Design Dissertation 2010

Mark Ingham: New Paradigms in Pedagogical Thinking for the Academy of the very near Future, or how the Wasp Became the Orchid #STU10

mima27 — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:52:12 +0000

Mark Ingham: New Paradigms in Pedagogical Thinking for the Academy of the very near Future, or how the Wasp Became the Orchid #STU10.

What is Design Thinking Anyway?

mima27 — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:52:33 +0000

Roger Martin from: http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=11097

Design thinking, as a concept, has been slowly evolving and coalescing over the past decade. One popular definition is that design thinking means thinking as a designer would, which is about as circular as a definition can be. More concretely, Tim Brown of IDEO has written that design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” [1] A person or organization instilled with that discipline is constantly seeking a fruitful balance between reliability and validity, between art and science, between intuition and analytics, and between exploration and exploitation. The design-thinking organization applies the designer’s most crucial tool to the problems of business. That tool is abductive reasoning.

Don’t feel bad if you’re not familiar with the term. Formal logic isn’t systematically taught in our North American educational system, except to students of philosophy or the history of science. The vast majority of students are exposed to formal logic only by inference and then only to the two dominant forms of logic — deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Those two modes, grounded in the scientific tradition, allow the speaker to declare at the end of the reasoning process that a statement is true or false.

Deductive logic — the logic of what must be — reasons from the general to the specific. If the general rule is that all crows are black, and I see a brown bird, I can declare deductively that this bird is not a crow.

Inductive logic — the logic of what is operative — reasons from the specific to the general. If I study sales per square foot across a thousand stores and find a pattern that suggests stores in small towns generate significantly higher sales per square foot than stores in cities, I can inductively declare that small towns are my more valuable market.

Deduction and induction are reasoning tools of immense power. As knowledge has advanced, our civilization has accumulated more deductive rules from which to reason. In field after field, we stand on the shoulders of the giants who have come before us. And advances in statistical methods have furnished us with ever more powerful tools for reasoning inductively. Thirty years ago, few in a boardroom would have dared to cite the R² of regression analysis, but now the statistical tools behind this form of induction are relatively common in business settings. So it is no wonder that deduction and induction hold privileged places in the classroom and, inevitably, the boardroom as the preeminent tools for making an argument and proving a case.

Yet a reasoning toolbox that holds only deduction and induction is incomplete. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, American philosophers such as William James and John Dewey began to explore the limits of formal declarative logic — that is, inductive and deductive reasoning. They were less interested in how one declares a statement true or false than in the process by which we come to know and understand. To them, the acquisition of knowledge was not an abstract, purely conceptual exercise, but one involving interaction with and inquiry into the world around them. Understanding did not entail progress toward an absolute truth but rather an evolving interaction with a context or environment.

James, Dewey, and their circle became known as the American pragmatist philosophers, so called because they argued that one could gain understanding only through one’s own experiences. Among these early pragmatists, perhaps the greatest of them and certainly the most intriguing was Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce (rhymes with “terse”) was fascinated by the origins of new ideas and came to believe that they did not emerge from the conventional forms of declarative logic. In fact, he argued that no new idea could be proved deductively or inductively using past data. Moreover, if new ideas were not the product of the two accepted forms of logic, he reasoned, there must be a third fundamental logical mode. New ideas came into being, Peirce posited, by way of “logical leaps of the mind.” New ideas arose when a thinker observed data (or even a single data point) that didn’t fit with the existing model or models. The thinker sought to make sense of the observation by making what Peirce called an “inference to the best explanation.” The true first step of reasoning, he concluded, was not observation but wondering. Peirce named his form of reasoning abductive logic. It is not declarative reasoning; its goal is not to declare a conclusion to be true or false. It is modal reasoning; its goal is to posit what could possibly be true. (For further information, see “Why You’ve Never Heard of Charles Sanders Peirce.”)

