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Ideation, or if you prefer, brainstorming, is a structured activity with many degrees of freedom within that structure. When leading sessions, I emphasize divergent, generative thinking, and ask participants to defer evaluation and prioritization. Defer, not disregard. Of course we need to bring convergence into the process, but not until later. As you'd expect, much of the energy and focus for these ideation sessions is on the creation of good ideas. But there's an interesting important role for bad ideas to play.

In my team of user researchers, we deliver not only a report (you can see an example from a few years ago here/0, but also an ideation workshop. In this session, we pass the baton to our client team. Together, we not only generate a broad set of things for the business to make, sell or do, but the team really takes ownership of the research insights by repeatedly applying them. The act of repeatedly translating insights into possible actions builds up a neural pathway, where the implications of those insights become burnt into their thinking. Bad ideas serve both masters, as sacrificial elements that lead to breakthroughs and as pitches for insight batting practice.

Creative activities often follow a double-hump model. At first you'll hit all the obvious ideas. These aren't a waste of time; sometimes the obvious ideas have been neglected and you can treat those as low-hanging fruit: obvious, easy to implement, incremental improvement. But you'll find that you run out of steam with those ideas. Like the false ending in a '80s rock song, don't think this fadeout means it's time to start applauding. There's still more. Push on, and this is when you get to the transgressive, weird, crazy and sometimes innovative ideas. That's the place you want to get to, where you are truly butting up against the edges of what's allowable.

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All Photos courtesy of Reboot

This is the fifth post in a 7-part series from Panthea Lee of service design consultancy, Reboot. Lee is the jury captain for the 2012 Core77 Design Awards for the Service Design category. In The Messy Art of Saving the World, Lee will explore the role of design in international development.

After all the protests of 2011, from Cairo to Damascus, Moscow to Wall Street, it's easy to forget that the "Arab Spring" began in Tunisia. The country remains the most coherent example of how revolution can happen in the 21st century: The autocratic regime of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had ruled for 23 years, deeply corrupt and largely unchallenged. The Tunisian people's long-simmering frustration exponentially increased—and found new outlets—with the Internet, social networking and text messaging. When a fruit vendor, angry at government mistreatment, set himself on fire, his story catalyzed the collective outrage. Ben Ali was gone in a month.

Demonstrations spread from Tunisia to over 16 countries, but none was as peaceful, or resulted as quick a deposition. And today, none is as far down the road as Tunisia in building a new, more representative and more equal post-revolutionary society.

For this reason, many eyes around the world are watching the country, including the World Bank, which recently commissioned Reboot to report on its evolution.

Today, I'm so excited to announce the release of our findings: "Tunisia: From Revolutions to Institutions" is launching at the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development* and is also available for download here.

As the report shows (and as I've written before), design has an important role to play in global governance and development—especially in the context of today's rapidly changing world. The Arab Spring demonstrated a fundamental change in the relationships between governments and citizens. Never before have people had so much power to demand accountability and fairness from their leaders.

And that power is only going to grow. As technology makes us all more connected to each other, populations are gaining new ways to demand opportunity, fairness and justice. If policy makers are going to serve the world's increasingly vocal populations, they've got to be prepared to listen.

But too often, there's a gap between the people who fund and create economic and development policies and those on the receiving end. Too often, development policies are based on site visits in major cities, or survey reports that may be outdated, or on commonly-accepted wisdom about what a certain region is like. These methods fall short in the face of real life (as any designer might predict).

Policymakers need deep, nuanced understandings of what citizens want and need. In short, the global governance and development community can benefit from better design.

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Communities in China use a lot of outdoor furniture. And chairs, laundry, food preparation, morning ablutions all spill out onto the narrowhutong and urban streets. Because they do, everyday people create the infrastructure to support these activities. Much of the furniture is outside year-round, with owners making a minimal effort to keep it protected from the elements. When there is the threat of rain, for instance, they angle chairs against walls to ensure the rain runs off instead of puddling and potentially soaking the wood.

In the United States, the Shakers are often lauded for their carefully observed furniture designs, including their hanging furniture—grandfather clocks, bookshelves, chairs placed on racks with neatly spaced hooks, and defying gravity.

Image by Dave Morris/Flickr

Simple and elegant as the Shaker style is—including their signature practice of storing chairs hanging upside down—I'd argue that the Chinese DIY chair storage is just as, if not more elegant than the Shaker hanging furniture, since it can apply to most high-back chair designs and also works with any wall.

The type of noticeboard frame seen in my hutong photo is fairly common in Chinese cities, so the lean-forward approach with the hind legs wedged under the frame requires minimal preparation for use. And, in terms of effective user-friendly design, the subtle repositioning of a rained-soaked chair with one hand allows the owner to easily wipe the surface with the other hand.

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Figure 1

Once upon a time, when I visited other countries, I would head to the department stores so I could experience the wide cultural variations in such things as cookware, cutlery and tools for crafts and gardening. Today, I seldom do this anymore because all the stores look the same. Rice cookers and woks may have originated in Japan and China, but today they can be found in kitchen appliance stores all over the world. Italian, German and American appliances are for sale in Asia. Asian appliances are for sale in Italy, Germany and America. The country of design and manufacture no longer matters much. A television set, automobile, mobile phone, camera or refrigerator looks the same whether made in Asia, North America or Europe.

