In the past, design has most often occurred fairly far downstream in the development process and has focused on making new products aesthetically attractive or enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising. Today, as innovation’s terrain expands to encompass human-centered processes and services as well as products, companies are asking designers to create ideas rather than to simply dress them up. Brown, the CEO and president of the innovation and design firm IDEO, is a leading proponent of design thinking—a method of meeting people’s needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable way. In this article he offers several intriguing examples of the discipline at work. One involves a collaboration between frontline employees from health care provider Kaiser Permanente and Brown’s firm to reengineer nursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser hospitals. Close observation of actual shift changes, combined with brainstorming and rapid prototyping, produced new procedures and software that radically streamlined information exchange between shifts. The result was more time for nursing, better-informed patient care, and a happier nursing staff. Another involves the Japanese bicycle components manufacturer Shimano, which worked with IDEO to learn why 90% of American adults don’t ride bikes. The interdisciplinary project team discovered that intimidating retail experiences, the complexity and cost of sophisticated bikes, and the danger of cycling on heavily trafficked roads had overshadowed people’s happy memories of childhood biking. So the team created a brand concept—“Coasting”—to describe a whole new category of biking and developed new in-store retailing strategies, a public relations campaign to identify safe places to cycle, and a reference design to inspire designers at the companies that went on to manufacture Coasting bikes. [hbr_brightcove id=”4443548301001″]
On Design Thinking | Maggie Gram
By embracing “design thinking,” we attribute to design a kind of superior epistemology: a way of knowing, of “solving,” that is better than the old and local and blue-collar and municipal and unionized and customary ways. We bring in “design thinkers” — some of them designers by trade, many of them members of adjacent knowledge fields — to “empathize” with Kaiser hospital nurses, Gainesville city workers, church leaders, young mothers, and guerrilla fighters the world over.
Design Thinking by IDEO: Human-Centered Innovation
Learn how IDEO uses design thinking to help teams solve complex problems through human-centered innovation, creativity, collaboration, and impact.
Jenny Wen: The design process is dead. Why Designers can no longer trust it.
the new product designer (and why we’re getting it wrong)
Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton
An introduction to radical participatory design: decolonising participatory design processes
Outside of community-led design projects, most participatory design processes initiated by a company or organisation maintain or even strengthen power imbalances between the design organisation and the community on whose purported behalf they are designing, further increasing the absencing experience. Radical participatory design (RPD) is a radically relational answer to the coloniality inherent in participatory design where the community members’ disappointment is greater due to the greater expectations and presencing potential of a ‘participatory design’ process. We introduce the term RPD to show how research and design processes can be truly participatory to the root or core. Instead of treating participatory design as a method, a way of conducting a method, or a methodology, we introduce RPD as a meta-methodology, a way of doing any methodology. We explicitly describe what participation means and compare and contrast design processes based on the amount of participation, creating a typology of participation. We introduce ‘designer as community member’, ‘community member as designer,’ and ‘community member as facilitator’ models and provide characteristics for the meta-methodology of RPD.
An introduction to radical participatory design: decolonising participatory design processes
Outside of community-led design projects, most participatory design processes initiated by a company or organisation maintain or even strengthen power imbalances between the design organisation and the community on whose purported behalf they are designing, further increasing the absencing experience. Radical participatory design (RPD) is a radically relational answer to the coloniality inherent in participatory design where the community members’ disappointment is greater due to the greater expectations and presencing potential of a ‘participatory design’ process. We introduce the term RPD to show how research and design processes can be truly participatory to the root or core. Instead of treating participatory design as a method, a way of conducting a method, or a methodology, we introduce RPD as a meta-methodology, a way of doing any methodology. We explicitly describe what participation means and compare and contrast design processes based on the amount of participation, creating a typology of participation. We introduce ‘designer as community member’, ‘community member as designer,’ and ‘community member as facilitator’ models and provide characteristics for the meta-methodology of RPD.
Built by Designers: No Explanation Needed
Designers now turn ideas into working products. Explore a curated collection of apps, tools, websites, and experiments designed, built, and shipped by designers.
Who—and What—Will Customers Become? - DesignIntelligence
Innovation transforms the customer as well as the product
Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds
"Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory by arguing for the creation of what he calls 'autonomous design'--a design practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth"--Publisher description
COMMUNITY-BASED, HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN
We propose a radical change in design from experts designing for people to people designing for themselves, leveraging the creativity of communities to solve their own problems. People in communiti…
HCDE Distinguished Lecture with Laura Forlano | Designing Consequences: On Living Well with Machines
Implementing an online pharmaceutical service using design science research
The rising prevalence of chronic diseases is pressing health systems to introduce reforms. Primary healthcare and multidisciplinary models have been suggested as approaches to deal with this challenge, with new roles for nurses and pharmacists being advocated. More recently, implementing healthcare based on information systems and technologies (e.g. eHealth) has been proposed as a way to improve health services. However, implementing online pharmaceutical services, including their adoption by pharmacists and patients, is still an open research question. In this paper we present ePharmacare, a new online pharmaceutical service implemented using Design Science Research.
