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How I Built This: Sara Blakely, CEO of Spanx - YouTube

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How I Built This: Sara Blakely, CEO of Spanx - YouTube

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How I Built This: Sara Blakely, CEO of Spanx

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At 27, Sara Blakely was selling fax machines and desperate to reinvent her life. So she came up with Spanx - hosiery that eliminates panty lines - and set to work building her business. During the seven years Blakely sold fax machines door-to-door, she faced a lot of rejection.

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The sleek LF-LC Design Concept was created by our CALTY design centre in Newport Beach, California. Hinting at styling cues that are coming in a wave of new Lexus models over the next 24 months, this stunning 2+2 sport coupe has already attracted great attention at the 2012 Detroit Auto Show.

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Designing Your Life Through Design Thinking - The Accidental Design Thinker

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Designing Your Life Through Design Thinking - The Accidental Design Thinker

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Design thinking can be a fantastic tool in designing your life.

Design thinking has helped me create new products, imagine new retail concepts, & solve other abstract challenges. It has also helped me to design a better life for myself. In fact, I believe design thinking may have helped save my life and that it has the power to save the lives of others.

Design thinking didn't help me survive death from an airplane crash or a charging moose. What it did do, was help me address a much slower but equally lethal health threat: the heavy stress from feeling a loss of control in my life.
My Personal Downward Spiral
Not too long ago, I went through a period of massive change. I was promoted into a position of much greater responsibility at work. Concurrently, I was also navigating life as a new father to my two children. These were changes I experienced while living in a new city with few friends and no family in the area to lean on.

I became overly stressed. I quickly found myself feeling like I wasn't excelling at the things that mattered most to me. I started to "rationalize out" important aspects of my life. I stopped exercising. I stopped watching what I was eating and started "stress" eating. I became more distant from my closest of friends. I stopped taking the time to reflect deeply, to have meaningful conversations with friends & family, to do the things that made me happy.

I started feeling like I was losing myself. I felt suffocated from the weight of stress, the feeling of dissonance from not excelling in the important parts of my life. I felt disconnected and alone.

I was also constantly tired. I went through a vicious cycle of not sleeping well, to overly-caffeinating myself during the day to compensate for this lack of sleep, back to not being able to sleep when it was nighttime again. I was going through life exhausted and feeling fueled only by fumes.

The lack of sleep combined with excess stress quickly started to take a toll on my physical & mental health. I wasn't happy and my body told me the same. As strange as it may sound, I literally felt that my body was dying and that I was on a crash course for developing some type of life-threatening illness.

I was far from my "best-self" and I knew that I urgently needed to make a change.
I didn't realize it until months later, that I was about to use design thinking to redesign my life. Self-Empathy - A Great Starting Point for Redesigning my Life
I knew I had to make an immediate change and I began a quick, yet intense evaluation of my life to understand why I was feeling such loss of control. It was time for me to do what I always preached was important to do for others but had clearly failed to do for myself: empathize.

Self-empathy sounded like it should be easy; I was already feeling sorry for myself which seemed like a great start. However, I was only scratching the surface and not truly understanding why I was feeling the way I was. As a brand marketer working with consumers, I've been trained to use tools like interviews and ethnographies to gain empathy but wasn't used to conducting a similar exercise with myself.
My magic tool that delivered the greatest insights into myself: an old-fashioned paper journal.
I started a personal journal to build deeper insights into my own behavior and state-of-being. While I felt I already knew who I was and what was important to me, I found that journaling helped to surface insights and themes that I was not acutely aware of until they were painfully obvious on a sheet of paper.

I put no restrictions on my writing; I wrote down any thought or feeling that came to mind without editing. It felt scary at first, even knowing that I planned to keep my journal private. However, I quickly found journaling to be mentally freeing and an activity I grew to cherish.

