A lot of hot air and expensive business consultancy time is sold in pursuit of facilitating creativity but the creative process is still thought of as a mysterious black box, often the preserve of certain people and not others. But what’s the actual science behind it? Are some of us more creative than others, and if so, why? What can all of us do to help ourselves have more and better ideas? This talk offers a brief introduction to the psychology of creativity.
bryankbrown / tags / design
Tagged with “design”
(15)
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The Psychology of Creativity — Claire Rowland (Fjord London)
Tagged with design by fire 2010 conference creativity ux
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Turning the Corporate Battleship with Design - Andrei Herasimchuk (Yahoo!)
Designing interfaces for digital products like the Apple iPhone or an interactive web application like Yahoo! Mail promises to be one of the hottest job design prospects for the next century. Nearly every product type we know about has gone or is going digital, from content rich websites like CNN.com to mobile task-based applications like Gowalla to products for the digital home like Netflix. But even when one has great ideas, or creates innovative design for their products, how does one get their company or clients to institute positive change through their work?
In this session, Andrei Herasimchuk will divulge lessons learned from the trenches on how to get large, global corporations to make big changes through Design. What works, what doesn’t and how to keep yourself inspired when tackling such large projects. In doing so, he aims to pass on key factors to success while inspiring designers everywhere to tackle the challenges that face them in the workplace, helping them to overcome the inevitable obstacles that will arise in their path. — Andrei Michael Herasimchuk was the lead designer behind the Adobe Creative Suite and the product lead for Adobe Lightroom. He was Chief Design Officer for Involution Studios, a digital product design company based in the United States and recently joined Yahoo! He is now leading the product design team in the redesign of one of the internet’s largest web-based applications, Yahoo! Mail, across web browsers, desktop clients, mobile smartphones and tablet computers. His writing and thoughts on design can be found at his blog, Design by Fire.
Tagged with ux design design by fire 2010 conference
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The Long Tail of Gadgets - How Open Source Hardware is Enabling Bottom Up Innovation in Electronics
Open source software has collapsed the cost of innovation in the digital world. Now open source hardware IP promises to do the same in the physical world of electronics. As an example of this emerging trend, Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, demonstrates Bug Labs’ product BUG.
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Jam Session: What Improvisation Can Teach Us About Design
Have you ever had a spontaneous creative triumph, perfectly in sync with your team?
A passionate believer in improvisation as a design skill, Hannah’s session will talk about the importance of this technique in her own design process and what lessons can be borrowed from improvised music.
From the jazz masters to the humble basement band practice, musical concepts such as timing, structure, rolls and expression have many lessons for designers creating an off-the-cuff interface.
Hannah will explore how the methods of music translate for a design/development team, as well as sharing personal stories and techniques for those times when you need a bit of a jam session.
http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/hannah-donovan
Originally from Canada’s icy north, Hannah Donovan is creative director at Last.fm, where she’s worked for the last four years. Before moving to London, she designed websites for Canada’s largest youth-focused agency, working on brands such as Hershey, Heineken and Bic. Hannah also plays the cello with an orchestra and draws monsters.
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Christian Crumlish: Designing Social Interfaces: 5 Principles, 5 Practices, 5 Anti-Patterns
As we use social tools on the web, design patterns are emerging. Social design must be organic, not static, emotional, not data-driven. A social experience builds on relationships, not transactions.
In 2008, Yahoo!’s Christian Crumlish introduced the idea of social design patterns to BayCHI. He returns in 2010 to share what he learned over two years. With his Yahoo! colleague Erin Malone, Christian created a wiki to gather social design patterns and published a snapshot of the wiki in book form.
Among the many principles of social design, Christian presents five:
- Pave the Cowpaths: Watch what people do, then support and adapt to that behavior.
- Talk Like a Person: Use a conversational voice. Be self-deprecating when an error occurs. Ask questions.
- Be Open: Embrace open standards. Support two-way exchange of data with other applications.
- Learn from Games: Give your application fun elements, like collecting and customization.
- Respect the Ethical Dimension: Understand the expectations people have in social situations and abide by them.
Christian then describes five practices:
- Give people a way to be identified and to characterize themselves.
- Create social objects that give people context for interaction.
- Give people something to do, and understand the continuum of participation, from lurkers to creators to leaders.
- Enable a bridge to real life.
- Let the community elevate people and the content they value.
Finally, he discusses five anti-patterns, commonly-used design choices that appear to solve a problem but that can backfire and pollute of the commons. Examples:
- The Cargo Cult: Copying successful designs without understanding why they are successful.
