The 2009 National Design Awards — the design world’s Oscars — presented Bill Moggridge, a founder of IDEO, with a lifetime achievement award. Sponsored by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the awards are now in their tenth year. A New York Times article offers more news about all the award winners, and the Cooper-Hewitt highlights Bill and his work.

Doug Solomon presented his talk, “Innovation and Economic Growth,” at the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s Committee on Development Information Science and Technology conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on April 29.

At a New York workshop on April 23, IDEO took a hands-on human-centered approach to designing for customer loyalty. Click to read more about setting the stage for loyality or to download a worksheet from the event. Join the discussion on IDEO’s “Big Conversations and Small Talk” on Facebook, or follow it on the event blog.

On Fast Company’s blog, Tim Brown will explore what he calls the Age of Involvement, the role of participation in an information society and how it leads to an expanded view of our economy. His first post, written to stimulate a conversation, asks if we can really spend our way out of this downturn and somehow magically create a post-crisis economy that is sustainable. Join the discussion here or read Linda Tischler’s introduction to Tim’s guest blog.

For the BBC’s “World of Business,” Peter Day interviews Tim Brown about creativity and “the difficult craft of thinking.” For more information on Peter Day’s program, click here. (On April 23, the broadcast will be replayed in the UK on Radio 4 at 20.30 UK time, repeated the following Sunday at 21.30 UK time.)

Listen to the podcast here or download an mp3 of the interview here.
For more about Tim’s take on design thinking, read his blog.

A domain co-lead for IDEO’s Connected Health practice, Arna Ionescu is a panelist at the Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare, in Boston. She’ll be on stage between 11 am and 11:30 am EST on Thursday, April 22. To follow the Twitter feed for anything related to Health2.0, click here.

It may not be entirely fair to call industrial design a slacker at social responsibility. But it’s certainly true that the discipline has struggled to figure out how to do good while still doing well. IDEO’s toolkit provides lofty inspiration and brass-tacks guidelines for firms eager to partners with aid agencies and other nonprofits.

Download the PDF

In a special report on health care and technology, The Economist interviews IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown for three articles.

For an article about what “the rich world’s health-care systems” can learn from India’s entrepreneurs, click here.
To read how technology is making health care more portable, precise and personal, click here.
To consider how far interactive digital medicine can go, click here.
To read Tim’s blog about design thinking, go here.

Reporter Linda Tischler writes about Gary Hustwit’s upcoming film Objectified, which both celebrates industrial design and asks viewers to contemplate the impact of ID. In the film and quoted in the article, IDEO’s Tim Brown, explains, “Most of what we design ends up in the landfill. We have to take that into account.” Other IDEO appearances in the film include David Kelley and Bill Moggridge.

Watch the trailer and read the article here.

To follow Tim’s thinking, read his blog.

The UK’s Design Council recently released the results of the i-team project, a pioneering effort that shows how the public sector can use cutting-edge innovation to create better, more sustainable services. Conceived by Forum for the Future, the i-team project was run as a collaboration with IDEO.

For more information about i-team, click here.

• “Redefining a Profession”
Alice Rawsthorn, a design critic writing for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. Read the article here.

• “Change By Design: In his new book, the CEO of design shop IDEO shows how even hospitals can transform the way they work by tapping frontline staff to engineer change”
Tim Brown writes about design thinking in BusinessWeek. Read the article here.

• “Need to Reinvigorate Your Business? Think Like a Designer”
BNET’s Paul Sloan interviews Tim Brown about Change By Design. Read the article here. Watch the video here.

• “Book Review, Change By Design, by Tim Brown”
Core77’s Robert Blinn points to what he thinks industrial designers will find thrilling about the book: “The reason for the iterative, nonlinear nature of the journey is not that design thinkers are disorganized or undisciplined but that design thinking is an exploratory process; done right, it will inevitably make unexpected discoveries along the way, and it would be foolish not to find out where they lead.” Read the blog post here.

•“Design Thinking”
On the Brian Lehrer Show, Tim talks about the book and taking design beyond packaging and products and into “design thinking.” Read the full article here.

•“Best Business Books of 2009 List”
Change By Design made Fast Company‘s list, “The Best Business Books of 2009.”  View the full list here.

•“Best Innovation and Design Books of 2009”
Change By Design tops BusinessWeek‘s “Best Innovation and Design Books of 2009” list. View the full list here.

Learn more about Change By Design here.

In April, David Kelley won the Edison Achievement Award for Innovation from the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University. He received the award for his “pioneering contributions to the design of breakthrough products, services, and experiences for consumers, as well as his development of an innovative culture that has broad impact.” Past recipients include Ted Turner and Martha Stewart.

For more about the awards, click here.
Read the article in Fast Company here.

The IDEO-designed Hemosense INRatio2 blood coagulation monitor wins a gold MDEA award. For more on the award, read here.