Back Soon

I am taking off for Christmas. And have promised myself I will not blog over the break. I will spend all my time with my family and be available for the kids. In a non distracted fashion. So this blog is on ‘away’ mode for two weeks (atleast).
Meanwhile – go on take a look around [...]

Social Design it is

I have just come back from India. And from Presenting the School of Design vision. For now its all go – and that is really exciting. In short the vision argues for three new kinds of courses:
1. Social Innovation: Where the key focus is upon a people orientated project that uses methodologies more attuned to [...]

Netroots

Word Spy – netroots
n. A grassroots movement that uses the Internet to communicate, organize, and raise money. Also: Netroots.
Example Citations:Democratic congressional candidate Darcy Burner … followed her husband to Washington state in 1998 when he was hired at Microsoft; she landed a job there in 2000, working as a marketing manager dealing in network architecture [...]

What is the methodology for Base of the Pyramid Innovation?

I found this interesting blog – where the aim is to come up with a ‘practice’ and method for designing and developing products for the BoP. I will be watching this blog from now on.
www.bop-innovation.com
I am very excited to embark on this new combined research and consultancy project about People Centred Innovation with Base of [...]

Design Education for the future

Now Imagine a Design School that offers courses at three levels: Bachelors, Graduate Certficate and Graduate Degree. The key focus of the courses is Design for Social Change. The primary context of practice is India – and the location of such a school if New Delhi. What this conjures up is design that focusses primarily [...]

A New School for India

Imagine a country where by many estimates 70% of the population is rural – with poor access to work, services and the benefits of technology. Where life in a sense is a curious mix of the ancient ways-practices and contemporary in the mobile phone and shampoo sachet. This context has energised many different responses -

William [...]

Integrated Design

I have been looking at the Bachelors in Integrated Design offered by the Koln International School of Design. This means I have considered it from many angles and there are many things I like about it.
1. I know many designers who trained as one kind of designer and then went on to practice as another [...]

Ranting is good

I was asked this monday and tuesday: ‘do you deliberately set out to provoke people’. I dont. It just all comes out when my dam of irritation breaks. I live and work in a pace where the conservative perspective dominates – or emerges repeatedly as a skill acquisition imperative. And to everyone I ask: ‘is [...]

GM wants 18 billion

If 18 billion is given to Better Place we will have genuine change. Is it time to ban private ownership of cars?But I do like Megan’s tone.
GM goes nuclear – Megan McArdle
So GM wants $18 billion just for itself. Words fail. Or rather, I don’t think I can print the words that [...]

Diabetes and Interaction Design

I saw charmr (you can say Charmr on youtube to watch the video) by Adaptive Path and was quite intrigued. I have students doing similar projects. This is ‘gadgets that help’.
I am in diabetes for a different reason – I want to change health outcomes for the, say, 40 million Indians and further 40 million [...]

Schon Lecture

Donald Schon, AERA 1987, “Educating the Reflective Practitoner”
And so the separation of research and practice. And the consequence of this is, I believe, that if you find yourself in university, you find yourself in an institution built around an epistemology–technical rationality–which construes professional knowledge to consist in the application of science to the adjustment of [...]

How do you program a VCR?

Its 1991. I am sitting on the grass at the Katsuta factory of Hitachi. It a factory that makes TVs. And I am sitting with factory workers – one of them says he goes home late so that his son can record a TV program. Because he dosnt know how to program the VCR. We [...]

Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money

This is a gorgeous piece. Okay I am in love with China – and cry for its faults. But I have to admit I smile every time I hear a bit of muscle flexing – and so very graciously done. Very cat to the American mouse. Come on I say to my Indian counterparts – [...]

Smart Phone or RFID embedded?

Is this making GPS outdated? The location mapping is terrestrial.
Scobleizer: Google’s Plan for Mobile Domination | Fast Company
Maps, Mail, Calendar, and Reader work in some form on a large number of handsets, but they can do so much more on a smartphone. With Maps, I love that you can get turn-by-turn driving directions and traffic [...]

Sketching was the new black

adaptive path » the joy of sketch : explorations in hand-crafted visuals
About two years ago, Adaptive Path experienced an upwelling of analog approaches. We started using design tools that jumped out of the screen and into the real world. We started using our hands to make things. Alongside our computers there appeared slabs of blank [...]

The Table in Context

This is interesting and different from the studio as the location of design. But still valid as the consultant preoccupation. What may also be interesting is to focus upon what we do not speak about because we believe mistakenly that what we believe in as the ‘right way’ is ubiquitous or that our way of [...]

You may already practice service design

Service design is old – and many different people do it. But the time has come to move from ‘need’ driven initiatives – which are also called social innovations – to a more ’systematic approach’. For social innovations and disruptive innovations dislodge the dominant industry – and companies today looking to build resilience need the [...]

The IxDA is pleased to announce its second annual conference-Interaction’09|vancouver.

Would love to go to this event.
IxDA Interaction 09 | Vancouver > Main
Interaction’09|vancouver will be held from February 5-8, 2009 in stunning Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in conjunction with Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Join several hundred Interaction Designers from around the world as we address the design of interactive systems [...]

The 5 habits of highly effective project teams

Cooper Journal: The 5 habits of highly effective project teams
Establish structure and discipline
At the start of a project, it’s common for managers and participants to be certain only of the impending release date – everything else is anyone’s guess. While this date is sometimes arbitrary and malleable, more often than not it is tied to [...]

What kind of people work in service design

Some people with a design background work in service design. I have posted the engine ‘people’ page here to give a slice of profession specializations – Product Design and Graphic design in particular.
Engine Service Design | About us
Engine people are a multi-disciplinary team of service specialists, and a network of experienced associates.

Service Design on film « Redjotter’s Weblog

A simple and easy video introduction to service design.

more about "Service Design on film « Redjotter’s …", posted with vodpod

start tackling problems and pushing through ideas together

Emergence 2007 » Blog Archive » What People Are Saying About the Emergence Conference
One of the big pushes coming out of the conference was to start continuing the conversations we’ve had over the past three days so that we don’t just convene every once in a while to talk about what [...]

I hope we’re nearing the end of the product design mindset

Emergence 2007 » Blog Archive » What People Are Saying About the Emergence Conference
Todd Wilkens from Adaptive Path’s talk–”The End of Products”–was near to our hearts. Building the argument for ecosystems rather than products, he talked about the need for less service design than a “service mindset,” concluding with the admonition: “I hope we’re nearing [...]

the most exciting and promising research opportunities for the future

Quasi-nerds only: interesting little compare and contrast – James Fallows
Two of America’s tech powers — IBM and Microsoft — have given glimpses of what they consider the most exciting and promising research opportunities for the future. Their lists are fascinating in their own right but also in a comparative sense, for what they show about [...]

I can do my take on Design Today

I make a proposition that Industrial Design is at a place where graphic design was in the 90s and photography was at the time of the digital camera. The line between the professional and the amateur is blurred. The amateur often explains better – and in the early days of the explainer these people were [...]