I highly recommend starting a journal as an immediate first step for designing your life.
Defining My Needs, My Wants, & My Problems
The stress, anxiety, and lack of sleep made it difficult to make sense of what was going on in mind. My journal helped give me the structure and insights I needed to help clearly identify my problems.

My journal surfaced a number of needs. The need for the support of family & close friends. The need for rest and taking care of my health. The need to let go of long-lasting burdens. The need to live a life of courage and without fear. The need to dream and push myself.

I synthesized the insights from my journal to better understand what was driving my needs and define the specific problems (aka. "life design challenges") that I needed to address immediately.

Had I been using design thinking explicitly, I would have taken my problems and put them into "How Might I..." statement(s) in preparation for ideation. Based on my journal, one of my statements would have been: "How Might I Simplify My Life?"
Ideation - Inviting Myself (& Others) To Devise Any Idea That Could Make Me Feel Better
Problem statements/themes in hand (I had 4 themes), I began brainstorming ideas as to how I might address each challenge. I listed each theme at the top of its own sheet of paper and tried to generate as many different ideas for potential solutions as I could.

I chose to ideate by myself first, as this "design challenge" was deeply personal and I didn't feel comfortable sharing the entirety of what I felt with most people. After my initial brainstorm, I did choose to supplement it with some ideas from a few folks whom I believed excelled in my target problem areas.

Sampling of ideas that surfaced from my ideation (How Might I Simplify My Life?):

Don't do it alone, lean on others, especially close friends and family

Put myself out there with my friends, even if I'm worried about being judged or misunderstood

Eliminate "ankle-biter" activities and either structure a way to get them done through automation or delegate. Make some hard decisions and cut, cut, cut.

Develop a purely functional AM routine that prepares me to tackle the day and saves my decision-making stamina for the more important decisions beyond what to eat for breakfast

Prototype - Creating The New Playbook For My Life
I paired some of the key insights from my journal with my favorite ideas from my ideation, and put them into a notebook that I frequently use for ideation and deep reflection. This became my working prototype or my so-called "playbook for my life".
(Thank you Jump Associates for this awesome notebook - I'm putting it to great use!)
I'm frequently surprised by how often people get thrown off by the prototype stage, thinking it needs to be something super elaborate. Don't fall into this trap, it doesn't need to be an alpha version sketch of the next iPhone. It would also be a shame to nail the planning components in designing your life, only to get stuck by trying to perfect the prototype. It should just be something, anything that takes some sort of physical form so that you (or others) can interact with it.

My prototype playbook had some pretty straight-forward guidance for simplifying my life including:

One cup of coffee per day, no caffeine after 4pm

Get 6+ hours of sleep per night

No bright lights/phones while laying down in bed before bedtime

10,000 Fitbit steps a day or equivalent level of movement

Testing My New "Me"
One of the best parts of using design thinking for your own life is that you can implement each stage immediately. There is no organizational buy-in, no coordination of facilities, participants, or workshops. The only buy-in and resources needed come from you.

I couldn't wait to test my prototype and see if my solutions were actionable and addressing the right challenges in my life. After all my self-reflection & ideation, I couldn't wait to "design-do" and hopefully regain control of my life.
My Results?
I actually started feeling better and more in control even before I tested my prototype playbook. My journal helped me to release the tension in my mind and understand what was going on in my head, while the ideation helped me feel like I was proactively taking action and in control.

I was amazed with how quickly I saw results after implementing my prototype. Simple steps like eliminating PM caffeine intake and developing an AM/night-time routine paid off immediately. I instantly felt better and started sleeping more soundly within days. I also felt less stressed at work and realized for the first time how much excess caffeine was exacerbating my general feelings of stress.

There were many other components of my prototype playbook geared at simplifying my life (the above is just a very small sample). Many of the components I've kept, some I've eliminated or continued to tweak.
Key Takeaway
Design thinking helped me regain control of my life and I believe it can provide similar results in the lives of others which is why I feel compelled to share my story. I hope I've convinced you in the role that design thinking can play in designing your life, whether it's a better career, a better lifestyle, a better anything.

