The Craze for Design Thinking: Roots, A Critique, and toward an Alternative

Paper to the Fifth International Conference on Design Principles and Practices, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy, 2-4 February 2011. Please email [email protected] for permission to reproducePlease email [email protected] for permission to reproduce this article. Common Ground Publishing reatians the copyright of this article.Favouring orientation to and the participation of design users in the design process, Design Thinking (DT) has a long lineage. With the Cold War’s end the Internet’s rise and Stanford University turn to teaching DT (2005), this ‘bottom up’, demand-driven conception of design gained new adherents, going on to win mainstream status when advocated in the Harvard Business Review in 2008. While some managers, especially in government, have since adopted DT rather uncritically, it has prompted a schism in design circles – one as grand, perhaps, as that between post-Modernism and Modernism back in the 1970s/1980s. Though DT has reached Latin America and Asia, enthusiasts differ on its meaning. However, critics like Verganti (Italy) and Norman (US) are unanimous that DT has wrongly made consumer contexts, behaviours and needs seem preferable to what McCullagh (UK) describes as ‘other drivers of innovation, including technical progress’. In DT, ‘sustainability’ tends to be taken for granted, and expensive prices are rarely considered. An alternative to DT is briefly outlined, which, it is hoped, can begin to address these defects

Risky business

Today nearly every workplace boasts codes of business ethics. But as far back as 1995/6, it was clear that ethics were a symptom of a wider aversion to ris

Hess is more

Interview with the late Dick Hess, co-inventor of Paint By Numbers and one of the 20th century's greatest illustrators and graphic designer

The Next Trend in Design

Paper given to a conference of the Design Management Institute, 18 May 2011, AmsterdamJust why are trends felt so trendy by designers nowadays? Where do trends really come from? How can we forecast the next trend, and be sure that it won’t simply be a transient fad? How can we make a simple, convincing, intelligent, and un-faddish new argument for design, which absorbs those merits that design thinking has, but which moves designers on toward a more practical and yet more ambitious practice? This article argues that critiquing bestseller books on ideas can help design managers control the future. It also argues for (1) a turn back to basic design skills (2) design for lower prices (3) the need for designers to deepen their internationalism (4) a turn toward science and technology (5) a need to see older people as quick learner

A Future for Energy Innovation

Energise! shifts debate on energy/climate away from the usual opponents – climate sceptics vs those who focus on consumer demand and the consumer creation of CO2. Instead, it begins from the world’s need for much more cheap and clean energy. Energise! also focuses on the sociology of energy, analysing concepts such as consumer greed, ‘addiction’ to oil, uncertainty in climate science, the Precautionary Principle and resource wars.People shouldn't feel guilty about your carbon footprint. The way to deal with global warming is to build a bigger, better energy supply – not to change behaviour at home and in the car. People are not addicted to energy, and there's still time to fix global warming without downgrading lifestyles

Room with a VDU: The Development of the ‘Glass House’ in the Corporate Workplace

Abstract This article argues that the presentation of early computer technology and its reception by the public had a causal effect on the design of computer products. It is also argued that the desire to show computers in operation led to the emergence and proliferation of the ‘glass house’, a particular element of the commercial interior landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. These glass-walled secure areas, built to house mainframe computer installations, appeared in order to meet the conflicting requirements of environmental stability, controlled access and crucially, the conspicuous display of corporate status. Although the phenomenon of the glass house disappeared as the computers they housed developed from large, centralised systems into distributed networks of stand-alone computers, this article posits that the widespread adoption of the glass house not only had a profound effect on the visual design of computers themselves but also led to the growth of a range of subsidiary industries, as well as having a lasting impact on the perception and reception of computers in the workplace and attitudes towards the specialist staff involved in their maintenance. Keywords: glass house, computers, technology, workplace, display, IB

The London Manifesto for Innovation

Analyses the stagnation of business and state commitment to R&D and innovation in Britain, Europe and America. Contrasts today with the agricultural, first and second industrial revolutions, plus post-war breakthroughs. Reviews linear models of innovation and their critics, innovatory business models, and ‘open’ innovationDuring today’s economic downturn, innovation will be more important than ever. The sooner far-sighted strategies are developed and implemented by government, business and other agencies, the more a better world will be within humanity’s reach

Mucedorus: the last ludic playbook, the first stage Arcadia

This article argues that two seemingly contradictory factors contributed to and sustained the success of the anonymous Elizabethan play Mucedorus (c. 1590; pub. 1598). First, that both the initial composition of Mucedorus and its Jacobean revival were driven in part by the popularity of its source, Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Second, the playbook's invitation to amateur playing allowed its romance narrative to be adopted and repurposed by diverse social groups. These two factors combined to create something of a paradox, suggesting that Mucedorus was both open to all yet iconographically connected to an elite author's popular text. This study will argue that Mucedorus pioneered the fashion for “continuations” or adaptations of the famously unfinished Arcadia, and one element of its success in print was its presentation as an affordable and performable version of Sidney's elite work. The Jacobean revival of Mucedorus by the King's Men is thus evidence of a strategy of engagement with the Arcadia designed to please the new Stuart monarchs. This association with the monarchy in part determined the cultural functions of the Arcadia and Mucedorus through the Interregnum to the close of the seventeenth century

Play as the main event in international and UK culture.

Since Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, 1938, few books have treated adult play at an abstract level using psychology. These works lack empirical statistics. On the other hand, most market research into consumer leisure lacks clear theoretical frameworks. ‘Play as the Main Event’ overcomes these twin deficiencies. It develops Huizinga and the major international theorists of play to define five distinctive features of contemporary play, applying this framework to five sub-sectors of consumer leisure: computer games, sport, gambling, performing arts, and theme parks and adventure holidays. ‘James Woudhuysen's innovative paper … subjects a key postmodernist theoretical concept to a detailed critical scrutiny across a range of sites of leisure and entertainment.’ Paul Filmer, TLS, 12.3.2004, 27. The paper led to: • 30,000ww paper ‘Computer games and sex difference’, Women in Games 2005 conference, Abertay University, March 2006, on http://www.woudhuysen.com/documents/ComputerGamesSexDifference.pdf • chapter, ‘Education as entertainment’ in The Routledge Falmer Guide to Key Debates in Education (July 2004). The paper brings together some of the vast but disparate literature and statistics on play to measure attendance at, participation in, and paid employment in playful pursuits. Inspired by interdisciplinary perspectives in economics, politics, sociology and technology, it asks: • Does play provide spaces and moments of freedom that lie beyond the grasp of market forces? • Is the entertainment provided by play genuinely educational? • Have UK government policies in support of adult play advanced the cause of culture? From government sources and the international business media, the paper gives a rigorous review of the five sub-sectors chosen, as well as of other aspects of adult play

Message from a grand old man

Interview with the founder of the industrial design profession – when he was 8