As quoted from their blog:

The Bootcamp Bootleg is intended for people who’ve already had an introduction to design thinking, but who need some refreshers as they head out to tackle real-world challenges. The teaching team curated the collection by leveraging the work of many predecessors, drawing from material developed by d.school teaching teams and folks throughout the design world over the last five years.

Download the Guide

hat tip to designsojourn

[Slideshow Link for Email/Other Subscribers]

From my Singaporean pal Brian Ling over at Design Sojourn, comes a set of design strategies he put together for a presentation. While there are some familiar themes regarding customization, usability, crowdsourcing, and designing to communicate an idea, there are also a few notable ones including Haptic Relationships or “high-touch electronics”. I particularly like this strategy because it involves applying usability principles in interfaces conducive to human movement and touch. The Nintendo Wii applied this to gaming in such a way that made total intuitive sense.

I also like using beautiful materials as a strategy. Foremost this is differentiation tactic that when applied to a line, will make it premium. Applied to an entire brand, it’s also likely to become premium in comparison to other brands, although I don’t necessarily think it has to be. What we’re talking about is standing out and looking great - no matter the material cost. Apple notebooks are either white plastic or matte aluminum. Nothing too fancy there, but they sure stand out!

Do you have a favorite strategy or one to add?

[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 30min]

Christina Wodtke speaks at Interaction 09 on defaults, sharing mechanisms, updates, notifications and even SEO as holistic elements of a viral system that is currently driving the popularity of social networks and social media successes everywhere. Over the last three years she’s been working on understanding social collaborative behavior and viral loops, and asserts that interaction design is key to an applications ability to promote itself.  Additionally, she speaks on the underpinnings needed to devise a successful social system as well, touching on identity, reputation, and relationships in digital communities.

[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 30min]

Some interesting ideas by Roger Martin here on how management education can be improved. First he mentions in his assessment of the MBA that most programs tend to be very shallow versus deep. Students are taught a variety of models, theories, and approaches but what remains unexperienced is the ability to decide which should be applied to a particular circumstance. Roger is rightly critical of standardized approaches when he discusses an financial options valuation formula that is applied to every conceivable options type.

Second, he discusses how MBA programs teach subjects individually with very little overlap of other disciplines. This narrow versus broad approach doesn’t allow for people to appreciate how other business functions can have an impact. Also, the philosophical approach of current management education is based on looking after one self, reminiscent of Milton Friedman’s ideas on business’ responsibility. Very true. Ethics, CSR, and Sustainability are definitely elective courses. Shouldn’t social and environmental values in addition to self-interest be integrated into all courses? Beyond what’s merely lawful or customary. What about having courses on other kinds of business models like social enterprises and entrepreneurships?

Lastly, he criticizes the approach of having students analyzing the here and now, then choosing among a set of existing options. Thereupon people are called to calculate the internal rate of return, forecast probability based on past data, and things of the like. In other words, students aren’t being challenged to imagine and create new options. Ultimately we should be more dynamic versus static-oriented.

He goes on to describe how management education can be improved by becoming more deep, broad, and dynamic. By going beyond inductive and deductive logic which refine and hone that which exists, to incorporating abductive logic which explores what can be.

Enter Design Thinking, a balanced orientation to administering business by being analytical (seeking 100% reliability on one end), and intuitive (seeking 100% validity on the other). And that’s how management education should be taught

[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 6.5min]

Full 85min Video Available On Demand - “Sustainability” isn’t just a nice thing to do. It’s a powerful source of business value, an organizing principle for strategy, and a remarkable driver of innovation at every level of the enterprise. And it’s all about design — of products and services, value propositions and contracts, buildings and production lines, marketing campaigns and incentive systems, and the daily conversations that are the life of your business.

Join Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic and author of the acclaimed The Truth About Green Business (FT Press), as he explores how your company can harness 3.85 billion years of R&D — and a commitment to a world that works — to drive innovation, profit and meaning.