As you think about New Year's Resolutions, getting healthy, being your best self, keep in mind that design thinking can play a positive & powerful role in designing your life.

Cheers to a safe & healthy start to 2018 and I wish you all the best in this New Year!

-The Accidental Design Thinker
Interested in Reading Other Great Resources on Designing Your Life / Design Thinking for Self-Improvement? Designing Your Life Books

'Designing Your Life' by Bill Burnett

'The Achievement Habit' by Bernard Roth

Designing Your Life Articles

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View all posts by accidentaldesignthinker

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Designing Your Life Through Design Thinking - The Accidental Design Thinker

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Design thinking can be a fantastic tool in designing your life. Design thinking has helped me create new products, imagine new retail concepts, & solve other abstract challenges. It has also helped me to design a better life for myself. In fact, I believe design thinking may have helped save my life and that it ...

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How We Design on the UberEATS Team – Uber Design – Medium

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How We Design on the UberEATS Team – Uber Design – Medium

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Creating the future of food delivery takes empathy, innovation, and an appetite for complex logistical challenges.

UberEATS is on a mission to make eating well effortless for everyone, everywhere. Our service connects customers to Uber-speed delivery from restaurants in over 80 cities around the world. We give people more options when choosing how to eat. We help restaurants reach more customers and build their businesses. We give delivery partners another way to earn good money, with or without a car. And of course, we weave everything into the smooth, magical experience people expect from Uber.

We're designing improvements to the way people find their food. It's an exciting challenge. Smartphones have only been around for a decade, but people have been preparing and selling food for millennia. On UberEATS, we get to combine brand-new technology with the very old, very fundamental, very universal activity of eating and enjoying cuisine.

Designers on the UberEATS team love food culture, logistical challenges, and the demands of a fast-growth startup. We take pride in our ability to move quickly, build empathy with our customers, and make complex services run smoothly. Our designs reach many different types of people with very different needs, but the same approach guides our mission to make eating well effortless at any time, for anyone.

UberEATS operates in over 80 cities globally, each with its own food culture, city infrastructure, and unique set of logistical challenges. Our customers include delivery partners wanting flexible ways to earn money, restaurant workers interested in improving and expanding their businesses, and everyday people looking for a bite to eat. The service connects these different types of people in experiences that are both digital and physical. Designers on the team arrange the elements of each screen, but also influence how people and objects move about the real world.

To understand all our different markets and how our products fit into the physical conditions of each city, we constantly immerse ourselves in the places where our customers live, work, and eat. Sitting in our offices in San Francisco or New York, we can't truly understand the experiences of a person on the streets of Bangkok or London. We need to go there, move about the city, experience the food culture, and watch how people use the things we've designed.

Designers on a Walkabout in Seoul, Korea

The Walkabout Program forms the foundation of our immersion initiatives. Every quarter, designers visit an UberEATS city and dive deeply into that market. They learn the city's food culture. They study the transportation and logistical infrastructures. They interview delivery partners, restaurant workers, and consumers. They eat and eat and eat. Upon return, they share their learnings with the entire team. Each visit helps build a comprehensive understanding of our different markets and customers.

Order shadowing allows us to observe our designs in use. We follow partners on deliveries, visit restaurants during the rush, and sit in people's homes while they order dinner. Watching our products in the wild helps us better understand the needs of our customers, how well our designs address those needs, and and what challenges exist in the real world that we can't replicate in the office.

Fireside chats give us the opportunity to hear from customers directly. As much as possible, we invite delivery partners, restaurant workers, and consumers into our offices to discuss their experiences with UberEATS. These sessions provide a lightweight way to empathize with users and bridge the gaps between deeper immersion activities like Walkabouts and order shadows. And while we don't have fireplaces in the Uber offices (yet), we do take advantage of the plethora of looping fireplace videos on YouTube.