Whether they realize it or not, designers live in Peirce’s world of abduction; they actively look for new data points, challenge accepted explanations, and infer possible new worlds. By doing so, they scare the hell out of a lot of businesspeople. For a middle manager forced to deal with flighty, exuberant “creative types,” who seem to regard prevailing wisdom as a mere trifle and deadlines as an inconvenience, the admonition to “be like a designer” is tantamount to saying “be less productive, less efficient, more subversive, and more flaky” — not an attractive proposition. And it is a fair critique that abduction can lead to poor results; unproved inferences might lead to success in time, but then again, they might not.

Some abductive thinkers fail to heed Brown’s requirement that the design must be matched to what is technologically feasible, launching products that do not yet have supporting technology. Consider the software designers who inferred from the growth of the Internet that consumers would want to do all their shopping online, from pet supplies to toys to groceries. Online security and back-end infrastructure had not yet caught up to their ideas, dooming them to failure.

Other abductive thinkers fail to address Brown’s second requirement: that the innovation must make business sense. Looking back on the dot-com crash, Michael Dell, founder of Dell, argues that little has changed. “Still today in our industry, if you go to a trade show, you walk around and you will find a lot of technology for which there is no problem that exists,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Hey, look at this, we’ve got a great solution and there is no problem to solve here.’ ” [2] Think of the Apple Newton, the world’s first portable data assistant. Launched in 1993, it utterly flopped. According RIM’s Lazaridis, it was a failure of abduction. “It had no future,” he argues. “What problem did it solve? What value did it create? It was a research project. What could you do with it that you couldn’t do with a laptop? Nothing. And everything you could do with it, you could do better with a laptop.” Apple Computer (as it was known then) wasn’t wrong when it inferred that customers would value a small, portable, digital assistant, but it didn’t ultimately deliver a solution that matched the insight.

So the prescription is not to embrace abduction to the exclusion of deduction and induction, nor is it to bet the farm on loose abductive inferences. Rather, it is to strive for balance. Proponents of design thinking in business recognize that abduction is almost entirely marginalized in the modern corporation and take it upon themselves to make their companies hospitable to it. They choose to embrace a form of logic that doesn’t generate proof and operates in the realm of what might be — a realm beyond the reach of data from the past.

That’s a risk many leaders won’t take. Making Peirce’s logical leaps is not consistent or reliable; nor does it faithfully adhere to predetermined budgets. But the far greater risk is to maintain an environment hostile to abductive reasoning, the proverbial lifeblood of design thinkers and the design of business. Without the logic of what might be, a corporation can only refine its current heuristic or algorithm, leaving it at the mercy of competitors that look upstream to find a more powerful route out of the mystery or a clever new way to drive the prevailing heuristic to algorithm. Embracing abduction as the coequal of deduction and induction is in the interest of every corporation that wants to prosper from design thinking, and every person who wants to be a design thinker.

“What is Design Thinking” is an excerpt from Roger Martin’s new book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009).

Notes

1 Tim Brown, “Design Thinking. ” Harvard Business Review, June 2008. p. 86.

2 Michael Dell, in conversation with the author as part of the Rotman School of Management’s Integrative Thinking Experts Speaker Series, September 21, 2004.

Filed under: Books

Learning to Design Without Losing Your Soul

mima27 — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 10:04:29 +0000

Learning to Design Without Losing Your Soul

By Francisco Inchauste on January 27, 2011

Aspiring designers are failing. They are being let down by their schools and sometimes by our design community. In America, creativity is on a decline. The resources available online are massive; Quality content is hard to find.

“I’m eager to hire the next great class of designers, but to my dismay–and the dismay of many young hopefuls who’ve often spent many years and thousands of dollars preparing to enter the industry–I’m finding that the impressive academic credentials of most students don’t add up to the basic skills I require in a junior designer.” — Gadi Amit¹

The design community has a new challenge. It’s not how we push design to the next level. It’s not how we best design publications for the 80 tablets coming out this year. It is something I see as much more critical: Guiding the next generation of designers.

More at: http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/learning-to-design-without-losing-your-soul/

From:

Smashing Magazine http://bit.ly/exJnSA
01/02/2011 16:40

Filed under: Web-sites

Just in Time

mima27 — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:53:53 +0000

Just in Time, or A Short History of Production

Installation/Book

London

A book printed through a printing chain made of four desktop printers using four different colors and technologies dated from 1880 to 1976. A production process that brings together small scale and large scale production, two sides of the same history.

