Platform design isn't just product design at scale. Learn the four concepts that set it apart—with a detailed Lego case study showing how great platforms enable creativity.
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.
Platform Studies
The Platform Studies book series has been established to promote the investigation of underlying computing systems and how they enable, constrain, shape and support the creative work that is done on them. The series investigates the foundations of digital media — the computing systems, both hardware and software, that developers and users depend upon for artistic, literary, and gaming development. Books in the series will certainly vary in their approaches, but they will all also share certain features: A focus on a single platform or a closely related family of platforms; Technical rigor and in-depth investigation of how computing technologies work; An awareness of and discussion of how computing platforms exist in a context of culture and society, being developed based on cultural concepts and then contributing to culture in a variety of ways — for instance, by affecting how people perceive computing.
The future for platform holders is cooperation, not just competition | Opinion
When an industry changes -- even quite radically -- it can be hard to pinpoint the moment that the shift began. There a…
Making the Case for Actionable Prosocial Design Research
Regulating harmful design is only half the equation — attention must also go toward how platforms can build prosocial design, and toward the research that shows them how.
Platform as a Runtime - the Next Step in Platform Engineering
As systems become larger and more complex we need to take the concepts of platform engineering to a higher level – to the code level – by creating platforms and abstractions that will reduce cognitive load, help simplify and accelerate software development, and allow for easy maintenance and upgrades to the platform. Let’s move from “platform” to “Platform as a Runtime”.
Design Kit
Design Kit is IDEO.org's platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world's most difficult problems.
What to build first: the house or the front door?
Join the conversation to stay on top of trends and opportunities in the platform engineering community.
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
The guide to implementing 2D platformers | Higher-Order Fun
Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details.
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.
Design Thinking
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″]
Game Platforms | Game Developer
Explore the latest news and expert commentary on Game Platforms, brought to you by the editors of Game Developer
Ditch Platforms
Guides, stories, and reasons to leave platforms in favor of protocols
The Music Industry is Broken
Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet
How to ACTUALLY Quit Spotify.
Kill Yr Substack | Jason Cosper
EFF is Leaving X
An Explanation (Which I Would Be Very Grateful If You Took The Time To Read)