Out with the old: Design Thinking, and in with the new: Creative Intelligence (CQ)

Bruce Nussbaum from Co Design speaks about the 'ossification' of design thinking:

"Design Thinking originally offered the world of big business--which is defined by a culture of process efficiency--a whole new process that promised to deliver creativity. By packaging creativity within a process format, designers were able to expand their engagement, impact, and sales inside the corporate world. Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.

There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all to well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation.
CEOs in particular, took to the process side of Design Thinking, implementing it like Six Sigma and other efficiency-based processes.

Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process. In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess along with the process and real innovation took place. In most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the process was low, very low.

Yet, the contributions of Design Thinking to the field of design and to society at large are immense. By formalizing the tacit values and behaviors of design, Design Thinking was able to move designers and the power of design from a focus on artifact and aesthetics within a narrow consumerist marketplace to the much wider social space of systems and society."

What we're after is creativity...

"That scaffolding of Design Thinking, that collection of behaviors is the heart and sole of creativity. It includes being attuned to the people and culture you are immersed in and having the experience, wisdom, and knowledge to frame the real problem and--most important of all perhaps--the ability to create and enact solutions.


Design Thinking broke design out of its specialized, narrow, and limited base and connected it to more important issues and a wider universe of profit and non-profit organizations. I believe the concept of Creative Intelligence expands that social engagement even further.

It is about more than thinking, it is about learning by doing and learning how to do the new in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex space--our lives today.


At this point, I am defining Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. You can have a low or high ability to frame and solve problems, but these two capacities are key and they can be learned. I place CQ within the intellectual space of gaming, scenario planning, systems thinking and, of course, design thinking. It is a sociological approach in which creativity emerges from group activity, not a psychological approach of development stages and individual genius"

The marriage between Design and Science

Quoted straight from IDEO founder Tim Brown's blog, and I couldn't agree more:


"I wonder how much might be gained if designers had a deeper understanding of the science behind synthetic biology and genomics? Or nanotechnology? Or robotics? Could designers help scientists better see the implications and opportunities of the technologies they are creating? Might better educated and aware designers be in a position to challenge the assumptions of the science or reinterpret them in innovative ways? Might they do a better job of fitting the new science into our lives so that we can gain more benefit?

If scientists were more comfortable with intuitive nature of design might they ask more interesting questions? The best scientists often show great leaps of intuition as they develop new hypotheses and yet so much modern science seems to be a dreary methodical process that answers ever more incremental questions. If scientists had some of the skills of designers might they be better able to communicate their new discoveries to the public?"

Now, how do we begin the marriage?

Figuring out what I don't know

This past week has been difficult for me in communicating to my team as the point person for the incubator group.  At first, I thought I just wasn't organized - this was part of it - my email was a mess.  I fixed that and still have to go through the some 40-50 emails that have been firing back and forth within the Network.

But the larger underlying problem, or, zinger, that was holding me back...which I finally realized after a week of anguish not knowing what my stress was being caused by was that everyone on my team uses design and/or systems thinking towards business...and I frankly had no practiced knowledge of what those two concepts were!  I thus didn't know how to identify who my teammates were in order to create action items for us to move forward and work synergistically together.

I am now foraging through articles like mad trying to figure out all of this in the context of management (which is where the core of my team bases their expertise in).  More to come soon!  Hold on to your hats folks, it's gonna be a speed-of-light paced ride of learning. Zoom zoom!

Innovation, two perspectives + RadioLab = Evolution Rules Us All

Eric Ries has developed a science for making startups more efficient and calls it the "Lean Startup".  His whole mantra is to make startups more efficient and likely to succeed.  He developed a framework, called the Lean Startup, as a methodology for making startups more efficient.  This is modeled after ideas from lean manufacturing including: 1) reducing cycling time, 2) eliminating waste, and 3) driving down back size and applying it to the process of innovation itself.  He says that if we can use feedback loops that follow a build, measure, learn cycle, we can then change direction in small increments and eventually realize whether or not you need to make a pivotal change to your idea.

At the beginning of this video, Eric talks about the birth of white collar work.  He says that it was born out of our ability to make tacit knowledge (that which must be learned, like that of a craftsman) more efficient.  

John Seely Brown also talked about how the world of innovation has shifted from that of going in a predictable world of equilibrium, to that of an exponential world of constant flux and dis-equilibrium.  The infrastructures over the past 300-400 yrs that we use to function are driven by punctuated evolution - at those punctuations we reinvent social, work, organization and political practices.  We are now experiencing that punctuated evolution every 2-3 years.  He says that the half-life of any particular skill is shrinking, skills learned in college have a half life of just 5 years.  

We used to protect those skill stocks till now - we are embracing change by learning how to participate on the edge of flows.  We are learning to make ideation more efficient by creating new knowledge (strongly tacit and scalable).  In learning, we now are 'creating the new' as opposed to 'learning the old'.  This creating is tacit, it is not explicit.  We're used to passing around the explicit knowledge, but it takes time to code the tacit.

RadioLab: What Does Technology Want?

In this conversation recorded as part of the New York Public Library series LIVE from the NYPL, Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants) try to convince Robert that the things we make—from spoons to microwaves to computers—are an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us. And we may need to adapt to the idea that our technology could someday truly have a mind of its own.

