students plan for the next-generation effects of their work beyond a project's completion.

For the Design Justice Network, a collective of design practitioners and educators that emerged out of the 2014 Allied Media Conference in Detroit, slowing down and embracing complexity are the keys to moving practices like design thinking toward justice. "If we truly want to think about stakeholders, if we want to have more levels of affordances when we design things, then we can't work at the speed of industry," says Wes Taylor, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a DJN leader.

IDEO's practices have been evolving to better address that complexity. Tim Brown says that toward the beginning of the company's life, its unique power was in bringing together different design disciplines to deliver new ideas. "We weren't looking particularly to help our clients build their own capabilities back then. We were simply looking to do certain kinds of design projects," he says.

Now, when the questions being asked of designers are deeper and more complicated-how to make Ford a more human-centered company rather than how to build a better digital dashboard, he gives as an example-IDEO leaders have recognized that "it's the combination of doing design and building the capabilities [of IDEO's clients and their communities] to design at the same time where the real impact can happen." What this means in practice is much more time on the ground, more partnerships, and sometimes more money. "It's about recognizing that the expertise is much more in the hands of the user of the system than the designer of the system. And being a little bit less arrogant about knowing everything," says Brown.

IDEO has also been building new design capabilities within its own team, hiring writers and filmmakers to tell stories for their clients, which Brown has come to see as " the key activity, not a key activity" for influencing change in societal systems. "If you had asked me 10 to 15 years ago," he says, "I would never have guessed that we would have as many folks who come from a storytelling background within a design firm as we do today."

Indeed, design thinking's greatest positive impact may always have been in the stories it's helped tell: spreading the word about the value of collaboration in business, elevating the public profile of design as a discipline, and coaxing funding from private and public channels for expensive long-term projects. But its legacy must also account for years of letting down many of the people and places the methodology claimed it would benefit. And as long as it remains in the halls of consultancies and ivory-tower institutions, its practitioners may continue to struggle to decenter the already powerful and privileged.

As Taylor sees it, design thinking's core problems can be traced back to its origins in the corporate world, which inextricably intertwined the methodology with capitalistic values. He believes that a justice lens can help foster collaboration and creativity in a much broader way that goes beyond our current power structures. "Let's try to imagine and acknowledge that capitalism is not inevitable, not necessarily a foundational principle of nature," he urges.

That kind of radical innovation goes far beyond the original methodology of design thinking. But it may contain the seeds for the lasting change that the design industry-and the world-need now.

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist based in San Francisco.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/UEaKX9YYHiQ

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Team America: World Police (6/10) Movie CLIP - I'm So Ronery (2004) HD

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-design-thinking

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Design and conquer: in years past, the word "design" might have conjured images of expensive handbags or glossy coffee table books. Now, your mind might go straight to business. Design and design thinking are buzzing in the business community more than ever. Until now, design has focused largely on how something looks; these days, it's a dynamic idea used to describe how organizations can adjust their problem-solving approaches to respond to rapidly changing environments-and create maximum impact and shareholder value. Design is a journey and a destination. Design thinking is a core way of starting the journey and arriving at the right destination at the right time.

Simply put, "design thinking is a methodology that we use to solve complex problems, and it's a way of using systemic reasoning and intuition to explore ideal future states," says McKinsey partner Jennifer Kilian. Design thinking, she continues, is "the single biggest competitive advantage that you can have, if your customers are loyal to you-because if you solve for their needs first, you'll always win."

And good design is good business. Kilian's claim is backed up with data: McKinsey Design's 2018 Business value of design report found that the best design performers increase their revenues and investor returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry competitors. What's more, over a ten-year period, design-led companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 219 percent.

As you may have guessed by now, design thinking goes way beyond just the way something looks. And incorporating design thinking into your business is more than just creating a design studio and hiring designers. Design thinking means fundamentally changing how you develop your products, services, and, indeed, your organization itself.

Read on for a deep dive into the theory and practice of design thinking.
Learn more about McKinsey's Design Practice, and check out McKinsey's latest Business value of design report here.
How do companies build a design-driven company culture?