I have a collection of photos taken around the world of stores, restaurants and street scenes. I sometimes use them in my lectures, asking the audience to state where the picture was taken. People respond with great confidence, but they are invariably wrong. Why? In what city—or country—was the photograph in Figure 1 taken? It could be anywhere. I can find store displays similar to that shown in Figure 1 in Asia, Europe or the United States. Even the language visible in my photographs provides surprisingly little information: Signs in Chinese, English, French, Korean or German are displayed throughout the world. One street scene from Hong Kong shows less Chinese characters than pictures I have taken in San Francisco, New York or London: most people judge the photos to be from Western Europe. Where did Figure 1 come from? A department store in Daejeon, South Korea.

The same lack of diversity extends to the training of designers. When I visit the top design schools across the world, I find that their curricula and methods are similar. I find more differences in the curricula of schools within a country than between the United States, Hong Kong, Korea, England and the Netherlands.

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This post is part of our year-long series, Apocalypse 2012, where our favorite futurists, resiliency and disaster experts examine the role of design to help you prepare for...the end?

We live in dichotomous times, navigating between conflicting imperatives, contradictory values, and eleventh-hour urgency. For designers, these dichotomies—far from providing generative yin/yang grist or complementary dualist push and pull—represent paradoxes that lash at our profession, our practice, and our promise. Lately I've been losing some sleep over them, so best to get this down on paper as part of Core77's Apocalypse 2012 Series. Exactly 1000 words, below.

We're at the apex of our power, but the nadir of our potency. Let's start with the biggest heartbreaker of them all: We are at a moment in history when, as designers, we are at our most powerful. There is almost nothing we cannot make, enjoying the triumphs of research and development in materials science, manufacturing technology, and information systems. We can get any answer we seek through social networks, peer communities, or hired guns. We have sub-specialties at unimaginably thin slices of expertise—from ubiquitous computing to synthetic biology—and a plumbing system in the Internet that is simultaneously unprecedented in human history and entirely taken for granted.

At the same time, unbelievably, we have never been in worse shape: We are witnessing the collapse of every natural system on earth. Take your pick—on the ground we've got clear-cutting, desertification and agricultural run-off. Underneath we've got fracking and groundwater contamination. In the air, greenhouse gasses; in the oceans, ice sheet melting, acidification and Pacific trash vortices; in space we have the ghastly and ultimately impossible problem of space debris (we won't be able to leave even when we're ready to, and nobody will be able to get in to help us if they wanted to). We carry body-burdens of toxic chemicals leached and outgassed from our homes, our cars, our food packaging. The consequences of industrialization metastasize out to slave factory labor, massive river diversions, obesity, malnutrition, gender inequality, rampant poverty, minefields. We tax our economies with war machinery instead of fueling healthcare and education provision. We feel helpless on the one end and hopeless on the other.

How can we be so strong and yet so weak? How can it be that we, as a species, are at the absolute height of our power at exactly the same moment that we are on the precipice of self-annihilation?

Is this funny? Or ironic? Or tragic? Or simply unthinkable. Whatever your reaction, for the design community, it is decidedly two things: rare and privileged. Design has been complicit in moving us to this precipice, of course, and certainly it alone will not be sufficient for pulling us back, but we need to acknowledge the fact that this time, and our place in it, are truly remarkable: We are equipped with our most powerful tools, right when the world needs us most. This is an astounding proposition for design.

The design of artifacts versus the design of systems. If all of these natural collapses have demonstrated one thing, it's that we are no longer living in a world of objects and things, but rather in a world of flows and negotiations. Undoubtedly this was always the case, but the feedback we're getting from the natural world has made it unassailable. In the old design model, we had 'problems' and we had 'solutions.' A designer's job was to take a problem—a brief, a market need, a new technology looking for an embodiment—and to solve it: Here's the problem; here's a solution. Next problem please.

We are now recognizing that this worldview is unbearably naïve and not a little arrogant; that problems are not static, they're dynamic. They are moving, organic and fundamentally systemic. You might say that they aren't even "problems" at all; they are "problem spaces"—a term progressive designers have been using for years. But I'd argue that you don't "solve" problem spaces, you negotiate them. And that this negotiation requires new kinds of processes, fluencies and participants. This is the new design practice that is emerging all around us: it's inter-, trans- and multi-disciplinary; it is tactical; it concerns itself with things like resiliency and sharing ecologies, and pays as much attention to meaning as to money. And it explores entirely new kinds of currency and value—currencies like participation, and reputation, and access, and happiness.

Is it possible that we feel powerless to 'solve' problems because we're (simply) using the wrong word to address them?

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Trained as an architect, Trace Hurns spent most of his career doing graphic design and branding throughout the greater Chicago area. He was known for his often misguided optimism and for his love of baseball and food. Originally from Texas, he moved to Chicago after getting married to an antiques dealer. He started freelancing at age 24 and almost immediately got a job with the Strikewell Bat Company. At first he was doing logos, but eventually came up with an idea for a new type of super premium baseball bat. He called them "First Love Bats." The idea was to have infants hug the bats long before they ever hugged their mothers. They would bond with the bat over their first two months. The bats would be filled with luck and positive energy and then sold for over five thousand dollars each. Many of the best hitters in the 1970's used these bats claiming that they felt a sort of pure joy when they used them.

