[column width="24%" padding="1%"] [/column] [column width="24%" padding="1%"] The other day, Hartmut Esslinger’s book “A fine line” finally dropped in my mailbox. Its green cover with subtle Wega inspired dots instantly makes you want to break open the book and eagerly rush through the pages. I will not review his book yet, as I still have a few chapters to finish, except to say, it is a refreshingly...

IDEO’s open source human centered design toolkit is a good source of inspiration. It will be a help for NGOs and social entrepreneurs to design and implement innovative, customer-centric solutions to specific design challenges for global communities in need via three simple steps: Hear, Create, Deliver.

Found an interesting visualisation tool at neoformix today. It allows you to visualise the relationship between different twitter search terms, in the form of a Venn diagram.

When Tim Brown was the the V&A last month, he mentioned the book “I miss by pencil” by Martin Bone and Kara Johnson of IDEO, which caught my attention. Although, I have just ordered the book and not yet had a chance to read it, this is how the book is described on the I miss my pencil website. “The book attempts to communicate what designers sometimes think and talk about during the design process...

In the may+june 2009 issue of interactions Elaine Ann writes an interesting article on the wider role of designers, illustrating it with a large scale case study labelled What’s Design Got to Do with the World Financial Crisis? I don’t fully share the idea that designers would have created a perfect financial system. The complexity lies not only in caputuring a good understanding of the system, but...

Design thinking may still be a somewhat fuzzy term in business, but the design community has grown increasingly fond of Dan Saffer – o danny boy Summarises design thinking into- Focus on customers/users- Finding alternatives (multiple solutions)- Ideation and prototyping- Wicked problems (no clear solution)- Wide range of influences (multi disciplinary)- Emotion (to connect with people) Victor Lombardy...

Its remarkable how much of what we were taught in university that feels obsolete today. Amongst other things, there was the theory of rational economics. Although, I only took a minor in economics and never went deeper into the topic, it is one of those things that have puzzled my mind ever since. Are we really that rational individuals? Do we have perfect information? Or is the world in fact much more random...