MAGENTA (Stencil duplicator, 1880)
CYAN (Spirit duplicator, 1923)
BLACK (Laser printer, 1969)
YELLOW (Inkjet printer, 1976)

210 x 297 mm
42 pages
100 copies
english

Filed under: Books, Exhibitions

D&AD Student Awards: Help is at hand

mima27 — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:14:25 +0000

Help is at hand PDF

Dear Mark,To help your students in the generation and development of their ideas for this year’s briefs we’re running three Student Awards Sharp’ners on 25, 26 and 27 January in London. Each event will play host to recent graduates, Creative Directors and Black Pencil winners who will share their experiences, top tips and sources of inspiration.

Each event will feature a Creative Brief Station, where you and your students can meet the D&AD team and practitioners to get advice on your students’ ideas and work so far. In addition, many of this year’s sponsors will be present to reveal the inside-story on their brands.

Venue: Vibe Bar, Brick Lane, E1 6QL
Start-time: 6:30pm
Members: Free
Non-Members: £5 per night

Tuesday 25 January 2011 – Advertising: What’s with the big ideas? Having them, honing them and winning with them, four teams will push their creative generation skills battling against other teams to win the rest of the audiences’ vote.

Confirmed so far:

Albion
Aaron Hinchion
Jon Plackett
Nick Darken

AMV BBDO
Nicholas Hulley
Nadja Lossgott

BUY TICKETS

Wednesday 26 January 2011 - Crafts 6 x 6Six speakers with six minutes each share their latest insights and inspiration from the worlds of Typography, Animation, Illustration, Photography, Copywriting and Film-making.

Confirmed so far:

Noma Bar
David Wilson
Chris O’Reilly
Laura Pannack
Sarah Brownrigg
Amelia Noble
Phil Nutley
Walter Campbell

BUY TICKETS

Thursday 27 January 2011 - You The JuryWhat’s the story behind those harsh decisions that govern the course of the design categories in the professional and Student Awards each year? Understand why things win, see a Student Awards category being judged live and test your own designs against the criteria.

Confirmed so far:

Jake Smith – JP74
Steve Owen – Figtree
Clem Halpin – Turner Duckworth
Paul Kemp-Robertson – Contagious
Fanny Siglers

BUY TICKETS

Text of Dissertation Hand in Friday 10 December 2010

mima27 — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 09:25:44 +0000

Dear Design Dissertation Student

175325

Text or Website of the Design Dissertation

DESI

1103

Dissertation (Design)

MB Ingham, ES McQuiston

10/12/2010

Next week hand in a completed [one copy only] printed text or URL [if you doing an on-line version] of the final dissertation with some or all of your illustrations in with the text and an indication of what your design for it will look like by 4pm on 0/12/2010 at the School Reception Desk, with header sheet…. 175325. This should be simply bound using the heat binder in the Library if you want. No ring bound files or loose bits of paper please. Be professional and think of your reader!

I would also like you to upload this as a PDF to your WordPress Web presence by Wednesday 15 December….

Coursework is receipted on the understanding that it is the student’s own work and that it has not, in whole or part, been presented elsewhere for assessment. Where material has been used from other sources it has been properly acknowledged in accordance with the University’s Regulations regarding Cheating and Plagiarism.

I will be around on Friday morning and I can open up LAB C at about 8am if you want to finish it off there…

Have a good week and all the best

Mark

PS Please bring All the books I leant out to you last term [Visual Research and No More Rules etc] and hand them in with your text. No Books No Degree!

Filed under: Design Dissertation, Hand Ins

The Future of Advertising

mima27 — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:42:14 +0000

By: Danielle SacksNovember 17, 2010

Advertising is on the cusp of its first creative revolution since the 1960s. But the ad industry might get left behind.

EnlargeIllustrations by Tavis Coburn

Twenty creative directors, planners, media strategists, and account executives from agencies across the country are down on all fours on the floor of a 100-year-old tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They are each staring down at a blank poster-size sheet of paper, contemplating their most abject fears about their careers, their livelihoods, and their future. They have reason to worry. They are, after all, in the business of advertising.