The bats put Hurns on the map, but also burdened both himself and the Strikewell Bat Company with a heap of lawsuits. Strikewell didn't make it and Hurns had to enroll in empathy counseling every Sunday for three years.

Several years later, in 1980, Hurns got a job with a local pizza restaurant. The place was failing and they couldn't afford much. Working with what they had, Trace developed the Brotherhood pie. Each one of these pies would only get one pepperoni, forcing the people that ordered the pie to make a decision over who gets the special piece. The restaurant was able to charge the same price for brotherhood pies as it did for full pepperoni pizzas. It was a success for them, but an emotional failure for Hurns.

He named them Brotherhood pies because he thought that people would be generous and the decision would bring people together. In reality, they became known as "conflict pizzas" and divided more families, ended more relationships, and destroyed more friendships than any other pizza in history. This was good for business in a perverse way but it took a huge toll on Trace's emotional health. He was never the same. The pizzas are now sold frozen.

To make matters worse, he was facing more lawsuits from the work he did for Fras-Oil. He worked on the graphic design for their motor oil jug, coining the phrase "Fras-Oil, clean enough to eat". This didn't sit well with almost anyone other than, amazingly, the people at Fras-Oil. Hurns even took it a step further by convincing them that they should also produce olive oil with the Fras-Oil brand name right on the bottle. They followed his advice and ran print ads in major magazines across the Midwest. It was very hard for Hurns to find work after this.

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We are now in the 21st century, but design curricula seem stuck in the mid 20th century, except for the addition of computer tools. The 20th century developed craftspeople capable of magnificent products. But these were relatively simple products, with simple mechanical or electrical components. In the 21st century, design has broadened to include interaction and experience, services and strategies. The technologies are more sophisticated, involving advanced materials, computation, communication, sensors and actuators. The products and services have complex interactions that have to be self-explanatory, sometimes involving other people separated by time or distance. Traditional design activities have to be supplemented with an understanding of technology, business and human psychology.

With all these changes, one would expect major changes in design education. Nope. Design education is led by craftspeople who are proud of their skills and they see no reason to change. Design education is mired in the past.

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When Don Norman wrote that he is "made to read a lot of crap" in Why Design Education Must Change, he had me sighing in agreement. Around ninety-percent of the design and design education research I read sends me to sleep. I am interested in design, education and research and the futures of all three, but why is the strike rate of interesting material so low? It leaves me rather depressed about a discipline that claims creativity to be among its key attributes. When it comes to engaging in public discourse, design research has suffered a failure of imagination.

I should clarify here that when I am talking about design research, I am talking of institutional, mainly academic research. I'm not talking about research that designers do in design practice. That this needs explaining is part of the problem, of which more in a moment.

The media regularly contains calls from scientists for more research funding, more science to be taught in schools and claims for the enormous importance of science to the world. STEM subjects—an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics—are the centrepiece of curriculum development and the associated funding. Newspaper columns and sections are devoted to science. Entire television channels and expensive series, such as the BBC's highly successful Wonders... series featuring Professor Brian Cox, are directly aimed to inspire and ignite the imaginations of schoolchildren and adults alike. Where are the equivalents for design? Gary Hustwit's Helvetica and Objectified may have been seen by most Core77 readers, but I doubt the average schoolchild is aware of either of them.

To be clear, I'm not bashing science. Science is important, as are technology, engineering and mathematics, but this is just one side of the coin (and brain). Given that the world is not only filled with designed objects and media, but also suffering under the enormous weight and consumption of much of them, design clearly has a central role to play in society for good or ill. Where are the impassioned calls for the role of design and for teaching design in curricula debates in mainstream media? Where are the TV programs, magazines and books? I am not talking about superficial style magazines or the design periodicals that essentially print articles on the reverse pages of press releases. Where are the design equivalents of Scientific American or National Geographic? Why isn't design debated in government in the same way as STEM subjects?

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Over the past year I've read and participated in discussions about design school and the quality of education students currently receive, and thought it would be valuable to share some of my own experiences and what they've taught. The design program I attended in the '70s was a new start-up, with 30-to-1 student-teacher ratios until my senior year. We quickly learned that our instructors weren't equipped to teach everything we needed to know—quite the opposite. Our program's lead professor, in particular, was really behind the times and set in his ways. Disconnected from industry, he had little appetite for embracing new techniques, approaches and technological innovation.

Out of our collective dilemma, we pushed ourselves into new collaborations and individual inquiry, discovering how our profession was led and changing. The understanding and perspective gained has served us well throughout our careers and taught an important lesson—you can't be taught design in the traditional sense of lectures and labs, but you can learn it! We also learned that our design instructors functioned more like coaches—able to provide direction and strategy, offer the voice of experience and inspiration. However, developing and honing the skill set required a commitment to lifelong learning as an individual process.

As students, you must take every opportunity to enrich and optimize your education through inquiry. Having taught design courses myself, I know your instructors will appreciate you even more as they are introduced to new technologies, approaches, insights and experiences you bring to the classroom through this process...nearly as much as they'll take pride in your career achievements. Perhaps you'll even challenge them and they will have to respond in kind.

