A while back, I wondered about the next business design events. I wish I’d known earlier about these two concurrent events from leading business design schools Rotman and Case Western:
Designing Information and Organizations with a Positive Lens, Nov 11-12 in Cleveland, OH. This workshop is organized the Weatherhead business school at Case Western, a pioneer […]

Reflecting on how we can help ourselves and others improve design thinking ability, I was struck by the need to address mindset and skillset exercises.
Mindset deals with things like design maturity. How do we change our thinking to address things like

Framing
Problem Solving
Form and Function
Abductive Thinking (generating multiple possibilities)

Skillset deals with specific activities, methods or tools […]

An important note: don’t take the actual term ‘design thinking’ too seriously. It’s useful shorthand, but has some significant drawbacks. The real point of the design thinking conversation is about advancing a mindset and skillset that can produce better results.
At the same time, if ‘design thinking’ has its drawbacks, what should we use if we’re […]

One of the dangers of design thinking is that it’s easy to focus on theory, not practice. Embedded in the term itself is a bias towards, well, thinking. And that often correlates to “not doing”. However, if all design thinking has to offer is a bunch of theory, then there’s really no intersection with business, […]

The shorthand of “design thinking” gathers a set of skills and perspectives that correlate to increased design maturity (23kb PDF) - framing and solving problems, instead of designing function, form, and style.
However, most designers, particularly graphic designers, are practicing at the level of form, function, and style. We see this level of maturity reinforced through […]

Something that causes all kinds of misunderstanding in the design community and business press is when people talk about “Design” but mean different things. I don’t tell my neighbors that I’m a designer, because then they think I wear black turtlenecks (sometimes true) and make things look pretty (usually false). Even places like the AIGA […]

Many thanks to FastCompany’s Heath Row for pointing here to bplusd. I’m travelling, and was delighted and flattered to learn today that Heath had noticed this little corner of the web. Welcome to new visitors - I hope you enjoy the time here. Many thanks to the friends who wrote email letting me know…I’ll get […]

What’s the point of design thinking? We use design thinking as a shorthand for a certain mindset, approach, and methods. But many conversations about design thinking (including many of my own comments) seem to be at a theoretical level, where the end goal of design thinking is fairly vague - something like ‘enlighten those poor […]

Dave Pollard has only recently discovered design thinking, but his blog is one I’ve read for a long time in my “business+design” RSS folder. His post on the changing behavior of organizations reflects the impact that design thinking can have on business models and on the economic landscape.
I was struck by this thought in particular:

For […]

If you’re following the business and design conversation, you’ve probably noticed Bruce Nussbaum blogging at NussbaumOnDesign. He’s a welcome voice with a tremendous reach. Still, reading Nussbaum or the other business press there’s a focus on product design that misses the mark for me. For example, in reference to implementing an innovation process, Nussbaum’s take […]