This slight three-story brick building on the edge of Chinatown has been taken over by Hyper Island, a school based in Sweden renowned for producing the most coveted digital talent in the ad industry. That school is located in an old prison on the Baltic Sea, and students are taught that there are no boundaries when it comes to digital marketing.

Last summer, the Swedes at Hyper Island recognized that where there’s panic, there’s opportunity, and opened this New York branch. Like the many foreigners who settled in this downtown locale before, the school arrived with its own set of promises — to drag the denizens of Madison Avenue into the 21st century. While its students back in Sweden are “digital natives,” these elder New Yorkers are “digital immigrants,” who have gathered for three days of hard-core immersion in dealing with the chaos digital technology has wrought on their industry. “Something digital immigrants would do,” explains one instructor, “is make a phone call to make sure someone received an email.”

Most of the men and women here — average age: 38 — have worked at agencies for more than a decade. Such tenure used to be considered an asset, but these days it’s more of a liability. They’re all well aware that coding is now prized over copywriting and that a résumé that includes Xbox and Google is more desirable than one featuring stints at BBDO or Grey.

For more go to: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/151/mayhem-on-madison-avenue.html

Filed under: Branding, Magazines

The Design Dissertation Helps You Get a Job?

mima27 — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 12:56:51 +0000

The Design Dissertation is one of the most demanding yet potentially most rewarding elements of any design course. Thoughtfully researched, it can be extremely valuable to your own learning development but also and help you get the job you want.

If you look at an article in the Wall Street Journal by Marisa Taylor in September this year she wrote, ‘When asked which skills new college graduates needed to improve most, more than half of the respondents to the question on The Wall Street Journal’s survey of 479 college recruiters named some combination of critical thinking, problem solving skills and the ability to think independently.’ Writing your dissertation will enable you to start developing these valuable thinking, research and writing skills. Thinking critically analytically, synthesizing complicated information, writing well, and organizing your time will all serve you well regardless of the career you begin. The Design Dissertation will help you with thinking differently, critically and creatively. It will help you get a job and a job better than someone who has not done one.

That is what I think, what do you? Mark

Quote from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703882304575466100773788806.html

Draft Dissertation Friday 29th October

mima27 — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 17:49:56 +0000

Re: Header Sheet Number 174414

Dear Dissertation Students

Just to remind you that you have to hand in your draft dissertation tomorrow. This has to be with a physical Header sheet as usual and you have until 4pm to do this. If you do not hand something in tomorrow[Friday] without extenuating circumstances you will be marked 0% and as this counts for 15% of your marks you can then only get 85% more marks…

You do not have to print out all of your work as you will be marked on what you have uploaded on to your website and the whole of your website. This has to be clearly labelled as ‘Draft Dissertation’ and must conformed you what your dissertation tutor has asked you to do.

You have tutorials as usual tomorrow at the same times as you have been having this term. Absence is not an option….

Best wishes

Mark

A ‘Draft’ of your whole dissertation showing how it will be structured and a fair amount of written text to accompany this structure. This is to be uploaded to your personal WordPress website, which will also be assessed for its clarity and purpose.

Filed under: Hand Ins, Timetables

A fresh look at Wally Olins’s highly regarded branding manual, now in paperback

mima27 — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:48:13 +0000

Reading on brand (text in full)
by Terry Eagleton

Branding used to involve stamping your symbol on the flank of some dumb creature, and nowadays involves stamping it across their T-shirts. Wally Olins, a man who one suspects would brand his own kneecaps if there was profit to be squeezed from it, has written a suitably slick account of a supremely shallow phenomenon. Olins is the kind of corporate consultant who believes that rebranding may help solve the problems of Uzbekistan: the problems of this country (which is reputed to boil its enemies alive) is that it doesn’t have a sexy enough image. Perhaps boiling people alive simply needs to be rebranded. In this book, which sometimes reads as though it has a marketplace where its mind should be, a relentlessly trivialising practice has found its true chronicler.

[Full Text]

Filed under: Books, Branding, People