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curated by sierra gonzalez 

How Should We Educate Designers? And For What?

A fresh and fascinating discussion is under way in the D-School space over just what to teach designers. It’s an important debate because it involves the future of America’s talent pool. As any business person will tell you these days,…

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(via Sierra’s shared items in Google Reader)

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Wired: Where are you looking for innovative media?
Tibor Kalman: I don’t know. Probably it’s being hatched in some garage. It’s always the freaks in garages who make things move forward. There’s always a garage and antisocial behavior involved. I think without those two things there is no real cultural advancement.

Wired 4.12: Color Him a Provocateur

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One man’s trash: “Hey Chair Be a Bookshelf!” by Maarten Baas. Picture by M. van Houten for A world in Smoke and Clay | International Herald Tribune

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D schools are doing a serious disservice to their students by only teaching them “design thinking” when a class in typography or mechanics or drawing might not only give them a valuable skill, but also teach them thinking and making and doing — all at the same time. For design to be truly useful as a profession and as a discipline, designers can’t just use “design thinking” to come up with strategies and concepts. Dare I suggest that those are much easier than building a product? Some notes on a whiteboard and a pretty concept movie or storyboard pales in comparison to the messy world of prototyping, development, and manufacturing. It’s harder to execute an idea than to have one, genius being 99% perspiration and all.

What we’re going to end up with is a generation of “innovators” who are MBAs in MFAs’ clothing, who can neither create or run businesses like entrepreneurs can, nor design products and services like designers can. It’s the worst of both worlds. What we as employers are searching for are people who can do as well as think. This isn’t to say that we’re looking for glossy stylists either: we want designers who create thoughtful, meaningful designs: designs that pay attention to details, and have emotion and craft in them, as well as reason and cleverness. The world desperately needs those designers. Start making them again.

Design Schools: Please Start Teaching Design Again | Adaptive Path blog (This post sparked Bruce Nussbaum’s counterpoint blog post, linked below.)

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Design Vs. Design Thinking--The Talent Battle Continues.

There is a nasty civil war going on in design education between traditionalists who want to focus on form and a new generation who focus on concept. This generation is into design thinking. It’s an important battle for the entire…

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(via Sierra’s shared items in Google Reader)

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Account planners and fearless noticing

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Yesterday I was in Chicago. In the afternoon, thanks to an invitation
from Mike Ronkoske, I did a presentation for a group of planners and
clients at Energy BBDO. The theme was anthropology and ethnography.

I was attempting to describe how an anthropologist notices, and how he gets from noticing to insight.

One of my talking points was a weird thing I noticed on the Connecticut
train. Guys were reading papers and magazines, and snapping each page
as they went. In and of itself, this sort of thing is annoying and
banal in equal measure, the sort of thing we notice only to dismiss.

But in this case, I found myself wondering, why snapping? Almost
nothing is actually nothing. The surface of social life is littered
with tiny but telling details. The anthropologist’s job is to notice
and notice and notice. So I noticed snapping.

And at this point in my presentation I actually got a little tearful, I
have to tell you, and, as I don’t have to tell you, there is no crying
in anthropology, so I kinda had to get a grip. But I found myself
telling these young planners about the time I sat beside Marshall
Sahlins, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, as he
read one of my papers. Professor Sahlins was traveling at speed
through my paper, not because it was well written but because not even
bad writing could slow him down. Suddenly, he stopped absolutely dead
in his tracks and said, “hm, I wonder why that is.”

I was watching a very smart man acknowledge the limits of
understanding. You could almost hear him thinking, “why can’t I think
this?” This is the secret of noticing. Spotting things that defy
expectation, things that don’t “compute.” The temptation for the
rest of us is to “fake the results” and assimilate the anomalous to
existing categories. Good noticers are fearless noticers.


(via Sierra’s shared items in Google Reader)

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So one Big Design Management Challenge is how do you switch gears from designing for to designing with? Maybe the object of design is not a finished product but a set of tools that allow people to design their experiences for themselves.

Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?

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If Designers Are the Enemy, Are Innovators the Heroes?

Woohoo! There’s nothing like a design bombshell to distract us from our Monday mourning. It all started when Bruce… (via Sierra’s shared items in Google Reader)

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Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?

In a speech to design management students at Parsons, Bruce Nussbaum explains the challenges of an increasingly democratic design landscape.

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