Our products are new, complex, and require the tight coordination of people and objects in the real world. It's impossible to replicate these conditions inside our offices, so we test designs as quickly as possible in the real world. We observe and iterate as soon as we identify opportunities to improve the design.

Speed is crucial. Our business is a marketplace that needs to quickly reach critical mass to provide value to each of our different customers. Delivery partners and restaurant owners need to receive enough orders from consumers to earn good money. Consumers need a wide range of restaurants to choose from and a large network of delivery partners to deliver the food quickly. We need to build products quickly so that our customer base can grow quickly. Swift iteration allows us to move fast and ensure we get the design just right.

UberEATS designers and researchers field testing prototypes for the Driver App on bikes in the snow.

Rapid field testing helps us see how customers respond to designs in progress. Our researchers and designers take mock-ups and prototypes into restaurants, inside delivery vehicles, and into people's homes to test our products in the places they'll be used. Getting out of the office is essential when designing for real-world problems like finding parking, delivering to large apartment buildings, or speeding up workflows in the kitchen during the dinner rush.

A/B testing lets us simultaneously test multiple versions of a feature and quickly determine which performs the best. We use this method when designs have clear success metrics that we can measure with data analytics. This often means completing a specific task like rating an order or choosing a dish recommendation. Shipping multiple options at once rather than iterating on one version sequentially allows us to find the best performing design faster.

Operations team experiments test concepts and designs in a single city to quickly gauge their opportunity. Our colleagues on the ground in each market interact closely with our customers, have great ideas for products, and aren't afraid to hack together a quick experiment to prove out the value. The first versions of features like the "Most Popular Items" category in our UberEATS menus started as an operations team experiment in Toronto before later iterations were released to all users in all cities.

Our app is little more than a year old and just beginning to innovate on the experience of restaurant delivery. Technology makes things easier for everyone involved, but the process works the same way it has for decades: People order food the moment they need it, delivery partners deliver one order at a time, and restaurants provide the same menu options for delivery as they do for dining in.

We see a huge opportunity to innovate and evolve from the traditional model of food delivery. We've started by providing driver partners the option to do both rides and deliveries so they can stay busier and earn more money while online with Uber. We designed a restaurant sales dashboard to let chefs monitor the demand of individual dishes and tweak recipes to improve their menus. And we created the "Under 30 Minutes" menu for people who want to leverage the speed of Uber to get food fast. The design team constantly seeks to generate innovations like these and provide new ways for people to eat, for restaurants to run their businesses, and for delivery partners to earn money.

The UberEATS team running an innovation workshop.

Innovation workshops stimulate novel solutions to the problems and opportunities we address on UberEATS. When we need to develop a new idea, we gather representatives from other disciplines and use design thinking methodology to look at our challenges in new ways. Together we research and share experiences from similar services to generate insights and inspiration, then run creative exercises to generate a wide range of ideas. These structured brainstorms shake up the mindset of the team, push our creativity, and spawn innovative ideas like pooled deliveries and 'virtual' restaurants only available on UberEats.

Conferences, meetups, and talks related to the future of food keep us informed about the latest trends. Members of the team regularly attend events related to cuisine, cooking, food technology, and the restaurant industry. They report back their learnings to the team and we all discuss how those insights relate to UberEATS. These share outs often generate ideas for new products, services, and features.

Field trips to food innovators show us how other companies are shaping the future of food. We've visited IOT startups developing connected cooking products, artisanal farms mixing new technology with old farming expertise, and companies that allow chefs to beta test menu concepts before opening new restaurants. Seeing how others are innovating in similar problem spaces helps us think differently about ours and generate new ideas about our products and services.

Immersion, iteration, and innovation power the UberEATS design team on our mission to make eating effortless. Our approach allows us to solve complex logistical challenges with brand new technology that complements people's deep connection to food.