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Back in 2004, I wrote an article called 1000 Words of Advice for Design Students. Flattered that several departments were using the document in their curricula, I followed it up with 1000 Words of Advice for Design Teachers, in 2006 (not used very much in curricula, that one!). For the past year I've been putting together the bones of a new MFA program in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, welcoming its first students in the fall of 2012. (Applications for the inaugural class open this month.) So now it's a year in and a year away, and I thought it might be a nice idea to revisit the 1000-word format, document some of the thoughts and strategies and arguments for the new program, and lay the groundwork for the certain learning ahead. It turns out that 1000 words is woefully insufficient for discussing the most important aspects of the program, but it's a taste, and if you'd like to learn more, please do head over to productsofdesign.sva.edu where you'll find mission statements, Q&As, and more curriculum information than you'll be able to save to Instapaper. In the meantime, here we go, again: Exactly 1000 words below.

You Are What You Eat
The first decision made for the MFA Products of Design department had nothing to do with philosophy or pedagogy or accreditation; it had to do with food. We've devoted a significant amount of the architecture and planning to what we eat—with generous prep space, two full-size fridges and sinks, rice cookers, steamers, slow-cookers and other industrial-grade implements that will help students do better, think better and feel better by supporting their food energy needs. Butcher-block classroom tables gang up into short and long dining tables; drawing demo mirrors double as cooking demo counters. One of the preeminent greenmarkets is five minutes away from the school, open Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays of every week. Several of our faculty are passionate about, and plan to do coursework around, food and food systems. Students will be encouraged to form dinner co-ops (you cook a meal to feed 6 people once a week; the other days you eat someone else's).

I've gotten two major criticisms on this one: The first is "But the studio will smell!" Yes, it will. It will smell like food. (Most smell like plastic.) The second is "Students are out of control! I mean, who will clean the coffee maker?" Oh hell, I will.

Build a Place, Not a Space
It's been a big challenge finding the sweet spot of what to provide students in terms of individual workspace, collaborative space, leisure, model making, presentation and celebration space. But space has been the wrong word all along of course; the goal is to create place, not space. And that's where architect Andrea Steele and her team have landed, taking a holistic approach to how the philosophy and the pragmatics of the program get instantiated in its built environment.

We've used several principles here: Build as little as possible, keeping elements versatile, resilient, and nimble; Give everything more than one purpose, leveraging vertical elements for both display and domain; Recognize that the biggest waste of space in a school is the classroom. Ours are sundrenched, tech-equipped, and furnished as students' project rooms. And once every day, from 5 to 8pm, they turn into classrooms. Provide welcome for bicycles, accommodate personal phone calls. You get the idea.

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At the start of almost every technology transition, chaos rules. Competitors create confusion, often quite deliberate, as they develop their own unique way of doing things incompatible with all others.

A challenge is arising as gesture-based control takes over on cellphones, tablets, touchpads and computers. Change invariably creates confusion and this situation is exacerbated by the different design philosophies of competing companies coupled with the lack of standardization. This problem is compounded because the new modes of interaction ignore the many important lessons of proper interface design, including discoverability, feedback and the power of "undo."

Today, the long-established, well-learned model of scrolling is being changed by one vendor, but not by others. Gestures proliferate, with no standards, no easy way of being reminded of them, no easy way to learn. Change is important, for it is how we make progress. Some confusion is to be expected. But many of these changes and the resulting confusions of today seem arbitrary and capricious.

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Think before acting. Sounds right, doesn't it? Think before starting to design. Yup. Do some research, learn more about the requirements, the people, the activities. Then design. It all makes sense. Which is precisely why I wish to challenge it. Sometimes it makes sense to act first, think afterwards.

In the real world of product development, time is always short and budgets limited, so it is almost impossible to start with research. "Yes," the product manager will say, "I know we should do some research first, but we don't have time, we are too far behind schedule. But for the next project, we will start with research, OK?" It never happens. The next project will also start out with no time, behind schedule. In fact, let me create a law:

Norman's Law of Product Development: A project is behind schedule and over its budget the day it is started.

Today we teach the importance of doing design research first, then going through a period of ideation, prototyping and iterative refinement. Lots of us like this method. I do. I teach it. But this makes no sense when practical reality dictates that we do otherwise. If there is never enough time to start with research, then why do we preach such an impractical method? We need to adjust our methods to reality, not to some highfalutin, elegant theory that only applies in the perfect world of academic dreams. We should develop alternative strategies for design.

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A. Meunier: Paris, Comédie-Française, 18th century watercolour

Innovation, creativity, thinking outside the box, unbounded thinking, lateral thought, design thinking—all terms that have gone into and out of fashion, but which hold the same goal—unconventional and novel approaches to problem solving. Everyone is trying to find the new twist and harness the insight and innovation contained within their organizations in order to better prosper amid today's competition and uncertainty. With every new label there seems to be a wave of interest, speculation and further inquiry into how one goes about making both individuals and groups more effective at creatively tackling challenges to arrive at novel solutions. However, today's challenge isn't coming up with what to call 'it,' but how to quickly and effectively set the foundation for discovery and insight—cognitively, emotionally and cooperatively within groups.

To me, and I'm sure many of my colleagues in academia and in the design profession, all the focus on labeling is counterproductive and confusing. It also seems ironic since there is so much we've already learned about personal and individual psychology that are universal drivers of behavior, and much that has been learned about innovation from the world around us—military forces in times of conflict, great sports teams confronting a nemesis or the thousands of survival-based adaptations nature has conjured through evolution. Innovative and novel approaches to problems are everywhere and the riddle no more complex than in the past.

