Fast Company reports on the IDEA Awards in “Big Awards for the Year’s Best Industrial Design.” IDEO topped the list for design firms with 8 wins.

Read the article here.

By IDSA

IDEO topped the list of IDSA award winners with eight IDEA awards. Winning designs ranged from human-centered design to research to industrial design.

IDEA Gold:

Human-Centered Design Toolkit

I Miss My Pencil

IDEA Silver:

Steelcase i2i

IDEA Bronze:

GE Caulk Singles

Numico PKU

Peek Mobile

Coalesse Vecta Akira

Steelcase Amia

See the gallery on the IDSA’s website here.

A lot of Chinese companies agree that industrial design breeds enormous business value, while at the same time they consider industrial design to be nothing more than an add-on incremental innovation, the goal of which is limited to making products lighter, smaller or better-looking. So how will industrial design contribute to those Chinese companies that are eager to step beyond their status quo?

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IDEO’s Aaron Sklar will be a panelist at Weight of the Nation, the Center for Disease Control’s inaugural conference on obesity prevention and control, July 27 - 29.  Aaron will serve on the “Leveraging Social Marketing to Reduce Adolescent Obesity” panel.

Weight of the Nation is hosted by CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Association of State and Territorial Public Health Nutrition Directors, the Directors of Health Promotion and Education, and the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors.

Bill Moggridge was honored at a White House luncheon with Michelle Obama along with 9 other recipients of the National Design Award, sponsored by the Cooper-Hewitt. Bill received the lifetime achievement award.

Read the article from The New York Times here.

James Duncan Davidson shares his running notes from Tim Brown’s TEDGlobal 2009 presentation in Oxford, England. Tim talked about how design got small—and can be big again.

By Arna Ionescu

Arna Ionescu writes on gaining a competitive advantage through design thinking in Australasian BioTechnology. The article is based on her workshop presentation at AusMedTech 2009.

To read the article online, click here and scroll to page 52.

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IDEO’s Ripple Effect project with the Acumen Fund and the Gates Foundation, which explores innovation around clean water transport in developing countries, was profiled on Triple Pundit.

Read the article here.

In “IDEO Targets Schools in Climate Change Initiative,” Design Week covers IDEO’s work with Oxfam to help young people understand and engage with climate change.

Read the article here.

TED, a nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading,” blogged about the collaboration of IDEO with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, IDE, Heifer International and ICRW and the resulting Human-Centered Design (HCD) — a system used by multinational corporations to develop design solutions at the intersection of desirability, feasibility, and viability.

As part of the Designers Accord’s Case Studies in Sustainability, Alissa Walker writes about IDEO’s collaboration with the Gates Foundation, IDE, Heifer, and the International Center for Research on Women to create the Human-Centered Design Toolkit.

Read the full story here.
To learn more about or to download the Human-Centered Design Toolkit, click here.
Find out more about the Designers Accord here.

By Fran Samalionis

“When it comes to improving services, is it worth spending money on service designers? Of course, improving services can be attempted without recourse to seeking expert help, but the result is more than likely to be a false economy. Changes in service design will be long-lasting and profitable only if they are driven by insights gained by close observation of the people who use those services. It is this human-centred approach that lays at the heart of everything our design teams do at IDEO.

Design challenges are inherently complex – and every client has their own particular knots to untie - but over the years, our experience has shown that better service design depends on overcoming four crucial problems that are common to all our clients: how to get closer to consumers; how to collaborate across every part of organisation; how to create a strong narrative that inspires key people and finally, how to conquer the fear of failure. Hand in hand with identifying the problems our clients all share has gone the development of techniques to tackle them. This article takes a look at these in detail and shows how they can be used in collaboration with organisations of every size and in every business.”

This article by IDEO’s Fran Samalionis, is published in the new book Designing Services with Innovative Methods by Satu Miettinen and Mikko Koivisto.

Download the PDF here.