The results have been gratifying. In just a short time, we've expanded to over 80 cities worldwide. We've provided restaurants with new ways to reach customers and build their businesses. We've created another, often easier option for delivery partners to earn money with Uber. We've invented new ways for hungry people to find and enjoy the food they love. As designers, we get to solve complex problems, positively affect people's lives, and shape the future of eating.

We're hiring designers, writers, and researchers in San Francisco and New York. If you're interested, email me at paulclaytonsmith@uber.com.

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UberEATS is on a mission to make eating well effortless for everyone, everywhere. Our service connects customers to Uber-speed delivery from restaurants in over 80 cities around the world. We give...

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Steelcase - Design story of B-Free furniture - YouTube

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Steelcase - Design story of B-Free furniture - YouTube

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Steelcase - Design story of B-Free furniture

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B-Free furniture forms neighborhoods within the workplace. Seating, tables and screens create spaces where people easily connect, concentrate and collaborate, and the collision of ideas becomes a natural part of the work day.

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Mark Bickerstaffe, Director of New Product Development K&B discusses the inspiration and direction behind the design of the Composed line of bathroom faucets.

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Presentation Board Layout Tips | Visual Communication Design

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Presentation Board Layout Tips | Visual Communication Design

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One of the most crucial parts of the design process is the presentation and the selling of your concept. You have worked on your design process for weeks now and your presentation is where you get to showcase the best aspects, features of your design. You want to make sure you put your design in the ' Spot Light '

TIPS:
1 ) Plain background colours work best.
Use white, grey and on a VERY special occasion black. The content is the focus not the pretty background that you have spent hours perfecting.

A good tip for a background - is to take one of your perspective, parraline drawings and change the opacity/transparency value so that it doesn't detract from the design.
2) Use ONE FONT! and if you can...max 3 sizes of font to create visual hierarchy
The largest of the fonts should be for the title, the second largest (maximum size 12 font) should be for the text in your paragraphs, and the third should be for referencing key elements of your design images.
3) Structure the content of your boards from most important to least!
This is my list of what I believe is most important to least (note: this will occasionally change)

Informative statement that is concise which tells us about the features and benefit of your design. This statement should sell your design

Perspective or Isometric view that best shows off your design ( This should be the biggest image)

Floor Plan or Site Plan or Orthogonal drawings ( Front + Top + Side views)

Elevations - For architecture it's important to include at least 2 elevation views - East / West / Top

Hand drawings / renders that shows your design morphing from brainstorming to refinement

Cropped close up views or particular features of your design that you feel it's important for the viewer to know.

4) Include concept and development sketches.
Even if they aren't perfect scaled drawings but just a side panel of quick vignettes (a vignette is a small sketch) that show how your idea developed from a blob to the wondrous creation it is now.
5) Text should be in short key sentences.
Your board is your way of showing your design VISUALLY. If you need to explain your design - do it in your oral presentation. Nobody wants to read an essay on your design, and nobody will read it if you put it there. An overload of text is just a waste of space!
6) Don't forget to put your name.
Do I have to say more.....?

7) Use ICT -

Use the Computer method to layout your presentation board. Use Illustrator or Photoshop to construct your A3 board. If you need to scan any hand drawn images using the photocopier and email them directly to your email.

8) Do not clutter your boards with rubbish (non-related stuff).

Provide some empty space to 'free' your boards, Negative white space is good, it allows the viewer to ease into your board and not get overwhelmed You will not get better marks by showing more information - it is the quality not quantity that counts here!
9) DO NOT leave your boards to the last minute!
Plan your design at least a couple of days before hand so that you at least know where you are going to place things! If you rush it, then it will look rushed!
10) Get inspired.
The best way to learn is by looking at others works - preferably other professional or uni students. Look at various examples and write down, drawn the best bits you like. Then by using your creativity and the inspiration you found you should be able to create an amazing striking presentation board.

