If Design Thinking Can Power Up Companies, How About "Art"? - Idris Mootee

If "Design Thinking" Can Power Up Companies, How About "Art"? "Art" Should Not Be Reduced To Something Just For Display. "Art" Is The Soul Of Design. L1010301 This is the view from my temporary office. I have received a lot of great feedback from my last post and I guess it is a popular subject. And there are many different point-of-views out there. I want to continue on the subject and this was written on my 18 hour transpacific flight while eating a stack of home made French toast because I can’t stand airline food. Executives are increasingly convinced that businesses are not merely offering functional devices or products to help customers to get their jobs done, but also visual imagery, customer experiences, user identity and social connectiveness. This new design consciousness is a result of many factors including the commodization of quality manufacturing, proliferation of channels, oversaturation of brands and products and rapidly changing customer expectations. Plus a heightened demand for better aesthetic experience and usability given the increasingly complex interfaces for technology products. Design has (and should) become a critical element within the strategic tool kit for new product development. But it can be useful as part of the business strategy tool kit to create growth.

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The Real World According to the Minds of Two Game Designers - A TED Collage

Two of the world's leading game design experts, Jesse Schell , an academic, and his even younger peer, Seth Priebatsch, an entrepreneur offer a take on game technology and how they see it evolving and how it influences the world in which we live.

From his official bio: "Prior to starting Schell Games in 2004, Jesse Schell was the Creative Director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, where he worked and played for seven years as designer, programmer and manager on several projects for Disney theme parks and DisneyQuest, as well as on Toontown Online, the first massively multiplayer game for kids.

"Schell is also on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches classes in Game Design and serves as advisor on several innovative projects. Formerly the Chairman of the International Game Developers Association, he is also the author of the award winning book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses."

Schell Games' latest endeavor: creating a video game based on the box office hit The Mummy. 

Two things you'll notice about Seth Priebatsch: One, his infectious, get-you-out-of-your-chair enthusiasm. Two, the inventory of entrepreneurial feats he's managed to accumulate at a remarkably young age. The 21-year-old founded his first startup at age 12, and by age 18, he'd founded another -- PostcardTech, which makes interactive marketing tours for CD-ROM.

Now he's working on SCVNGR, "a massive experiment in building a mobile game together." Backed by Google Ventures, SCVNGR is part game, part game platform.  Players play SCVNGR by going places, doing challenges and having fun -- outside of the office, beyond the screen, in the real world. Organizations use SCVNGR by building on the game layer by adding their own challenges to the places they care about.

The Art of Business Design 2.0 - James Rock

View more presentations from James Rock.

The Design of Business - A Great Blog Reflection By Anders Sunderlin on Roger Martin's Book on Business Models.(2009)

The Design of Business: Why design thinking is the next competitive advantage, by Roger Martin was a positive surprise as it was a quick read, well structured, delivered several interesting concepts and some in depth cases on design thinking and business model innovation. Even though several of the cases are familiar for many readers (such as P&G, Apple, Cirque du Soleil, McDonalds and RIM) Roger, who is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, professor of strategic management, and author of the book The Opposable Mind, adds interesting perspectives and sometimes information from behind the scenes working as a consultant and advisor. The book is an extension of Roger's popular article (free download) from 2004 with the same name. The book in three bullet points: * It introduces and explores the concept of the "Knowledge Funnel" describing how knowledge advances from mystery to heuristic, to algorithm for businesses to gain efficiency and lower costs, and the activities of moving across the knowledge stages (exploration) and operating within each knowledge stage (exploitation).

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The Creative Process Gone Wrong - Great Video and Article - Bob Sutton

One of my students, Rob, just sent me a link to this video on how the design of the stop sign is ruined by a bad creative process -- unfortunately, this parody resembles the process in far too many organizations and teams that try to do creative work in real organizations. It is funny but disturbing. He saw this in Tina Seelig's class, who teaches a fantastic class on the creative process. This video brought to mind three things:

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