The interesting thing about designing in today’s age is that we can no longer create rigid solutions and expect them to be meaningful 5, 10 or 20 years out, as the population increases and the environmental shifts continue. Solutions must be more flexible and adaptable, especially when they apply to one of the most complex systems of all—cities.
In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, “Learning to Bounce Back,” PopTech founder Andrew Zolli writes about resiliency (an area of interest for Hot’s Sarah Brooks, as well). “Resilience speaks not to just how buildings weather storms, but to how people weather them, too,” says Zolli. Building resilient systems requires empathy and compassion, knowing people and understanding their needs, communities, culture, networks, and attitudes to the conditions and environments they live in. We must take all of these into account when we design and plan, which is the essence of a design thinking process.
Design thinking is a holistic approach that can tackle complex system problems. It considers the bigger picture and offers myriad possibilities, which can be flexible and adaptable. Design by nature is collaborative and consists of teams from different backgrounds and disciplines. This should also be true when it comes to tackling natural disaster planning and recovery. Designers should be at the table with government officials, institutional and company leaders, urban planners, economists, and other stakeholders to think of creative ways of working, reorganize information in thoughtful ways, and develop processes to implement.
Now more than ever, we need to come together in a coordinated effort. We must to learn from our mistakes and to do so we need to be transparent about the process and the decisions we make. This will allow room for continual adjustments along the way and for people to play integral parts, especially residents who eventually are the ones who rebuild in the long term.
Chuck Owen, distinguished professor emeritus at Institute of Design, IIT, said it best in his article “Design Thinking: Notes on Its Nature and Use”:
“…the handiwork of humankind is finally beginning to impress itself on the global environment and on us, its inhabitants. This should inspire us as design professionals to reconsider what we do, who our clients are, and where we can best offer our expertise. In particular, the decision processes of high-level decision makers are in need of serious overhaul. The ultimate value of human- and environment-centeredness is a guarantee that the best interests of humankind and environment will be considered in any project.”
Our work needs to consider the complex systems in which people work, live, and play. Today we have information, technology, and talent at our fingertips. We must shift our mindset that complex systems in place cannot change. They will eventually fail if they don’t. Rethinking our systems to becoming more resilient is an investment. Designers dream to tackle big complex problems and the time has come to make it happen.
OpenIDEO Preventing Atrocities Challenge Winning Concepts
Congrats to the latest atrocity @OpenIDEO challenge winners! My concept made the list and I’m excited to see how the concepts develop with USAID. Thanks for the all comments and feedback.
It’s Official: Yahoo Is Buying Tumblr For $1.1B, Vows To Keep It Independent | TechCrunch
Yahoo has now officially confirmed that it is buying blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion mostly in cash, after reports on an impending deal first surfaced last week. It says it will keep it as an independent company, with founder David Karp at the helm as CEO.
Announcing the desigNYC Lab | DesigNYC
Excited to have been part of this workshop and help with facilitation. Great nonprofits with a lot of heart.
Service Design Jam NYC Recap
Two weekends ago, I participated in the Global Service Jam in New York City. This 48-hour event took place in 150 locations around the world—from Bangalore to Helsinki to San Francisco—and over 3,000 people participated. The Global Service Jam is a non-profit volunteer activity and has grown considerably from the first jam, held in 2011, which had nearly 60 participants in New York City alone. People from different disciplines, and with varying degrees of service design experience, joined together in this challenge which started Friday evening and ended Sunday afternoon. This year’s theme, kept top secret until being revealed at each local jam location, was Grow. Each team had to interpret what the theme meant to them, and build a service around it.
The purpose of the design jam is not to create a real and complete working concept, but to explore and prototype what meaningful services might be possible within the theme. Our diverse team consisted of designers from graphic, industrial, interaction, service, and teaching backgrounds. Working quickly—and with strangers—can be challenging, but it can also be fun. Especially when you add a time constraint to the mix. It’s easy to get stuck when brainstorming ideas, but eliciting feedback from other teams helped us refine our thinking. We went from a very abstract level to narrowing in on a concept we wanted to explore further—growing the city’s cycling community. Jumping right in, we spoke with people on the street and in nearby shops, and surveyed people online, asking them to share their experiences cycling in the city. We asked questions like:
- Why are you riding your bike today?
- What are some positive experiences you’ve had cycling?
- What are some negative experiences you’ve had cycling?
- Would you encourage other people to ride in the city?
- How would you encourage them?
Once our research was complete, we pulled out our design tools and analyzed the information we’d gathered. Tools like value articulation proposition, storyboarding, and “The Five Ps” for designing service—people, props, places, processes, partnerships—enabled us to identify a few key areas on which to focus.
- What kinds of resources are important to cyclists, and what resources are missing that could improve their cycling experience?
- How could we leverage the data collected by cyclists to better connect, and advocate for, the cycling community?
We found that although people feel it’s important to encourage others to cycle, they are not currently active in the cycling community. We saw an opportunity to facilitate activism. The mere act of cycling can inform the greater community and help build a database of information, which can ultimately help the community grow. Aggregated data from other cyclists better inform street maps and bike routes, traffic reports, weather conditions, and the locations of partnering bike shops.
By Saturday evening, we’d sketched storyboards and had our service and product defined. With only five hours left we really jammed on Sunday, creating a quick stop motion video of our design and presenting it to the other teams. One of the best storytelling tools is video—high or low fidelity—as it can quickly show one’s journey using a service or product, and the touch points and values being exchanged.
It’s truly remarkable how many great concepts and insights can be developed when people around the world come together for an event like this. It was inspiring to see what we could do in such a short amount of time. The overall vibe was encouraging, supportive, and collaborative.
Why We Need A New and Hyperlocal Model for Design Activism
Post by Julie Kim from Hot Studio
In defining a new model for design activism, we need not start from scratch. Fortunately, we have a rich and ongoing tradition in the United States of local community service: think one-on-one mentoring programs for urban youth, volunteer days at senior homes, homeless shelters and schools.
Some of these models have timeless efficacy; others have gone stale and need to be re-envisioned. This is where designers can step in and add great value. There’s tons we can do to add to—or in some cases, disrupt—this long-standing tradition of local community service. I’ll focus on a few of these opportunities in my upcoming talk at Compostmodern 13. Check out the link for the full article and principles posted on Core77.
Connecting: Short film about the future of Interaction Design and User Experience
Lapka for iPhone: five sensors to measure the world, inspired by NASA and Yves Saint Laurent
A small Russian hardware startup brings ‘luxury tools’ to your phone
(via poptech)
Design Thinking and Building Resilient Systems
(Source: hotstudio.com)
Attending The Future of Security: Ethical Hacking Big Data & the Crowd. Rethinking what security is. #FutureOfSecurity
@OpenIDEO YouthCafe concepting session. So nice to meet fellow online contributor @haiyan!
@frogdesign hosting the froggy feud at the Design Research Conference 2012. @elisemetzger @sillykk @amberlindholm
"To both build scale while having things be locally relevant, that’s really a designer’s problem to solve"
(Source: fastcodesign.com)