There's more to succeeding in business than developing a great product or service that generates a financial return. Empathy and purpose are core business needs. Design thinking means putting customers, employees, and the planet at the center of problem solving.

McKinsey's Design Practice has learned that design-led organizations start with design-driven cultures. Here are four steps to building success through the power of design:

1. Understand your audience. Design-driven companies go beyond asking what customers and employees want, to truly understanding why they want it. Frequently, design-driven companies will turn to cultural anthropologists and ethnographers to drill down into how their customers use and experience products, including what motivates them and what turns them away.

Makeup retailer Sephora provides an example. When marketing leaders actually watched shoppers using the Sephora website, they realized customers would frequently go to YouTube to watch videos of people using products before making a purchase. Using this information, the cosmetics retailer developed its own line of demonstration videos, keeping shoppers on the site and therefore more likely to make a purchase.

2. Bring design to the executive table. This leader can be a chief design officer, a chief digital officer, or a chief marketing officer. Overall, this executive should be the best advocate for the company's customers and employees, bringing the point of view of the people, the planet, and the company's purpose into strategic business decisions. The design lead should also build bridges between multiple functions and stakeholders, bringing various groups into the design iteration process.

3. Design in real time. To understand how and why people-both customers and employees-use processes, products, or services, organizations should develop a three-pronged design-thinking model that combines design, business strategy, and technology. This approach allows business leaders to spot trends, cocreate using feedback and data, prototype, validate, and build governance models for ongoing investment.

4. Act quickly. Good design depends on agility. That means getting a product to users quickly, then iterating based on customer feedback. In a design-driven culture, companies aren't afraid to release products that aren't quite perfect. Designers know there is no end to the design process. The power of design, instead, lies in the ability to adopt and adapt as needs change. When designers are embedded within teams, they are uniquely positioned to gather and digest feedback, which can lead to unexpected revelations. Ultimately, this approach creates more impactful and profitable results than following a prescribed path.

Consider Instagram. Having launched an initial product in 2010, Instagram's founders paid attention to what the most popular features were: image sharing, commenting, and liking. They relaunched with a stripped-down version a few months later, resulting in 100,000 downloads in less than a week and over two million users in under two months -all without any strategic promotion.

Learn more about McKinsey's Design Practice.
What's the relationship between user-centered design and design thinking?

Both processes are design led. And they both emphasize listening to and deeply understanding users and continually gathering and implementing feedback to develop, refine, and improve a service.

Where they are different is scale. User-centered design focuses on improving a specific product or service. Design thinking takes a broader view as a way to creatively address complex problems-whether for a start-up, a large organization, or society as a whole.

User-centered design is great for developing a fantastic product or service. In the past, a company could coast on a superior process or product for years before competitors caught up. But now, as digitization drives more frequent and faster disruptions, users demand a dynamic mix of product and service. Emphasis has shifted firmly away from features and functions toward purpose, lifestyle, and simplicity of use.

McKinsey analysis has found that some industries-such as telecommunications, automotive, and consumer product companies- have already made strides toward combining product and service into a unified customer experience. Read on for concrete examples of how companies have applied design thinking to offer innovative-and lucrative-customer experiences.
Learn more about our Operations Practice.
What is the design-thinking process?

McKinsey analysis has shown that the design-thinking approach creates more value than conventional approaches. The right design at the right price point spurs sustainability and resilience in a demonstrable way-a key driver of growth.

According to McKinsey's Design Practice, there are two key steps to the design-thinking process:

1. Developing an understanding of behavior and needs that goes beyond what people are doing right now to what they will need in the future and how to deliver that. The best way to develop this understanding is to spend time with people.

2. "Concepting," iterating, and testing. First start with pen and paper, sketching out concepts. Then quickly put these into rough prototypes-with an emphasis on quickly. Get feedback, refine, and test again. As American chemist Linus Pauling said: "The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away."

What is D4VG versus DTV?

