Tag Archive | critical artifact

Are you a Designer?

Nov14

I am a designer!

How many of you consider yourself as a designer? This was one of the first questions we were asked in our service design workshop at Lahti University of Applied Sciences on October 9th 2012.

Probably you can guess the answer, roughly half of the participants raised their hands. Then it was time to wake people a bit. We were asked to draw twenty different pictures, and for every picture there was 5 seconds time for drawing. After the exercise Bas Leurs, one of our teachers from Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences announced: Now you all are designers! Yes, he is correct, everyone is a designer.

Why and when do we design?

One student expressed well the reason for design: “We must design because we are not perfect”. Continue reading →

Takeoff into Design Thinking

Nov13

There is an ever growing list of definitions for design. Some people agree with Nelson & Stolterman who’ve said that “Design is the ability to imagine that-which-does-not-yet-exist, to make it appear in concrete form as a new, purposeful addition to the real world (The Design Way)” whereas others prefer Tim Brown’s version: ”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”. For us, however, the most important lesson was that everybody can be a designer.

Group work starts – Museum on wheels sees its first ray of light

The beginning process of our group work was well structured. It all started from group formulation and first assignment. We were instructed to choose one most inspiring service of the given public services. Decision were unanimous, we would look deeper into fascinating world of museums. Everyone took a pile of post-it notes, a pen and a square of own space and started 10 minutes ideation flow. How we could improve museum experience? What would be the services which will attract customer attention? Something exciting, novel and unexpected. Continue reading →