Thirty years of practice has left me an ardent believer that both social and individual psychological principles must be understood and managed, and the emotional stage set, for the 'spontaneous magic' of professional groups to be realized effectively. It is not just about setting the cognitive stage. I've come to realize that innovation and creativity is about replicable, meaningful preparation, then bringing expertise to bear while directing creative energy effectively—with inspiration, purpose and diplomacy. Creativity is sometimes an individual sport, but seldom, and so aspects of group dynamics must frequently also be managed. To use a simple metaphor, setting the stage for creativity within professional organizations and teams is a lot like a theatrical production in both its preparation and execution, and might best be understood in the context of four principle stages: casting, stage building, rehearsal and performance. I'll attempt to illustrate key aspects to consider while using this broad analogy.

CASTING

An effective director must assemble a cast appropriate for the script. When casting in business I'd highly recommended hiring based on five measures to ensure you have a truly meaningful performance—intellect, technical skills, creative aptitude, work ethic and EI or 'emotional intelligence.' This is because you need folks with the necessary skills and intelligence as well as introspection and empathic abilities. The ability to empathize—to see the world from viewpoints of others—is a critical first step in the ability to attack a given challenge from new perspectives. While IQ measures spatial and algebraic reasoning, verbal comprehension, information and memory, EI is a function of being able to perceive, use, understand and manage emotions—to detect and decipher, harness, comprehend, appreciate, describe and regulate them. So, to get to creative and insightful, first establish empathy within your organizations and become more comfortable with qualitative findings rather than quantitative data. While data can provide meaning, direction and analysis many of my most insightful discoveries were borne of qualitative and emotional observations. To be truly empathetic I've also found you need to find fellow cast members who can check their egos at the door; in stage parlance: 'No divas!'

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Like two pugilists in a ring, creative collaborations require passion, ambition and a good dose of competitiveness if they're to deliver results that matter.

I've been giving 'collaboration' a lot of thought. I guess that's inevitable when you work in a company that's partner to one of the longest running collaborative gigs in design consulting. In design circles, especially around award time, collaboration gets a lot of airplay—but what happens to it the rest of the time? Why is something we praise as being so conducive to design success so infrequently discussed in design forums? More to the point, what is it about collaboration that makes me giddy with optimism on one hand while forcing me to contemplate popping an antacid with the other? I guess, when I come right down to it, it's that collaboration, by definition a joint enterprise, is often invoked by persons or interests having very little patience for the stuff. Sure it's nice to make a lot of noise about it, but should you act on it, or call upon it in earnest, you'd better be sure collaboration is what the folks sitting across the table have signed up for.

As a young designer, I always believed that when someone spoke to me at length about collaboration it was some veiled reference to my impending need for behavior modification. Alternatively, when I found myself in cultures that used the term liberally—my gut shrank up trying to determine if 'collaboration' was code for 'the client-is-always-right.' Three and a half years after returning to the world of consulting, I've come to believe that collaboration is quite possibly THE pivotal dynamic in generating great design results. No big surprise right? But when I think about collaboration, what I increasingly imagine is something I like to call competitive collaboration, an all out, skin-in the game style of cooperation that requires real commitment from both parties, not the whimsical feel-good stuff that so easily dissipates at the first sign of trouble. With that in mind, I thought I'd share a few observations on behaviors that I believe lead to successful collaborations and, when we're lucky, great design programs.

WORK HARD aka ENGAGEMENT

As Philippe Starck has eloquently observed "Design hates lazy people" and it does. Design is hard work for clients and consultants alike. The best results stubbornly defy us by the elliptical fashion in which they arrive. You can work your ass off on a given problem and move it an inch or, you glance out the studio window and move it a mile. The rub of it is you can't count on either track to yield consistent results. Instead we work. And work again. Some might say it gets easier with experience, and it does, but the fact of the matter is, if you find design problems getting easier—you are most likely repeating yourself. Attacking a problem with fresh eyes means daring to start fresh—and that is hard work. Beyond the adrenaline rush of the creative chase, the thing that makes this otherwise intolerable process bearable is engagement; the zone in which we find ourselves fully committed to the pursuit of that first spark and the subsequent journey with which we eek out its promise. The only way I know how to get there is through deep engagement—my own, my colleagues and my clients. Without it, programs drift leading dangerously toward indifference, which in design most often leads to mediocrity and crap.

GET DIRTY aka PROTOTYPE

While you're doing this 'hard' work, you will of course get dirty. Which is just another way of saying you'll need to check your ego at the door, roll up your sleeves and be willing to fail—more importantly, be willing to make. Making is an inextricable part of good design exploration. PowerPoint is an abstraction of an abstraction. Things don't fail quickly in abstract. Nothing brings clarity faster to an abstract conversation like a 'thing.' If you want to drive powerful, effective decision-making with your client, the type that leads quickly and brutally to decisions—my advice is to MAKE. Whether we are talking about things, experiences or otherwise—prototyping, putting your ideas into action so that they might (more often than not) prove you wrong, is critical to the mechanism of design. Today we have an arsenal of tools at our disposal to make and fab: Dimension machines, Aruduino boards, After Effects, you name it. There is little excuse not to make. Which begs the question, if the team you're collaborating with isn't bringing 'things' to the table, what are they bringing? Talk? If a picture is worth a thousand words, I'd be willing to bet a prototype is worth two thousand, easy. The difference between a good idea and a great idea is execution. My advice: make.

