DesignThinkers 2009: The Journey Into the Design Mind

Submitted by GlimmerGuy on 11/03/2009 – 4:01 pmAdd comment

ChunkyMonkey In my keynote speech today at RGDOntario DesignThinkers 2009 in Toronto, I talk about how I approached the writing of Glimmer like a kind of anthropologist, venturing into the exotic jungle of Design as an outside observer. My goal was to bring back lessons from the wild world of design to the world at large, which could really use this knowledge.

I began my journey by doing what designers themselves do when they take on a new project—I questioned everything and tried to bring a fresh perspective to the situation. For instance, design is a world that has its own native tongue, which I tried to capture and translate in the Glimmer Glossary. (Here’s a Wordle.net visualization of some of the Glossary words.)

I couldn’t help joking that if a CAD-monkey spent a lot of his time chunking information, he might look a lot like that chunky monkey above.

While writing Glimmer I found that I went a bit native in that I began using design principles more in my own work as an author. For example, I worked in a more iterative way with multiple drafts and rewrites, trying out ideas, then recasting them after feedback. I also created flow charts and diagrams and put them up on the wall to visualize my book as I wrote it, something I had never done before.

At the end of my keynote, I ask the design-thinker audience members to contribute ideas about how they think design can be applied to social problems and life challenges. For example, can design thinking be applied to people designing their local community center or something as mundane as helping someone reboot his career? How?

I’d like to collect any ideas here on GlimmerSite from readers about how and where design thinking can be used in new and interesting ways, so please post them below in the comments section (and come back often to see what others are posting). Thanks.