Presentation Board Examples:

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So you have your design done! Now it is time to present it to the class and hand-it in for marking. One of the most crucial parts of the design process is the presentation and the selling of your c...

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Industrial Design Storyboard | Free Images at Clker.com - vector clip art online, royalty free & public domain

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Industrial Design Storyboard | Free Images at Clker.com - vector clip art online, royalty free & public domain

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Industrial Design Storyboard | Free Images at Clker.com - vector clip art online, royalty free & public domain

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Download Clker's Industrial Design Storyboard clip art and related images now. Multiple sizes and related images are all free on Clker.com.

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Posts about Board Games written by hesir

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Holy MOMA! An Eames-Inspired Prosthetic Leg

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Holy MOMA! An Eames-Inspired Prosthetic Leg

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You read that right: For an undergrad design project at Carnegie Mellon, Joanna Hawley came up with the funny, strange concept of a prosthetic leg inspired by the famous Eames Lounge Chair. As she writes:
Prosthetics generally lack humanity, style and grace. Often, they look much like landing gear and make the wearer uncomfortable, self aware, and sometimes depressed. By channeling the Eames' use materials and iconic style, we designed a leg with Steve McQueen in mind. We sought to convey a creative use of positive and negative space, a balance of materials and a reflection of the wearer.
Check out her design process:

The design, of course, is a concept. But it's worth noting that other designers have tackled the problem of beautifying prosthetics. Another example from the same assignment, from a different student at CMU, was Nike inspired:

And another that was inspired by TAG watches:

Can anyone out there think of any weirder design mashups? We'd love, for example, to see a Droog inspired prosthetic.

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Holy MOMA! An Eames-Inspired Prosthetic Leg

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You read that right: For an undergrad design project at Carnegie Mellon, Joanna Hawley came up with the funny, strange concept of a prosthetic leg inspired by the famous Eames Lounge Chair. As she writes: Prosthetics generally lack humanity, style and grace.

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ID Sketching | Erik Askin – RISD | Industrial Design

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How to tell a great story, visualized | TED Blog

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How to tell a great story, visualized | TED Blog

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A good story can make a campfire that much eerier. A good story can flip a conversation at a party from completely awkward to wonderful. Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great storyA good story can glue your nose to a book. And, on screen, a good story can rivet generation after generation.

So, uh, how do you tell one?

Andrew Stanton, the Pixar writer and director behind both Toy Story and WALL-E, has many ideas, and he shared his expertise in his TED Talk, The clues to a great story. Below, see his golden rules of storytelling visualized by Karin Hueck and Rafael Quick of the Brazilian culture and science magazine Superinteressante. Each month, the magazine's editors take a TED Talk and give it to their graphic wizards to interpret in any way they see fit. Here, a reimagining of Stanton's talk on stories. Via the Ugly Duckling. Just click the image to see a larger version.

(See also the first infographic in this series, illustrating David Blaine's experiment to hold his breath for an astonishing 17 minutes. And the great take on the talk in which "eyeborg" wearer Neil Harbisson explains how he hears color. And the hows and whys of effective altruism, in this visual interpretation of Peter Singer's TED Talk.)

If you're lucky enough to live without want, it's a natural impulse to want to try and help others. But what's the most effective way to give? This was the question philosopher Peter Singer asked in his 2013 TED Talk, given in Long Beach, California, and he shared some surprising thought experiments to help balance emotion

Colorblind artist Neil Harbisson is an intrepid "eyeborg" wearer. That's a device that converts color into audible frequencies, meaning that Harbisson gets to hear a symphony of color, instead of seeing a world only in grayscale. Below, Harbisson's talk from TEDGlobal 2012 gets the graphic treatment in a beautiful chart that shows precisely which colors sound which musical notes for him. This is

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A good story can make a campfire that much eerier. A good story can flip a conversation at a party from completely awkward to wonderful. Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great storyA good story can glue your nose to a book. And, on screen, a good story can rivet generation after generation.