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I frequently find myself in a state of simultaneous dismay and delightful admiration about the end product of designers. Let me explain.

This state can be described by contrasting the way a designer and an engineer would solve the same problem. Designers evoke great delight in their work. Engineers provide utilitarian value. My original training was that of an engineer and I, too, produce practical, usable things. The problem is that the very practical, functional things I produce are also boring and ugly. Good designers would never allow boring and ugly to describe their work: they strive to produce delight. But sometimes that delightful result is not very practical, difficult to use and not completely functional. Practical versus delightful: Which do you prefer?

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Dina Delgado is a psychotherapist-turned-designer orignally from Mexico City. After years of listening to people (both professionally and on the streets) she came to the conclusion that most adults were in dire need of the open-minded wonder they had as kids. It was her belief that this attitude was taken away by "the man" and it was up to her and others like her to get it back. In 1975 she started an "idea studio" with her lifelong partner Joseph Ledon called Nov Future.

The first line of products rolled out by Nov Future was called Bounce Objects. The goal was to make a series of bouncy balls for adults infused with special ingredients and made in special places. Dina explained it like this: "I want people to bounce a ball for a reason, knowing that someone, somewhere didn't hold back in the crafting of the ball. Each one bounces a different way and it's up to the individual to learn to control it and master it. Once mastered the bounce object will be a powerful ally."

The following is a quick breakdown of the bounce objects above:

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At the entrance to the "ParaDesign" exhibit currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, visitors get to read a definition of the term. ParaDesign, we are told, is work that is "about, against, around, aberrant to, alongside, or not quite design." The work we are about to see, the curators continue, "was intended not to solve problems, as professional architects and designers must do, but to pose keen, significant questions about the codes and habits that give built and designed objects their air of inevitability."

Somewhat surprisingly, my reaction on reading this was not one of giddy joy and expectant excitement. Rather, it was one of grim foreboding. "Oh dear," I sighed aloud, to the slight consternation of the man standing next to me.

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As the writer of a blog on design and joy, a lot of what I think about on a daily basis has to do with things that delight us in spite of their apparent non-utility. In addition to rainbows, I write about things like kaleidoscopes and swimming pools, confetti and hot air balloons, bioluminescence and optical illusions. By understanding the aesthetic essence of these simple pleasures—color, light, growth, abundance, magic—my goal is to look for more ways to design delight into our world.

It's not lost on me that this can seem like a frivolous endeavor and from time to time I've been asked to answer for the energy I devote to pleasure and whimsy. While I'm waxing prosaic on treehouses or designing "joyful" service gestures, other designers are engaged in tackling weighty issues of clear importance to humankind. Providing sanitation in the developing world, developing systems for healthy eating, creating sanitary products for women in Africa: these "design for the other 90%" projects make a measurable improvement in the quality of millions of people's lives. Through design, they reduce the spread of disease, enable social change and create thriving new economies that raise entire communities above the poverty line. Their projects highlight the unique contribution of designers and design methods to solving real, thorny systems challenges. By contrast, delight seems like a first-world design problem: something you do only after you have ample food, clean water, safe shelter, clothing, education, healthcare and all the other basics, covered.

But as a design principle, delight is deceptively light. Over the past few years, research has been accumulating to show that positive emotion offers real benefits in terms of physical well-being, social interaction, and professional performance. Through neuroscience, we're learning that pleasure taps into primal pathways in the brain that were formed to help us grow, develop and prosper. And through psychological studies of people and relationships, we're discovering that joy inspires attitudes and behaviors that lead to greater health and success. So when I think about delight in the context of design, it's not just about delight as an end (however appealing that may be), but about delight as a conduit to bigger goals and to better lives.

What follows are four examples of the tangible benefits of designing with joy in mind, a sort of case "in defense" of delight that serves as both support for efforts to integrate positive emotion into design, as well as a design challenge for those inspired to try.

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Travis Salisbury was an Industrial Designer who worked for various government agencies before his retirement in 1977. In the late 1950's, Salisbury received an honorary degree in Design from the Montana Institute, and later took a job as director of design for the Montana State Legislature. This was an honorary position i.e. he didn't get paid. His main goal as a designer was to "help people get along and have fun while doing it." He organized a huge number of "supper days" events where opposing politicians would cook each others favorite meal and then eat them together. This helped Montana greatly. In 1961 he designed Chair #406 (named after Helena's area code). This chair looked completely normal except for one small feature -- a V-shape under one of the legs.

The reason for this "V" was to allow a game to be played with multiple chairs. People would play by hitting a ball through the "V" with some sort of mallet. Salisbury wanted people to be able to blow off steam in-between sessions. The "V" was large enough to let a croquet ball pass. All of the #406 chairs have since been sold off or scrapped -- people got too caught up in the game and it became a distraction.

After multiple years of writing proposals to the U.S. mint, Salisbury finally hit the big time in 1965 with his Average Citizen Quarter Program (or ACQP). The idea was simple: put an average citizen on a quarter. For a year, applications were scoured over until Randy Young, a steelworker from Pittsburgh, was selected. The coins were minted in 1967. Less than two months after the coins were minted, Randy Young was arrested for armed robbery -- the coins became known as "Jailbird Quarters." The Mint immediately stopped production of the coins, and the ones that existed were given an acid treatment to hide their features and to shame both Salisbury and Young.