Ode to the Biomimicry Institute (answers to the Specialty Program Application)

When/how did I learn about Biomimicry, what was my first responsive action?

I observed the biomimicry movement at a distance for several years (read the newsletter, joined AskNature, and read Janine Benyus's book).  It wasn't until late 2009 after attending a talk by Dr. David Hammond at the Palo Alto Research Center that I became connected to the Bay Area Swarm.  I soon after connected with Diana Lee and became a TBI barnacle. Through the 2010 SF Education Summit, the 2011 SF Educators Workshop, the 2011 International Bionic Engineering Conference in Boston, and numerous speaking events and swarm networking events, I've met a majority of the TBI board, staff and other networkers worldwide. I also began sprinkling biomimicry into my biology classes, published an article through our local PBS-affiliate, KQED, and created a twitter account devoted to biomimicry (733 and counting). I am currently helping organize the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Network.

Though I have always been enraptured with biology, it was winter quarter of 2003 in undergraduate school I remember consciously recognizing my admiration for the nature's balance and genius – homeostasis reminded me of the way nature balances itself through positive and negative feedback loops. Having studied all the human physiological systems, I later began exploring other animal systems. The more I studied, the more amazed I became at how incredible animals are adapted to their environments, and how those animals shape their environment over time.

At the time, however, I didn't realize how I could use my love for nature's designs (besides for conservation work) and pursued a pre-med degree and eventually my masters in molecular, cellular, and integrative physiology. It wasn't until discovering biomimicry in 2007 that I realized a way for me to transfer my knowledge of biological concepts in a deeply profound way that was both inspiring, practical, and in demand.

Personal goals in completing the program?

My five goals for completing the program are:

1) Be able to speak biology through an engineering and design language

2) Deeply reflect in nature and use my creativity to see a guide of applications to industry challenges (primarily engineering and industrial design)

3) Become more disciplined and practiced using the biomimicry process and life's principles

4) Utilize my resource handbook to greatly enhance and build the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Network

5) Extend my relationships with the Northwest Regional Network to expand our collaborative capacities

How do I envision the program enhancing or advancing my Career?

1) The Specialty Program will provide a practicing knowledge, built relationships, and accreditation with which to build the San Francisco Regional Network. Our regional network aims to provide a biomimicry incubator for Bay Area companies through workshops, partnerships with universities, and connections to venture capital. We would like to eventually serve as a resource bank of biomimicry and interdisciplinary industry experts, as well as market biomimicry to our large, diverse, and intelligent Bay Area audience.   Overcoming innovation challenges in the Virtual Lab will enable me to design workshops which address potential roadblocks for emerging biomimicry technologies.   I will also be more aware of ways in which we can collaborate with others in Northwest Regional Network.

2) The Specialty Program will enhance my effectiveness as a community science liaison because I will gain a form-funciton perspective of biology with a language that is accessible to engineers and designers.  The program will provide resources and ideas for helping others practice the biomimicry process (primarily through formal and informal education).  Having stumbled through biomimicry innovation challenges myself through the program, I will better understand the challenges of developing an emerging biomimicry technology into a product. This Specialty Program will also set me up for future training if I decide to become a biologist at the design table.
 I envision several pathways for my career as a community science liaison.  These pathways my follow one after the other or merge:

1. Inspire lifelong learners about nature's designs and the promise of biomimicry
2. Help train others to use the biomimicry process to solve problems (for education and for business)
3. Make scientific/biologic/biomimetic research more accessible to different disciplines through language translation
4. Help connect emergent technologies in bionics and biomimicry to funding sources for product development
5. Future: Become a B@DT consultant

Understanding Female Friendships

Studies show that friendships between women are important for our physiological and phsychological health.  According to an article from 2008 in Women's Health:

"In life, it's important for women to have close friendships with other women. Physiologically, females have a greater need to emotionally bond with others. Whereas many men get by with loose, casual relationships with other men, women tend to look for nurturing, emotionally-fulfilling bonds with other women.

Women gain self-esteem, validation, and happiness from such exchanges. Female friends can boost each other's self-worth through compliments, honest opinions, and suggestions. In times of trouble, females seek one another out to know that their feelings or experiences are normal and healthy. From these interactions, female friends bring away an increased sense of happiness and fulfillment."

Source: 

Gerics, Jennifer. "Women and Friendship: Female Bonds Have Both Psychological and Physical Health." Women's Health. Suite101.com. Online article (Aug 2008).

Reading:

 Benefits http://womenshealth.suite101.com/article.cfm/women_and_friendship#ixzz0rjvAJmAx

Tie-Die in the Sky?

What I wouldn't pay or do to see this amazing sight!! Thanks to National Geographic photographers for capturing the rare northern lights seen all the way down in Georgia this week.

Photo taken by: Shawn Malone

Aurora Pictures: Rare Northern Lights Seen in U.S. South

According to National Geographic:
"Auroras are created when charged solar particles collide with molecules in Earth's atmosphere, infusing the molecules with extra energy that then gets emitted as light.
Familiar green auroras appear lower in the atmosphere, around 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface. The light is actually a mix of colors, but the human eye is most attuned to the green part of the spectrum, according to the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Sometimes, however, an influx of slower moving, less energetic particles can make auroras appear higher in the atmosphere, around 185 to 310 miles (300 to 500 kilometers). At these altitudes, the light displays are pure red."