Sustainable Brands Boot Camp –13 week online training series designed to teach professionals strategies for building business and brand value through sustainable innovation. Taught by leading experts, topics include market drivers, business model and product innovation, supply chain partnerships, brand strategy and marketing, metrics, and more. Available live and on-demand. Find out more: http://bit.ly/sbbootcamp

[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers -  90min]

Janine Benyus, author of the book “Biomimicry”, speaks extensively about the topic in this great presentation.

Earlier this year I bought myself a copy of John Thackara’s “In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World”, to get a glimpse of what this designer/futurist had to say about sustainability and society. While published in 2005, the content didn’t seem a bit dated as some business and trend books usually do. In many regards, I’d compare the book to “Natural Capitalism” for its contributions of highlighting social/environmental issues and solutions. But what Thackara also does is mix in storytelling, history, trends, potential future scenarios, philosophy, and criticism in such a manner that gives the reader a circular view of what’s going on, without placing heavy emphasis on normative ideas.

Many times in my book reviews I go through the various chapters, highlighting the main points. That hasn’t been easy with this book as it relates to many subjects, some of which readers will already be familiar with and for which further detail won’t be necessary. So at times my writing will more take the form of notes, rather than flowing editorial.

Lightness

Reference to physical weight reduction for process-related energy expenditures (and by that token carbon footprint); systems thinking; adequate provision, consumption, and replenishment of five capitals (natural, social, human, manufactured, financial); eco-efficiency principles of natural capitalism; low material/energy intense solutions; service design instead of ownership; design for easier disassembly leading to increased chance of up/recycling.

Speed

Increased consumption rates are associated with faster-paced, more dynamic lifestyles. The big issue is acceleration. Speed isn’t free. Eco-efficiency gains need to be balanced out in future innovations developed for the same end results. Previously, society operated much more on event/personal time (kairos) versus clock/public time (chronos). Religious calendars had periods of slowness (like Lent, Advent, Ramadan) for a reason. For improved lives, we need to move from real-time to more quality time. Trend examples: slow food, slow cities. Thankfully we tend to live slower as we get older, and with time more people are becoming 50+. Another trend is downshifting life (less money but more flexible time for quality living). The early internet theory of disintermediation’s mass effect on economics and transactions guided by techno invisible hand not entirely true. Trust and social interaction/relationships are still highly important. The telephone is still a very fast and time-effective means of conducting business and developing relations. Japanese word for trust cultivation: Nemawashi - laying the groundwork; process by which groups in Japan develop the shared understanding without which nothing much gets done. “If trust is established it takes  less effort to reach a consensus in regard to any issue.” Trust can’t be digitized.

“Acceleration weighs us down. Always on means seldom free. But the design challenge now is not to design slow systems to replace fast ones…but to enable situations that support an infinite variety of fast and slow moves - at a rhythm dictated by us, not by the system.”

Mobility

Car use versus trains/planes is high. Consider the quantity and quality of time spent in mobility. Actual time = transport + transaction/maintenance time. Logistics is the lifeblood of living operations. While going from Make-to-Build to Make-to-Order and RFID (radio frequency identification) have improved systemic efficiency, large supply networks also have costs in energy (carbon footprint) and materials (packaging/other) from transport and 3rd party warehousing. Solution ideas: 1) Think more, drive less, intermodal transport 2) Substitution; telepresence (like web conferencing) is good, although imperfect for social reasons 3) Move from faster to closer.

Locality

Networked & diverse cities/regions are more resilient and able to take care of their economic and food needs as conditions change.

Situation

Work and living spaces need to be better designed (physically and spiritually) for higher qualities of life.

Conviviality

While the dictionary meaning is “Fond of feasting, drinking, and good company”, John talks in broader terms of human health (physical and social). Solution examples include improved health care systems, barter/noncash trading exchanges, and connected communities of practice/interest. While not mentioned, some of these solutions have come to see the light of day through enabling technology including Freecycle, Craigslist, Meetup.com, Upcoming.org, Tweetups, and the like. For examples of cultural aspects we should consider retaining or designing for, see cultural universals as discussed by George Murdock, among others.