After the public disgrace of the Jailbird Quarters, Salisbury moved to New Jersey and began to write textbooks for elementary school students. The only one of his books that made it very far was Learn to Control Your Machine. The art on the cover was a drawing that Salisbury's uncle drew of Travis at age ten.

The text of the book was simply "Learn to control your machine" over and over again, much like in the movie The Shining. At least five times per page there was a spelling error, 500 errors in the book. Students were graded on the amount of errors that they could find. Salisbury made sure that there were at least 100 variations of the book so that the students couldn't cheat. Some students were actually helped by the book, others were scarred for much of their lives.

After finally making money with his book, Salisbury went back out west to Montana, and got his honorary Design Director position back. This was 1973. After noticing that many of the politicians were making embarrassing and even incriminating doodles in their notebooks, Salisbury made them a custom notebook that would solve the problem. They would have the usual-sized ruled paper, but there would be a bigger column left near the binding when they tore off pages. This notebook had an area for doodles and a doodle book that the politicians could keep for later once all of the pages had been ripped off. A doodle book from the Montana State Legislature recently sold on eBay for $1000.

Salisbury worked four more years in Montana and retired in 1977. Some say that he was a pioneer and others say that he severely hurt the chances of other designers with dreams of working in government. Salisbury still lives in Montana where he's working on a new book about how the Jailbird Quarter fiasco was planned called Randy Young is Innocent.

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Design Fancy is a series of short stories about fictional designers who make fictional things. The stories (and the objects) are by Matt Brown. Special thanks to Greg Burkett.

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I fear the future of our technologies, but not for the usual reasons. For me, the future would bring forth solutions to our needs and wants, design that provides value in a sustainable and responsible manner. Technology that is relevant and appropriate. But what I see developing seems driven by greed and profit, resulting in restrictive business plans and attempts to enforce proprietary constraints on activity by corporate empires.

The power of my electronic computing and communication equipment is more dictated by my service provider than by the technology itself. Imagine traveling in the future and entering a new country:

Please have your papers ready. Passport, visa, customs form, medical coverage, service provider roaming agreement.

I wrote the first draft of this column from Madeira where I was attending a conference. I couldn't get on to the Internet because, irony of ironies, this was a technology conference: the 300 attendees had so overwhelmed the hotel's meager Internet that it became useless. Three hundred attendees probably meant 500 -800 IP devices, counting laptop computers, phones and all the demonstration machines, often requiring multiple IP addresses.

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Design discourse often strikes me as analogous to a family get together. It sets out well enough; optimistic with an undercurrent of reconciliation, but it can turn sour. A casual remark or offhanded comment cuts quick, unearthing volumes of unresolved conflict and lingering baggage. It can be disquieting and, at times, maddening. But generally speaking, it's okay because after dessert is served and the plates are cleared, we get to leave the family table, and return to the business of doing design.

When I leave the 'table' my thoughts turn quickly toward incorporation: How do I filter through the chatter and weave the good stuff into a viable practice of design; one that bridges the here and now with a hopefully grand tomorrow? Where do we place our bets? Where do we invest? How do we incorporate the disparate soundings offered up by design into a practical set of tools that can empower a team's results, elevate its relevance, and if we're lucky, safeguard its future?

With this in mind, I'd like to share some thoughts that have kept me occupied lately. Consider them field notes; observations culled from the murky intersection of 'practice' and 'theory.' I invite the Core community to have at them. Tear them down or build on them -- but please comment as you see fit:

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In design post-graduation education the PhD is fast becoming the new Masters. This partly reflects the maturing of design research, but is also a response to the need for institutions to beef up their research quota and the attendant external funding. If you want to teach at a design college, the expectations of some institutions are often difficult to fulfill. Many ask for a PhD and several years of commercial practice, preferably current. It's a tough call - both are extremely time hungry and it's hard to do both well.

A Masters is often the terminating degree for a designer heading off professionally (certainly in the USA). For others it is a return the pleasure of self-determined projects having worked in agency life for a few years. But a PhD is a different beast to a Masters. I know of several designers who "fancy the idea" of doing a PhD and there are plenty of Masters students who are attracted to it, either because they want to expand their MA work or because they're not really sure what to do next.

Having officially become Dr. Polaine earlier in the year as well as having taught post-graduate students for many years, I thought I would offer some thoughts on the journey. As always, your mileage may vary.

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Cyprien Côté loved people, loved nature, and everything in between. "Especially everything in between" he would say. He was an explorer, an industrial designer, and more than anything else a friend to the natural world. As a designer he was known for his strange antics with clients. Routinely he'd lose fifty pounds for the first meeting, get the brief, only to show up four months later buff with fifty pounds of new muscle. In the early 60's, when he got his start, he convinced more than one client that doing macaroni art was a critical part of the design process. He was from the town of Tadoussac in Quebec and from visits to his Aunt in Terrebonne he quickly gained an appreciation for plants and beasts early in his life. His first design/invention took 10 years to produce- the whalesong radio (CHANT DE BALEINES) - a radio that could tune in to the bellows of whales from around the world.