For more than a decade, manufacturers have used a design-to-value (DTV) model to design and release products that have the features needed to be competitive at a low cost. During this time, DTV efforts were groundbreaking because they were based on data rather than experience. They also reached across functions, in contrast to the typical value-engineering approach.

The principles of DTV have evolved into design for value and growth (D4VG), a new way of creating products that provide exceptional customer experiences while driving both value and growth. Done right, D4VG efforts generate products with the features, form, and functionality that turn users into loyal fans.

D4VG products can cost more to build, but they can ultimately raise margins by delivering on a clear understanding of a product's core brand attributes, insights into people's motivations, and design thinking.
Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods Practice.
What is design for sustainability?

As consumers, companies, and regulators shift toward increased sustainability, design processes are coming under even more scrutiny. The challenge is that carbon-efficient production processes tend to be more complex and can require more carbon-intensive materials. The good news is that an increased focus on design for sustainability (DFS), especially at the research and development stage, can help mitigate some of these inefficiencies and ultimately create even more sustainable products.

For example, the transition from internal-combustion engines to electric-propulsion vehicles has highlighted emissions-intensive automobile production processes. One study found that around 20 percent of the carbon generated by a diesel vehicle comes from its production. If the vehicle ran on only renewable energy, production emissions would account for 85 percent of the total. With more sustainable design, electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturers stand to reduce the lifetime emissions of their products significantly.

To achieve design for sustainability at scale, companies can address three interrelated elements at the R&D stage:

1. rethinking the way their products use resources, adapting them to changing regulations, adopting principles of circularity, and making use of customer insights

2. understanding and tracking emissions and cost impact of design decisions in support of sustainability goals

3. fostering the right mindsets and capabilities to integrate sustainability into every product and design decision

What is 'skinny design'?

Skinny design is a less theoretical aspect of design thinking. It's a method whereby consumer goods companies reassess the overall box size of products by reducing the total cubic volume of the package. According to McKinsey analysis, this can improve overall business performance in the following ways:

Top-line growth of 4 to 5 percent through improvements in shelf and warehouse holding power. The ability to fit more stock into warehouses ultimately translates to growth.

Bottom-line growth of more than 10 percent. Packing more product into containers and trucks creates the largest savings. Other cost reductions can come from designing packaging to minimize the labor required and facilitate automation.

Sustainability improvements associated with reductions in carbon emissions through less diesel fuel burned per unit. Material choices can also confer improvements to the overall footprint.

Read more about skinny design and how it can help maximize the volume of consumer products that make it onto shelves.
Learn more about McKinsey's Operations Practice.
How can a company become a top design performer?

The average person's standard for design is higher than ever. Good design is no longer just a nice-to-have for a company. Customers now have extremely high expectations for design, whether it's customer service, instant access to information, or clever products that are also aesthetically relevant in the current culture.

McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies over a five-year period in multiple countries. Advanced regression analysis of more than two million pieces of financial data and more than 100,000 design actions revealed 12 actions most correlated to improved financial performance. These were then clustered into the following four themes:

1. Analytical leadership. For the best financial performers, design is a top management issue, and design performance is assessed with the same rigor these companies use to approach revenue and cost. The companies with the top financial returns have combined design and business leadership through bold, design-centric visions. These include a commitment to maintain a baseline level of customer understanding among all executives. The CEO of one of the world's largest banks, for example, spends one day a month with the bank's clients and encourages all members of the company's C-suite to do the same.

2. Cross-functional talent. Top-performing companies make user-centric design everyone's responsibility, not a siloed function. Companies whose designers are embedded within cross-functional teams have better overall business performance. Further, the alignment of design metrics with functional business metrics (such as financial performance, user adoption rates, and satisfaction results) is also correlated to better business performance.

3. Design with people, not for people. Design flourishes best, according to our research, in environments that encourage learning, testing, and iterating with users. These practices increase the odds of creating breakthrough products and services, while at the same time reducing the risk of costly missteps.

4. User experience (UX). Top-quartile companies embrace the full user experience by taking a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. Design approaches like mapping customer journeys can lead to more inclusive and sustainable solutions.

