Archive

The Economist is presenting a series of online articles about design thinking in the lead-up to the magazine’s “Ideas Economy: Innovation” event in Berkeley, California. IDEO’s Tim Brown and David Fetherstonhaugh write on the power of collective contribution. Click for the full article.

March 11-12, 2010

The Economist is hosting a conference to explore how today’s challenges reflect customers’ fast-changing needs. At the event, IDEO’s Paul Bennett joins the discussion about how businesses need to start thinking of new ways to compete. Click to the Economist's website for more information about the conference.

IDEO has been named one of Fast Company's 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2010.
View the full list here.

Virtual Wallet, an IDEO project with PNC Financial Services Group, has been chosen as a 2010 Edison Best New Products Award finalist. The awards celebrate the persistence and excellence personified by Thomas Alva Edison and work to increase America’s drive in the realm of innovation, creativity and ingenuity throughout the global economy.

Watch a live announcement about the awards on Discovery.com. (The dial-in question number is (240) 662-1815.)

Read more about the Edison Awards here.

Presented by IDEO and hosted by DESIGN 21: Social Design Network, the Living Climate Change Video Challenge aims to extend the conversation about how daily life is shaped by climate change to a wide global audience. Entrants are invited to create their own 2-minute videos, which will be evaluated by an impressive panel of judges drawn from education, technology, media and government:

Judges for the under 18 age category
- Dr. Milton Chen, senior fellow and executive director emeritus of the George Lucas Educational Foundation
- Roshi Givechi, design director and co-lead of IDEO San Francisco
- David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Stanford “d.school”
- Sir Ken Robinson, celebrated creativity and education expert
- Sandy Speicher, Design for Learning domain leader, IDEO

Judges for 18 and over category
- Wendy E Brawer, DESIGN 21 advisory board member and founding director of Green Map System
- Allan Chochinov, editor-in-chief, Core77.com
- Mat Hunter, chief design officer, Design Council
- Gary Hustwit, independent filmmaker
- Xeni Jardin, co-editor of BoingBoing
- Jennifer Leonard, IDEO project lead and Living Climate Change guest editor
- Bill Moggridge, director, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
- Pascal Soboll, practice lead, IDEO

For details, visit Living Climate Change.

View a PDF about the Living Climate Change Video Challenge.

Innovation gives leading organizations an advantage over their competition. Design thinking is an approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit, taking a human-centered approach to enable the cultivation and development of ideas into tangible strategies and offerings. It accelerates innovation to help create better solutions for the challenges facing business and society.

Design Thinker is a simulation game created ExperiencePoint in collaboration with IDEO that provides a meaningful experience with design thinking. Users compete to solve a realistic and complex challenge using design thinking, while engaging with the terms, techniques and thought patterns of successful innovators. Built for designers and non-designers alike, Design Thinker creates an energizing, practical and relevant learning experience that supports tangible business objectives using leading edge technology. The game can be easily integrated into leadership and management development programs, and its innovation content is readily linked to other key business learning modules and applied to action-learning projects.

Design Thinker is available in flexible formats: it is optimized for a half-day or full-day experience, and also available as an in-class exercise or online experience for remote, in-tact teams.

To learn more about Design Thinker, visit experiencepoint.com/sims/DesignThinker

Columnist and panel moderator Alice Rawsthorn asks, What exactly is sustainable design? What constitutes success? And failure? On what criteria? These issues were debated at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The panel, “Design for Sustainability,” included William McDonough, the American architect who co-authored the book, “Cradle to Cradle”; Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity; and IDEO's Tim Brown. Click here for the full story.

March 2, 2010, 10am - 5pm

Your invited to join the Vine Salon, “User-Based Design Solutions to Meet the Challenges of Community” — a day of hands-on workshops and collaborative design thinking exercises, followed by a wine and hors d’oeuvres reception. The event, hosted by PCBC, will take place at IDEO's Palo Alto office.
For more information about the event or to buy tickets to the event, click here.
Download the program agenda here.

Sandy Speicher is included in the Metropolis article, “Back to the Future.” In the story, Sandy explains, "When you're looking at new models of education, the first question is: How much do you want to stick to the paradigm, and how much do you want to break it?” To learn more, read the full article.