Learning

Too much content; little time to think. “Learning is about the acquisition of new skills, including social ones - not just stockpiling of facts.” eLearning’s history has seen its hype, failures, and re-considered potential. Although to be viable for users, tech support is critical. Increasingly there are shared learning opportunities in corporate/organizational education through wikis and other (social) knowledge management systems. Personal interaction remains important though as part of the learning process, in addition to flexible time management. “New geographies of learning need to be based on redesigned configurations of space, place, and network that respect the social and collaborative nature of learning - while still exploiting the dynamic potential of networked collaboration. We need to design the spatial configuration of education so that it connects communities and learners that, right now, tend to be separated from one another.” Also important are the role that projects play in learning to construct and collaborate; students should help design them too, not just be dictated by the teacher or syllabus. “Technology becomes interesting when it facilitates new kinds of interaction among teachers, students, and the external world - and this does not need to be expensive. To get the most out of technology and networks, new skills and attitudes are needed - and these either are free or can be taught.” These include search & evaluation skills, learning how to be found and how to link, editing, communicating, and organizing all kinds of digital media. Different ways to share & experience knowledge. Assessment (self and guided). Mentors. Mass collaborative learning, wikis. Property rights and commons. Playtime and games; effect of modeling and simulation upon learning.

Literacy

Info overload isn’t the problem. “It’s the unfiltered, unsorted, and unframed…lacking mechanisms to select what’s important. Design task is to make information digestable.”

Smartness

Thackara’s law: “If you put smart technology into a pointless product, the result will be a stupid product.” Law of diminishing amazement (LODA), “The more fancy tech you pack into a product, the harder it becomes to impress people with its benefits.” John goes on to talk about the silliness of some “smart appliance” concepts, and goes on to extol biomimicry. The most important property of future materials is Lightness (to make, to operate/use, to recover, to recycle). Goes on to discuss how advanced sensors and computing yield adaptations to changing conditions in systems. Yet with pervasive computing, people will always be smarter because complex calculations can’t always take ALL variables into account. Personal example: internet ads can sometimes be highly irrelevant and sometimes disrespectful because circumstantial and contextual information is unavailable for conditional logic. HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) design is difficult and can often reduce UX (user experience) satisfaction for a significant percentage of people, if personal interaction options are completely taken away.

“The transition to a light and sustainable economy means moving from an economy of transactions - selling and buying things - to an economy in which the quality of services, not the acquisition of goods, becomes our measure of well-being.” John questions the viability of techno-dependent, ambient intelligent future. Quotes from James Woudhuysen, former manager of research for Philips, “in new technology, systems are more prone to being incompatible than to matching up with each other.”

Flow

John ends the book with the following seven transition frameworks:

1) Blueprint and Plan to Sense and Respond

“Being responsive to events in a context and being able to respond quickly and appropriately when reality changes. This implies that we develop an understanding and sensitivity to the morphology of systems, their dynamics, their “intelligence”- how they work and what stimulates them.” Desired outcomes aren’t static. By understanding why a system is in one state, we can explore the kind of interventions that would nudge it into another more desirable one. This means designing as steering. From thinking of ourselves as authors of a finished work, toward facilitators to help people act more intelligently, in a more design-minded way, in the systems we all live in. Going from designing on the world versus designing in the world. Design in such a framework becomes a process of continuous observation, measurement, and feedback.

2) From High Concept to Deep Context

“Small changes to interconnecting subsystems can make things better, but they can also make things worse. This is why the application of “high-concept” design to contexts we barely understand is irresponsible and probably counterproductive.” Systems are complex; we need to appreciate that and design our man-made ones in that we act lightly, sense feedback, and act again.

3) From Top-Down Design to Seeding Edge Effects

Interconnectedness and the ability for small changes to occur from within -> Dexterity. “To find out what’s happening on the edge, we first need good peripheral vision.” We need to spot opportunities at the juncture between industries; to imagine relationships and connections where none existed before; above all, we need to look in new places for inspiration, because most solutions will involve new alliances and new connections.