- Breaking Email: Sending an email alert, but rejecting or silently discarding the reply.
- The Password Anti-Pattern: Asking people for their password to another service encourages poor on-line hygiene.
- The Ex-Boyfriend Bug: Connecting people who share a social circle but who have reasons to avoid each other.
- The Potemkin Village: Building groups with no members. Instead, let people gather naturally.
Christian stresses that social design is an ecosystem in which designers must balance many trade-offs. Not every design pattern applies to every application, but good designers can use patterns to strike a balance that works.
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Mental Models: Sparking Creativity Through Empathy - Indi Young
You have probably heard all about addressing “the whole user experience.” You may have also heard that “innovation” is the new key to getting ahead of your competition, and “empathy” is the way to design good solutions. You are eager to jump on the bandwagon, but how can you address all the things going on in the user’s world, gain insight into their philosophies, and innovate based on what you learn? How do you know the extent of the user’s flow of attention in the first place?
This session will introduce you to a method for modelling the attention flow of a group of people with similar motivations and discuss how to make sure this model truly represents the root of what is driving your end user’s natural behaviour. It is easy to make assumptions, but less so to dive down to the core emotions, philosophies, and actions that drive people’s behaviour. The presentation will focus on how mental models represent the whole user experience, addressing how to coax the model towards representing the true roots of people’s behaviour.
Tagged with @media indi young design conference
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Design Imperatives from the Roman Empire to NASA
The world of design has become big business — and business is being revolutionized by "design thinking."
Using his own unique career path from Navy nuclear engineer to Harvard MBA to leadership roles at IDEO, Frog Design and Adaptive Path, Michael Meyer zeros in on the lessons of breakdowns and innovation from the Roman spread of civilization to the NASA space program, and provide valuable insight from his insider’s view of the design world over the last 10 years
http://fora.tv/2010/06/21/Design_Imperatives_from_the_Roman_Empire_to_NASA
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Technology’s human side & creative leadership
John Maeda, president of Rhode Island School of Design, comments on his ideas of time, simplicity, and technology.
He describes how the pendulum is now swinging back from technology towards humanity and creative leadership.
http://fora.tv/2009/04/01/Graphic_Artist_John_Maeda_Designs_Technologys_Human_Side
Tagged with foratv maeda risd design simplicity creativity leadership
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The Designful Company
In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovators, companies can no longer merely “unlock” wealth. Today they have to actively “create” wealth, or end up in the fossil layers of business history. As a result, brand-builders have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play a key role in the next management revolution—the rise of the designful company.
In his session, Marty will explain why design thinking—in its broadest sense—will become the new best practice, and how you can leverage your unique position as a brand-builder to transform the way business does business in the 21st century.
http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/marty-neumeier
Marty Neumeier began his career as a designer, but soon added writing and strategy to his repertoire, working variously as a designer, copywriter, journalist, magazine publisher and brand consultant. Having developed brand identities for companies such as Apple, Adobe, Kodak and Hewlett-Packard. He has also authored three bestselling books (‘The Brand Gap, ‘Zag’ and ‘The Designful Company’) which discuss how organisations can bridge the gap between business strategy and customer experience.
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Kerning, Orgasms And Those Goddamned Japanese Toothpicks
Freud popularised the term, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences”, to describe how adjacent villages—identical for all practical purposes—would struggle to amplify their tiniest distinctions in order to justify how much they despised one other. So you have to guess how much he would have enjoyed design mailing lists. And, Perl.
Truth is, to the untrained (un-washed, un-nuanced, un-Paul-Rand’d, and un-Helvetica’d) outsider, discourse in the design community can sometimes look a lot like a cluster of tightly-wound Freudian villages.
So, how is the role of design perceived by the people who are using the stuff you make? What role (if any) should users expect in the process of how their world is made and remade? What contexts might be useful in helping us turn all of our obsessions into useful and beautiful work?
Can an Aeron chair ever be truly ‘Black’? Will there ever be a way to get Marketing people to stop calling typefaces ‘fonts’? And, when, at last, will the international community finally speak as one regarding the overuse of Mistral and stock photos of foreshortened Asian women?
By leveraging his uniquely unqualified understanding of design, Merlin will propose some promising patterns for fording the gap between end-users and the unhappy-looking people in costly European eyeglasses who are designing their world.
Is there hope? Come to Brighton, pull up a flawlessly-executed mid-century-Modern seating affordance, and we’ll see what we can figure out together. One village to another.
http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/merlin-mann
Merlin Mann is best known as the creator of 43folders.com, a popular American website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.
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