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Exploring Design at Business in Amsterdam

Exploring Design at Business in Amsterdam

Exploring Design at Business in Amsterdam

Design Lab Associate Director Michèle Morris, and members Nanna Inie, and Jennifer Taylor recently attended the Design at Business Summit in Amsterdam. The three-day event brought together design practitioners from private and public sectors, including SAP, Nestlé, Red Cross, Eindhoven University of Technology, and HPI Potsdam, among others.

Through a series of keynotes and workshops, the summit centered on the question: Is it time to innovate design thinking? Day one of the summit, titled “Outside In,” broadly explored challenges in the world where there could be a role for design thinking, a core aspect of the Design Lab’s philosophy. The remainder of the summit offered diverse perspectives on methods and applications, covering areas such as experience design, organizational design, transformative practices, and design leadership.

The summit kicked off with keynotes describing opportunities for design thinking in addressing societal challenges. Maarten van Aalst and Fleur van Monasso from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre explained how risk management has become increasingly complex in the face of a changing climate. Marco Steinberg from Snowcone & Haystack built on this theme in describing how the growing complexity of societal challenges has required a shift from managing “risk” to managing “uncertainty.” In his work supporting scalable solutions within government agencies, Steinberg moves away from traditional, linear processes of planning and implementation, to an iterative approach where cycling through planning, implementation, and evaluation guide programming, for example by using prototyping as part of a “soft launch.”

Other sessions described opportunities for advancing design processes. Presenters included Ford designer Joy Mountford, who argued that, in order to gain a genuine understanding of how people interact with a new technology, tools for prototyping must engage multiple senses to effectively embed users in the experience. Sean Carney, Chief Design Officer at Phillips, described how its Cocreate process engages stakeholders in the design process. For instance, patients and physicians contribute to the design process to improve children’s care experience during diagnostic testing in radiology.

So what might the future look like for design thinking? Recounting the history of design over the past two decades, Alexander Grots illustrated how design has evolved from an early, business-minded focus on products and deliverables, to increasingly focus on the methods and toolkits that guide the design process, and most recently to shaping ways of thinking that cultivate confidence, courage, and creativity. In the face of increasingly complex and ambiguous challenges, this latter perspective speaks to the Design Lab’s dedication to pursuing opportunities for design in shaping ways of thinking, doing, and being among people and organizations.

The Design Lab is dedicated to identifying the landscape for design-driven innovations as well as establishing itself as a leader in this space.

Design Lab Associate Director Michèle Morris, and members Nanna Inie, and Jennifer Taylor recently attended the Design at Business Summit in Amsterdam. The three-day event brought together design practitioners from private and public sectors, including SAP, Nestlé, Red Cross, Eindhoven University of Technology, and HPI Potsdam, among others.

Through a series of keynotes and workshops, the summit centered on the question: Is it time to innovate design thinking? Day one of the summit, titled “Outside In,” broadly explored challenges in the world where there could be a role for design thinking, a core aspect of the Design Lab’s philosophy. The remainder of the summit offered diverse perspectives on methods and applications, covering areas such as experience design, organizational design, transformative practices, and design leadership.

The summit kicked off with keynotes describing opportunities for design thinking in addressing societal challenges. Maarten van Aalst and Fleur van Monasso from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre explained how risk management has become increasingly complex in the face of a changing climate. Marco Steinberg from Snowcone & Haystack built on this theme in describing how the growing complexity of societal challenges has required a shift from managing “risk” to managing “uncertainty.” In his work supporting scalable solutions within government agencies, Steinberg moves away from traditional, linear processes of planning and implementation, to an iterative approach where cycling through planning, implementation, and evaluation guide programming, for example by using prototyping as part of a “soft launch.”

Other sessions described opportunities for advancing design processes. Presenters included Ford designer Joy Mountford, who argued that, in order to gain a genuine understanding of how people interact with a new technology, tools for prototyping must engage multiple senses to effectively embed users in the experience. Sean Carney, Chief Design Officer at Phillips, described how its Cocreate process engages stakeholders in the design process. For instance, patients and physicians contribute to the design process to improve children’s care experience during diagnostic testing in radiology.

So what might the future look like for design thinking? Recounting the history of design over the past two decades, Alexander Grots illustrated how design has evolved from an early, business-minded focus on products and deliverables, to increasingly focus on the methods and toolkits that guide the design process, and most recently to shaping ways of thinking that cultivate confidence, courage, and creativity. In the face of increasingly complex and ambiguous challenges, this latter perspective speaks to the Design Lab’s dedication to pursuing opportunities for design in shaping ways of thinking, doing, and being among people and organizations.

The Design Lab is dedicated to identifying the landscape for design-driven innovations as well as establishing itself as a leader in this space.

Design Lab Associate Director Michèle Morris, and members Nanna Inie, and Jennifer Taylor recently attended the Design at Business Summit in Amsterdam. The three-day event brought together design practitioners from private and public sectors, including SAP, Nestlé, Red Cross, Eindhoven University of Technology, and HPI Potsdam, among others.