Learn more about McKinsey's Design Practice.
What are some real-world examples of how design thinking can improve efficiency and user experience?

Understanding the theory of design thinking is one thing. Seeing it work in practice is something else. Here are some examples of how elegant design created value for customers, a company, and shareholders:

Stockholm's international airport, Arlanda, used design thinking to address its air-traffic-control problem. The goal was to create a system that would make air traffic safer and more effective. By understanding the tasks and challenges of the air-traffic controllers, then collaboratively working on prototypes and iterating based on feedback, a working group was able to design a new departure-sequencing tool that helped air-traffic controllers do their jobs better. The new system greatly reduced the amount of time planes spent between leaving the terminal and being in the air, which in turn helped reduce fuel consumption.

When Tesla creates its electric vehicles, the company closely considers not only aesthetics but also the overall driving experience.

The consumer electronics industry has a long history of dramatic evolutions lead by design thinking. Since Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007, for example, each new generation has seen additional features, new customers, and lower costs-all driven by design-led value creation.

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods and Sustainability Practices. For a more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey's Articles referenced: Agile Organizations collection. Learn more about our Design Practice-and check out design-thinking-related job opportunities if you're interested in working at McKinsey.

"Skinny design: Smaller is better," April 26, 2022, Dave Fedewa, Daniel Swan, Warren Teichner, and Bill Wiseman

"Product sustainability: Back to the drawing board," February 7, 2022, Stephan Fuchs, Stephan Mohr, Malin Orebäck, and Jan Rys

"Emerging from COVID-19: Australians embrace their values," May 11, 2020, Lloyd Colling, Rod Farmer, Jenny Child, Dan Feldman, and Jean-Baptiste Coumau

"The business value of design," McKinsey Quarterly, October 25, 2018, Benedict Sheppard, Hugo Sarrazin, Garen Kouyoumjian, and Fabricio Dore

"More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value," December 8, 2017, Benedict Sheppard, John Edson, and Garen Kouyoumjian

"Creating value through sustainable design," July 25, 2017, Sara Andersson, David Crafoord, and Tomas Nauclér

"The expanding role of design in creating an end-to-end customer experience," June 6, 2017, Raffaele Breschi, Tjark Freundt, Malin Orebäck, and Kai Vollhardt

"Design for value and growth in a new world," April 13, 2017, Ankur Agrawal, Mark Dziersk, Dave Subburaj, and Kieran West

"The power of design thinking," March 1, 2016, Jennifer Kilian, Hugo Sarrazin, and Barr Seitz

"Building a design-driven culture," September 1, 2015, Jennifer Kilian, Hugo Sarrazin, and Hyo Yeon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Design and conquer: in years past, the word "design" might have conjured images of expensive handbags or glossy coffee table books. Now, your mind might go straight to business. Design and design thinking are buzzing in the business community more than ever.

# data[].attributes.headline
mike: it's supposed to be messy and slightly chaotic

# data[].attributes.subject
mike: it's supposed to be messy and slightly chaotic

# data[].attributes.body
own this space, make your own corner, engage people with your own issues, make friends.

the idea is to network, this is a many-many conversation. not a many to few thing. this is not q&a with "Duh Experts". . .

David allowed all to edit. So let's do. Don't be self constrained and self censoring!

# data[].attributes.body
One of the items (existing solutions) given to students to explore was a laundry capsule pod. Some were so interested in it that they tried to apply it to other problems (solution finding a problem - wonderful solution looking to solve another wonderful problem, I recall solution finding a problem may not be advisable, but oh well...).

One team is exploring a cooking pod that has the different ingredients correctly portioned in compartments. Just add hot water, mix and cook - save time, less effort, save plastic waste.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.facebook.com/reel/2431496206998991?fs=e&s=TIeQ9V&mibextid=0NULKw

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scott Yu-Jan on Reels | AJR · World’s Smallest Violin

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
2.1M views, 81K likes, 573 comments, 1.8K shares, Facebook Reels from Scott Yu-Jan. AJR · World’s Smallest Violin