4) From Blank Sheets of Paper to Smart Recombination

We need to reuse and recombine actors, ideas, and organizations. The challenge is to innovate by learning from the world.

5) From Science Fiction to Social Fiction

Enhance daily life. The important point when envisioning scenarios of human activity is to distinguish explicitly between what Ezio Manzini calls disabling and enabling solutions. Human interaction is important. Service design sweet spots occur at intersection of latent social needs, open systems, smart consumers, and smart companies.

6) From Designing For to Designing With

Collaborative design, ethnographic research, user-centered design, open innovation, and agile development.

7) From Design as a Product to Design as a Service

And that about does it for today. John’s book is 226 pages and is a worthwhile read for its philosophical inquiries.

[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 60min]

Good ‘ole Bill lays down his thoughts on sustainable design from the regenerative school of thought in this one hour lecture. While I’m quite familiar with it, I thought I’d share it with you here since it’s a very inspirational philosophy and view of the world that “can be” - aligned with nature’s closed-loop systems where waste is equal to food. Although quite alluring, at times the ideas therein can appear lofty, utopian, and impractical precisely because they address systems design at a macro level (although solutions can address the micro as well). What I think you’ll enjoy though beyond the various examples and inspirational visions he portrays in his slides and stories (as is the case with most of his talks you’ll find on the web), is his deep philosophical dive into eco-effectiveness (cradle to cradle) versus eco-efficiency.

At the heart of that juxtaposition is the debate over incrementalism versus radical re-design. The right approach to use will always depend on the context though. Bill frames the argument as choosing to be “less bad” versus becoming neutral or positive. That can particularly be the case when toxicity is an element of the design situation.

Nonetheless, the principles of regenerative design and closed-loop systems are an essential framework to sustainability - so I hope you’ll take away something not only thought-provoking, but also from which you can draw upon in a critical analysis.

Sustainability is a vast field covering multiple topics in operations, marketing, design, innovation, and new business models. While articles, books, and conferences (if you have the budget and time to attend) can be great, nothing beats having professionals giving you the inside scoop.

The creators of the Sustainable Brands Conference, with whom I work as their community engagement manager, are organizing an online training seminar for 13 weeks. In order to help further this movement along, we’ve recognized many smart business people need to get up to speed - and we’ve done so by getting some of the world’s leading practitioners to teach the subjects they’re passionate about for 90min - available live and on-demand for a very affordable price.

If you’d like to learn more, go ahead and check out the speakers, session descriptions, and dates here. I’ve included the titles of the sessions here for you to see. P.S. - I’ll be speaking on the last session in February on public relations and social media

1. Introduction to Opportunities in Sustainable Innovation
2. Innovation Opportunities in Response to Today’s Environmental Hot Buttons: Climate Change, Water & Waste
3. The Changing Consumer Marketplace
4. Organizational Models for Integrating CSR with Brands
5. Building a Balanced Sustainable Brand Strategy
6. Sustainable Product Design – An Overview of Prevailing Approaches
7. Building Collaborative Supply Chain Partnerships
8. Transforming Your Company Through Sustainability – and Engaging Your Customers and Employees in the Process
9. Introduction to Life Cycle Impact Assessment
10. Business Metrics: Dashboards, KPI’s and other strategies for Goal Setting and Measurement
11. Building Credibility/Avoiding Greenwashing
12. Designing Communications that Resonate
13. PR/Social Media and Alternate Community Building Strategies

Tim Leberecht of Frog Design gave a presentation earlier this year at the Next09 conference in Berlin on how societal changes in regards to both the economy and people’s interactions with eachother and brands online are creating a convergence of services offered by the marketing and design agencies, and why “Meaning” has become sought after and a key deliverable. The video and slides are available below. See also his table of 5 attributes of meaning and the mediums/tactics to address them.

[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 30min]

[Slideshow Link for Email/Other Subscribers]