Through a series of keynotes and workshops, the summit centered on the question: Is it time to innovate design thinking? Day one of the summit, titled “Outside In,” broadly explored challenges in the world where there could be a role for design thinking, a core aspect of the Design Lab’s philosophy. The remainder of the summit offered diverse perspectives on methods and applications, covering areas such as experience design, organizational design, transformative practices, and design leadership.

The summit kicked off with keynotes describing opportunities for design thinking in addressing societal challenges. Maarten van Aalst and Fleur van Monasso from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre explained how risk management has become increasingly complex in the face of a changing climate. Marco Steinberg from Snowcone & Haystack built on this theme in describing how the growing complexity of societal challenges has required a shift from managing “risk” to managing “uncertainty.” In his work supporting scalable solutions within government agencies, Steinberg moves away from traditional, linear processes of planning and implementation, to an iterative approach where cycling through planning, implementation, and evaluation guide programming, for example by using prototyping as part of a “soft launch.”

Other sessions described opportunities for advancing design processes. Presenters included Ford designer Joy Mountford, who argued that, in order to gain a genuine understanding of how people interact with a new technology, tools for prototyping must engage multiple senses to effectively embed users in the experience. Sean Carney, Chief Design Officer at Phillips, described how its Cocreate process engages stakeholders in the design process. For instance, patients and physicians contribute to the design process to improve children’s care experience during diagnostic testing in radiology.

So what might the future look like for design thinking? Recounting the history of design over the past two decades, Alexander Grots illustrated how design has evolved from an early, business-minded focus on products and deliverables, to increasingly focus on the methods and toolkits that guide the design process, and most recently to shaping ways of thinking that cultivate confidence, courage, and creativity. In the face of increasingly complex and ambiguous challenges, this latter perspective speaks to the Design Lab’s dedication to pursuing opportunities for design in shaping ways of thinking, doing, and being among people and organizations.

The Design Lab is dedicated to identifying the landscape for design-driven innovations as well as establishing itself as a leader in this space.

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How They Got There: Janet Johnson

Graduate student Janet Johnson is currently working towards her doctorate degree in Computer Science, while also conducting HCI research in the UCSD Design Lab, primarily focusing on XR (extended reality).

So, what is Johnson’s research?  Johnson conducts HCI research, primarily focusing on XR. As Johnson describes it, “XR is an umbrella term for augmented reality, augmented virtuality, mixed reality, and virtual reality.” She says to think of it as a spectrum where one end is the real world alone, the other is complete virtual reality, and everything in between is varying mixes of the two. Johnson’s research primarily focuses on this mixed middle ground. “The majority of my research focuses on how we can use mixed reality or extended reality to help a novice…get help from an expert.” She then poses the example of both surgery and CPR. Johnson’s research explores ways for an expert to provide instructions to the novice as if though they were in the same room. Her goal is to help bridge the distance between novices and experts, both physically and skill wise, while also decreasing the amount of time a person receives aid. “By the time a medical personnel arrives at the scene, it’s already been 7 to 10 minutes, so each minute counts for the person’s life,” she explains. “You don’t have time in that 10 minutes to train the people around to be able to do CPR or any other sort of resuscitation, same with surgery.” 

As Johnson continues to conduct her research in this field, she’s excited for what the future holds for this technology and the ways she can contribute to it.  
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Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change by Victor Papanek
“The first sentence in this book is ‘There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them.’ I read this book in the 1980s, and it had a huge impact..."

Design Lab Students Swarm CHI Conference in Denver

In May, many UC San Diego Design Lab members and students swarmed the largest human-computer interaction conference in the world, ACM CHI 2017. Affiliated with ACM SIGCHI, the premier international society for professionals, academics and students who are interested in human-technology and human-computer interaction (HCI), the conference brings together people from multiple disciplines and cultures to explore new ways to practice, develop and improve methods and systems in HCI.

“I love the mix of people at CHI—chatting with people making new sensor technologies, new theoretical approaches, new architectural construction techniques -- it has incredible diversity but is still brought together with a common set of ideas and expectations,” said former Design Lab Fellow Derek Lomas, who presented at the conference.

This year, the mega-HCI conference, which was sponsored by tech-industry giants such as Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo! was held in Denver near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Organizers selected the site, which is full of scenic trees, mountains and valleys to serve as a motivation for the theme of “Motivate, Innovate, Inspire.”

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How I Talked To My Daughter About Body Image

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Design Lab member Shannon Master recently had her article published in TIME magazine's special edition on weight loss! Her work can be found on shelves across the nation from April 12 - July 12.

Below is an excerpt from Shannon's essay Does this mean I'm a real writer? where she discusses the article for TIME magazine.

"How I talked to my daughter-and myself-about body image...tackles important social issues surrounding body-image for young girls, their mothers, and women at large. It offers research on how mothers can not only help stop the cycle of negative body image in their young daughters, but also how moms as women themselves can work to improve their own body-image. I was surprised that the editors changed very little, except for the title, which is amazing considering this thing magically ejected itself out of me in a matter of days, rather than the weeks and months I can work on something that never sees the light of day. It looks pretty spiffy in its new home, complete with updated statistics and accompanying photos across an eight-page spread; eight pages of my words about how we can reframe our own body images as mothers, in order to help our girls have everything we never had—confidence and self-esteem with an unwavering sense of worth—in a frickn’ national publication."

Read more at shannonmaster.com
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