Last night, IDEO Chicago hosted an IxDA networking / knowledge-sharing event in its brand-new Chicago studio titled “Embracing the Physical/Digital Divide: Projects and Inspiration from IDEO Chicago.” The event allowed IDEO designers to showcase cutting-edge interaction design and (re)introduce themselves to the city’s creative community.
Learn more about IxDA Chicago here.
Check out pictures of the event on IDEO's Facebook page.

Mat Hunter, a former partner at IDEO, has been appointed as the new chief design officer for the Design Council in the United Kingdom.
Read the article in Design Week here.

Bill Moggridge has the incredible honor of leading the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York as the museum's newest director. He replaces Acting Director Caroline Baumann, who stepped in after the departure of Paul Warwick Thompson last summer.

Last year, Moggridge was given the Cooper Hewitt's Lifetime Achievement award, presented by First Lady Michelle Obama. Read about the award here.

Phil McKinney moderates a podcast interview with Dave Watson from Ford and Steve Bishop from IDEO. They discuss their co-innovation project on the Ford Fusion — a collaboration resulting in the development of the next generation instrument experience. This interview addresses the challenges in creating breakthrough innovations inside large corporations, co-innovation approaches and benefits, human-centered design approaches, the value of prototyping, and keys to staying focused.
Listen to the podcast here.
Read more about the interview here.
Learn more about IDEO's work with Ford here.

Tim Brown's Change By Design tops BusinessWeek's "Best Innovation and Design Books of 2009" list. I Miss My Pencil by IDEO's Martin Bone and Kara Johnson is also recognized.

Read about the list here.

In the Wall Street Journal, Gary Hamel writes about the power and importance of design, highlighting Tim Brown's take on design thinking. As Gary puts it, “Tim’s argument: design should be viewed instead as a fundamental business discipline that can produce insanely loyal customers and fat, chunky margins (and also help us solve global-scale challenges like pollution and poverty).” For the full article, click here. For information about Tim’s book on design thinking, Change by Design, click here.

IDEO's Tom Kelley recently spoke at Bilbao’s Global Business Conference in Spain and was interviewed by two major Spanish publication, El País and El Correo. El País is the most widely circulated newspaper in Spain.
“Nunca hay que malgastar una buena crisis,” El Correo (Read the full article in Spanish here.) “Con China sólo se puede competir con algo novedoso,” El País (Read the full article in Spanish here.)

November 17-18, 2009

IDEO's John Rehm will speak at the Design Thinking Symposium in Singapore, part of the Singapore Design Festival. His talk, “Design Thinking to Transform Your Organization,” will take place on November 18.

IDEO’s intranet, The Tube, has been honored with an Intranet Innovation Award. The IIAs are global awards that celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets. The goal is to find these ideas (whether large or small), and to share them with the wider community. Gold Awards are given across four different categories, each focusing on a specific aspect of intranets. Platinum Award winners are then chosen to recognize the most extraordinary entries for the year. To read more about the awards, click here.

In the December issue of WIRED UK, Ben Hammersley writes about how IDEO approaches design thinking as a practical way to solve problems. Read the full article here. To read what editor-in-chief David Rowan said about IDEO, click here.

Download the PDF here.

In “Social Software: The Other ‘Design for Social Impact,’” Gentry Underwood discusses the use of social software tools, from wikis to Facebook, in the corporate environment. Read the article on Core77 here.

October 27-30, 2009

TEDMED celebrates conversations that tackle the big issues of health, from personal and public health care to devices, Hollywood, and hospitals. At the event, IDEO’s Tim Brown will ask, “What happens with a design thinking approach to health care?”

Tim’s talk is Wednesday morning. To see the full schedule, click here.

In the Corner Office column of The New York Times, Adam Bryant interviews Tim Brown about leadership and lessons learned. Click here for the full article in The Times.

On Metropolis, Tim Brown writes about how he came to design. “It took years before this industrial designer realized that the true power of his craft transcended the physical object,” he explains. Read more about the making of a design thinker here .

GOOD magazine included “IDEO Social Impact” on its list of the GOOD 100. Others included on the list are Hillary Clinton, Electric Cars, Harlem Children’s Zone, and TEDx. Read the article here.

The Khaleej Times reported on Paul Bennett’s Dubai talk, highlighting his IDEO Facebook question, What is your dream for Dubai? Read the full story here. Join the next IDEO Facebook conversation here.