Talk at Design Academy Eindhoven next week

I'm doing a talk at Design Academy Eindhoven in their Design Debates series next Thursday 28 September, co-organised by MU, Onomatopee, Krabbedans, Alice, Capital D, CRISP and Premsela.

Jan Boelen, head of social design at DEA, is the respondent, and Bas Raijmakers is chairing.  

See DesignDebates.nl
Twitter: #DesignDebates

Design innovation workshop, Philadelphia

In March I co-facilitated the four-day Design Challenge 2011 for students at Temple University, Philadelphia, with James Moustefellos who with Youngjin Yoo directs the Center for Design + Innovation within the Fox School of Business.

An open call to students across all departments at Temple resulted in around 18 teams signing up for the day. All of them had to be mixed in terms of disciplines, drawing on at least two departments, although the majority of participants came from the Fox Business School.

The challenge to the students focussed on the area of the city close to the Temple campus, North Broad St. The project asked students
- How can we use increasingly pervasive digital technology to re-imagine the future of the city?
- Can we use digital technologies to inspire, mobilize and create social, economic, cultural, political and intellectual connections to solve the complex challenges that cities face today
- Can we build a sustainable open platform that encourages and supports a vibrant ecosystem of neighbors, entrepreneurs and communities?

Over four days, students worked together to do first-hand research in the North Broad area and then come up with service concepts to address issues they identified. This included a detailed briefing with input from community leaders and from city organisations (on Monday) and a one day workshop (on Thursday) led by James and I, which was a day of intense idea generation and visualisation. The presentations at the end of the day, judged by a team of entrepreneurs, community leaders and academics, showed what a wide range of responses. Students presented their insights from their research, and then proposals for a new service journey or service encounter, communicate in a range of media from collage, to sketches, to role play. The successful propositions combined an understanding of the service ecology around North Broad St, and a creative reconfiguration of community resources supported by digital technologies.

As a learning experience for the students, it showed how design-based approaches support rapid collaboration and proposition development. As a way to build relationships between the university and its community and city, it showed how to engage student energy and entrepreneurial drive. I look forward to next year.

MBA Entrepreneurship Project workshops 2011

This year, I have again run workshops for MBA students doing the core Entrepreneurship Project(EP) at Said Business School. The EP presents students with some important challenges
- how to explore an idea and develop it sufficiently to create a credible business plan
- how to integrate the various aspects of a new venture including strategy, marketing, operations, HR and finance
- how to work together collaboratively in their teams.

My workshops help with all three difficulties at the tricky early stage of students' projects. Even if they have managed to agree on a project title and a paragraph describing it, often they don't know what to do next. My approach is to use methods and tools from creative design that help explore what the idea is (and reject it and come up with a better one if the team wants to) from different angles, synthesizing key aspects such as end users (or customers) and other key actors, artefacts, technologies and processes, and also integrating organizational functions for the proposed new venture.

The important thing is that these methods are exploratory - they help the team look into and understand a bit better the central idea of their EP project which could be a new service, a bit of technology, or a relationship between people in one place and people somewhere else. The only testing we can do in the workshops is exposing the teams' ideas to one another - through design critiques that give teams valuable feedback from many brains.

The four methods we used were
(1) creating storyworlds: visualizations mapping the key actors involved in a project, starting with a person or a thing;
(2) visualizing the customer journey: representing this as yet imaginary encounter between the user or customer and the enterprrise's offering;
(3) drawing rough sketches of the user interfaces of key touchpoints in an offering; and
(4) making sketches of the service ecology or value constellation to identify actors and relationships between them.

Some teams found some of them hard to create. But they helped the students articulate to one another, for the moment, what their idea is and its implications, which is important to help them identify what research they need to do next.