“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”– Steve Jobs.
Not all of us get to design the next sexy iPhone but that does not have to stop you from making better designs and innovate. If you stop and think about it, you have a great deal of influence on the projects you are working on. Take for example a simple fixture design for your next CNC project. Could you pick a different material, re-use old parts, or something be 3D printed?. What about function and handling, could you make it more operator friendly? You have the power to design and innovate many things around you. What about the design of your department, your shop floor or the structure on the way to handle the next big project. Designing the next cool consumer product or a drill fixture always has the possibility for change and improvements.
In the book Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. Tim Brown shares his many years of knowledge on how to inspire Innovation and the systems to transform organizations.
The power of Design Thinking. There is always the old way to do things and it can defiantly be wise to listen to the old folks around as re-invinting the wheel seems silly, but with new materials and machines come new techniques.
Via Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation: Technology still has not run its course. The communications revolution sparked by the Internet has brought people closer together and given them the opportunity to share perspectives and create new ideas as never before. The sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics have merged in the forms of biotechnology and nanotechnology to create the promise of lifesaving medicines and wondrous new materials. But these spectacular achievements are unlikely to help us reverse our ominous course. Just the opposite. We need new choices. A purely technocentric view of innovation is less sustainable now than ever, and a management philosophy based only on selecting from existing strategies is likely to be overwhelmed by new development at home and abroad.
It takes time to create the next big design. Our culture is in a crazy emergency. With companies pressing their designers to get things created for the overnight 3D printing schedule or sample parts for the following morning meeting with the customer. We need to embrace patience and comeliness.
Via Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation: One autumn day in 1940 the industrial designer Raymond Loewy was visited in his office by George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company and one of the more colorful personalities in American business history. Hill offered Loewy $50,000 if he could improve upon the Lucky Strike package-a wager turned to Loewy and asked when it wuold be ready. “Oh, I don’t know, some nice spring morning I will feel like designing the Lucky package and you’ll have it in a matter of hours. I’ll call you then.” Today we no longer feel that we must sit patiently and wait for some outrageous insight to strike us. Inspiration always involves an element of chance, but, as Louis Pasteur observed in a famous lecture of 1854, “Chance only favors the prepared mind.” Certain themes and variations-techniques of observation, principles of empathy, and efforts to move beyond the individual-can all be thought of as ways to preparing the mind of the design thinker ti find insight.
Its time to make thing better. Tim Browns book is a great read. It will leave you in an innovative and inspiring mind.
Via Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation: The field of innovation. 1. The best ideas emerge when the whole organizational ecosystem-not just its designers and engineers and certainly not just management-has room to experiment. 2. Those most exposed to changing externalities (new technology, shifting consumer base, strategic threats or opportunities) are the ones best placed to respond and most motivated to do so. 3. Ideas should not be favored based on who creates them. (Repeat aloud.) 4. Ideas that create a buzz should be favored. Indeed, ideas should gain a vocal following. however small, before being given organizational support. 5. The “gardening” skills of senior leadership should be used to tend, prune, and harvest ideas. MBAs call this “risk tolerance.” I call it the top-down bit. 6. An overarching purpose should be articulated so that the organization has a sense of direction and innovators don’t feel the need for constant supervision.
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