The radio was a collaboration with several colleges from all over the world. Special listening pods had to be sent throughout the world's oceans to pick up the sounds. Sadly, only one of the listening pods still exists today and if you're lucky enough to have one of the radios, you'll only be able to hear humpbacks a couple days out of the year.
After a brief hiatus, Cyprien returned to the design world with his now famous CowCows (VACHEMENT VACHE ). Completely "fed up" with seeing cows unsuccessfully wipe flies from their eyes, he came up with an ear extender that could be used by the cow to fully remove any pest that was bothering them. They were made out of a super-soft material and cost about fifty cents (Canadian) per set.

CowCows were a huge success in Sweden and in the Midwestern USA. Although the cows couldn't buy the extenders themselves, they could speak through their milk production. If one farmer got his cows the extenders, sooner or later his neighbor's cows would stop producing milk in protest until they also had them.

In 1968 Côté took a trip to Italy that would change his life forever. One morning he was outside exercising when a small earthquake took place. He noticed a beetle near his feet that left his den while the earthquake was progressing. Intrigued by this Côté took the beetle back to his lab. As it turns out, this insect- the LoDuca Beetle- can sense earth tremors and always comes out to the light when he senses anything. Côté immediately took over a thousand of the Beetles back to Quebec and designed his earthquake warning system, INSECTES TREMOLOITANTS. The device was simple- one dark room, one light room, one tunnel. If someone would ever see the beetle, they would know that an earthquake would be on the way. Insectes Tremoloitants has saved over 800 lives and counting.

Côté died young at age 35 in a diving accident. In 1974, four years after his death, his brother Cypriaque realized and released one of Cyprien's early sketches- a sea shell empowered white-noise generator. All proceeds went to an undisclosed charity.

Does Côté's legacy live on? A quick google search will tell you that it doesn't, but certainly this was a man that deserves to be remembered. There are huge gaps in his career history and any evidence of his existence is welcomed.
As Côté would say: "Fête fort pour les bêtes, fête fort pour toé."

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Original cow image by Sunfox

Design Fancy is a series of short stories about fictional designers who make fictional things. The stories (and the objects) are by Matt Brown. Special thanks to Pierre-Alexandre Poirier and Jerry O'Leary.

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It's always interesting to take a look back at a year's worth of books, particularly from an industry still reeling from assaults to its very existence. This year, certain clear themes emerged from writers looking at the worlds of innovation and design.

Most clearly, we have entered the age of the individual. Emphasizing every person's ability to have an effect or make a difference was a theme touched on by many. The importance of cross-disciplinary innovation was another, with many outlining the powerful idea that innovation simply won't emerge from staring into a world you already know inside and out.

And even while many admitted that there are no easy answers to our time of global turmoil, there was an overarching sense of optimism too. Perhaps that's not entirely surprising--after all, who's going to buy a book in which an author stacks up the depressing evidence that we're doomed, doomed? But the cumulative effect was also somewhat inspiring.

Finally, this year's award for the Innovation Author's Preferred Hero of Choice goes to.... Johannes Guttenberg. Yes, some 560 years after the introduction of the printing press, it turns out that citing the German goldsmith is still seen as the best way to back up a theory about innovation.

Here then, in no particular order, are eleven books that made me stop and think this year.

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Traditionally what designers lack in knowledge, they make up for in craft skills. Whether it be sketching, modeling, detailing or rendering, designers take an inordinate amount of pride in honing key techniques over many years. Unfortunately many of these very skills have limited use in the new design domains. (Core 77 columnist Kevin McCullagh.)

I am forced to read a lot of crap. As a reviewer of submissions to design journals and conferences, as a juror of design contests, and as a mentor and advisor to design students and faculty, I read outrageous claims made by designers who have little understanding of the complexity of the problems they are attempting to solve or of the standards of evidence required to make claims. Oftentimes the crap comes from brilliant and talented people, with good ideas and wonderful instantiations of physical products, concepts, or simulations. The crap is in the claims.

In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have become applied behavioral scientists, but they are woefully undereducated for the task. Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes can produce novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions are seldom implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes can indeed produce insightful results, but the eyes must also be educated and knowledgeable. Designers often lack the requisite understanding. Design schools do not train students about these complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of human and social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and business. There is little or no training in science, the scientific method, and experimental design.

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A few months back, on this forum, Don Norman wrote a great piece that drew back the curtain on the ever-expanding blur that is design thinking. Norman's piece eloquently articulated a number of criticisms surrounding design thinking, but as I thought back on the article, I couldn't help but feel dissatisfied. For all the chatter the piece solicited, there was something left unsaid; something insinuated but not pursued. This fact gnawed at me for months, but I think I've come to recognize the source of my discomfort. Buried deep within the messy cloud enveloping 'design thinking' is the ever so faint echo of design's deep-seated professional insecurity.

So many design articles today seem content to throw the intuitive core of design under the train of its more rational self. They imply, by varying degrees that design fits neatly into two camps: aesthetic pursuit and intellectual analysis. Just as prevalent are the pieces that chastise design for purporting to own creativity. From where this perception arose—I have no clue. Perhaps it's the unintended consequence of selling design process (aka creativity) detached from the pedestrian world of results. Design and designers may have a lot to apologize for, but their advocacy of creativity is surely not one of them. If design is guilty of annexing creativity more effectively than other professions, so be it. There are worse accusations I can imagine.

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