Not what you expected: Implementing design thinking as a leadership practice

Changing user needs have created new opportunities for libraries, requiring evolving leadership practices that support innovation and rapid change. Design thinking can provide leaders with a concrete process to move toward action. The authors – one an executive administrator at a large, multi-branch public library, the other an academic librarian who leads a small team – share how design thinking has positively influenced their leadership practices. The benefits of implementing this flexible process have included improved user experience, more creative solutions, wise investments, staff empowerment, increased transparency and trust, and employee learning and development. Both leaders experienced these benefits even though they are in different positions on their hierarchical organization charts. The authors propose that implementing design thinking as a leadership practice has a place in the evolving role of libraries and can shift organizational cultures to become more user-centered and embrace innovation. In addition to these benefits, the chapter discusses specific project examples, challenges, and tips for library leaders to successfully implement the process. Design thinking is translatable across library types and throughout private industry. Discussing design thinking as a leadership practice can benefit the profession and communities by giving leaders a common language to use when learning from and sharing with each other in conversations about innovation

Organizational Ambidexterity and the Hybrid Middle Manager: The Case of Patient Safety in UK Hospitals

This article focuses on knowledge management in UK hospitals as an area in which organizational ambidexterity (OA) is a necessary condition. In contrast to much of the literature on OA that looks at senior managers, we focus on the role of "hybrid" middle managers, professional workers who hold managerial responsibilities, in ensuring that the quality of care delivered is at an optimum "safe" level for patients. We examine the influence of prevailing tensions and competing agendas characteristic of a professionalized, public-sector context upon knowledge exploitation and exploration at the middle levels of the organization. Our study investigates how these tensions are experienced and reconciled at the individual level. We examine the contextual and personal circumstances that enable hybrid middle managers to forge workable compromises between exploration and exploitation to facilitate OA. We find that this process is contingent on professional legitimacy, social capital, and a holistic professional orientation. This has wider implications for human resource practice to support the discretion and motivation of hybrid middle managers to facilitate OA for enduring performance and advancement of best practice

Design thinking and design doing: Describing a process of people-centred innovation

The research forms part of the author’s long-term enquiry into the challenges of implementing Design Thinking (DT) and its relationship to Inclusive Design (ID), something that has been understudied and under-researched. Both fields advocate research with users and have a history spanning decades, but they have remained largely separate in terms of academic research and practical application. The author was approached by the series editor for his expertise at the intersection of ID and DT. “State of the art” DT ideas and approaches were evaluated through study of circa 50 recent academic publications, papers and journal articles. Field research was based on personal leadership of over 70 ID projects with government, business, and the voluntary sector leading to frontline discoveries and insights. Peer-reviewed academic publication, conference presentation, and keynote delivery helped test ideas before making the link between ID and DT and delivering the publication. This 13,000 word, sole-authored chapter outlines gaps in the long-term effectiveness of DT, outlining five principles that aim to engender a more sustainable approach by aligning it to ID. These five ideas give an overview of newly-articulated frameworks, tools and methods for academic and industry application. The chapter sets a context for 16 other chapters within the publication and establishes the need for more empirical research to link between DT and ID. The ideas in the chapter have been used to direct practice-based research projects and education programmes at the RCA as well as organisations in its network. 700 Hong Kong civil servants have been trained using these ideas, alongside numerous industry organisations including Tata Consulting Services and Panasonic

The Influence of Sleep on Memory

The current study aims to examine the influence of sleep on general memory recall and its relationship to different strengths of encoding using abstract and concrete words. The study aims to recreate the procedure in the study by Soave (2010) and uses materials from Paivio (1968). Participants are randomly set into one of four, awake or asleep functions, and abstract or concrete words. Participants memorized a list of word pairs, and then entered an intermission period filled with either wakefulness or sleep. Following the 12 period intermission, participants were given half the word pairs and asked to complete the pairs. The results of the study didn\u27t show a significant relationship between the constructs due to methodological issues

Innovation in Traditional Productive Sectors - Visual Curation in Design

The purpose of this paper aims to describe the implementation of a Design Diagnosis practice within the scope of an International project under the acronym – REINOVA (Reindustrialization, entrepreneurship, and innovation in traditional productive sectors) was a project conducted by an international consortium composed by Portuguese and Spanish Institutions. The research presented is based on specific implementation of a strategy for the development of solutions within the scope of Design from the ESART partner within the REINOVA methodology. The discussion sessions that included the display of visual boards to the micro-entrepreneurs summarized the results of the image diagnosis and positively influenced the consumption context of some of the products previously idealized, namely the target audience, as well as the doses and form of presentation/communication of the product. The incentive programs for micro-companies must consider the volume of information that entrepreneurs need to address regularly, avoiding entropy in communication with small organisations

Visual storytelling - creative strategy of visual clues promoted by archetypal images

The following article describes a creative strategy in the learning environment regarding Digital Design, specifically the development of visual exploration on emotional archetypes to a group of students of Master of Graphic Design of the School of Applied Arts of the Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco, Portugal in the academic year 2018/19. The research topic was introduced in the development of a communication project for the Agro-Food product, bee pollen. The article presents the introduction to the problem, hypothesis, objectives, strategy, results, and conclusion. The development of the visual exploration strategy included the theoretical framework of Wertime [8], and Woodside, Sood and Miller [9], Although the results point out the richness of the proposed strategy in communicating the importance of the emotional concept among students and the notion of structure in the communication, The authors assessed from the resulting experience, the complexity of communicating the possibilities of the use of archetypal images in the development of communication solutions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio