At Design Thinkers 2009, a very eclectic audience including myself were asked to consider and reevaluate our impressions of what graphic design is. We were asked to revisit the steps we take towards being “creative” and “innovative”.
This was — and is — no simple feat.
Designing for the crowd
So you’ve got the killer social application, community, feature, software. The idea is going to make mint! Now what?
According to IDEA2009 – the conference for social and experience design, held here at MaRS yesterday – you need to design an experience that will make that idea sing with users. For that, Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone, authors of O’Reilly Media’s Designing Social Interfaces, present: 5 Steps, 5 Principles and 5 No-No’s for your killer social media innovation.
Faster than a speeding inventor
This month we have left the “golden umbrella” of the Biodesign fellowship here at Stanford University (a team of two physicians and two engineers designing medical devices) to step into industry as interns. I am taking my internship with an inventor who is making a name for himself in this industry. Though I have been working for less than a week, the differences I have noticed between the two are stark. Industry is fast: honesty and simplicity are critical.
Consultation with users is key
Last month I told you that I needed to really understand the science before I had any hope of solving a medical problem.
This month I’m telling you that the science allowed us to come up with ideas for the technology that could potentially solve the given medical problem but that we really needed to understand the physicians and the patients (our users) in order to design the product.
Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards.
Image courtesy of Popular Mechanics
The magazine Popular Mechanics highlights the recipients of its annual Breakthrough Awards in its November 2006 issue.
The Leadership Award was presented to Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer who was behind the first plane to circle the globe nonstop (Voyager, in 1986) and the first private craft to take a pilot to space, twice within two weeks — SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize in 2004.
