Interesting article on the shift of the retail environment.

http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20111115/brand-new-world

Brand New World

Our retail roundup includes kiosks, pop-ups, hidden shops, and a virtual experience activated by QR codes. All of this raises the intriguing question: What is a store today anyway?

By Martin C. Pedersen

Like just about everything else today, retail design is in a state of flux. We’re now living in a world where most items for sale in a store are also available online. Which raises a couple of important questions: What’s the role of traditional retail in an increasingly virtual world? And how will stores compete in the digital future? The reassuring news is that we still need physical transactions. The brick-and-mortar store will not disappear. Instead, it’s adapting to new realities, changing demographics, and perhaps a smaller budget. The retail roundup presented here is a snapshot of a fluid industry, with global brands attempting to put on a local face, big-box retailers mastering the art of crowdsourcing, and secret stores that are tucked away like Prohibition-era speakeasies. For designers, the shift is a subtle one, from places of transaction to spaces for human interaction and shared experience.

Would be nice to include a section of contacts where people could apply to be a part of an interdisciplinary/collaborative experience.

http://www.good.is/post/ideo-org-fellows-bring-beautiful-design-to-humanitarian-efforts/

IDEO

“Human-centered design, the framework through which all IDEO.org fellows operate, guides designers to come in with a “beginner’s mind,” asking lots of questions and observing everyday moments, resisting the instinct to jump to conclusions or try to sound smart. It’s relationships and hunches, not strategic plans and short-term goals, that are the real tools of the human-centered designer. Liz Ogbu, one of the fellows working on the water project, writes, “We are starting to think of available water services and technology as analogous to a set of Lego parts that can be applied and rearranged depending on the needs of the community.”

In class collaboration. Students paired up and picked a profession out of a hat. They had to mind map the strengths they held in their profession separately then list the strengths they held together. From there they had to define a collaboration between the two professions, highlighting their combined strengths.

Quotes of interest:

Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. pg 4

The causes underlying the growing interest in design are clear. As the center of economic activity in the developing world shifts inexorably from industrial manufacturing to knowledge creation and service industry, innovation has become nothing else than a survival strategy. pg 7

The reason for iterative, nonlinear nature of the journey is not that design thinkers are disorganized or undisciplined but that design thinking is fundamentally an exploratory process; done right, it will invariably make unexpected discoveries along the way, and it would be foolish not to find out where they lead. pg 16

Fail early to succeed later. pg 17

Design is now to important to be left to designers. pg 37

The next generation of designers will need to be as comfortable in the boardroom as they are in the studio or the shop, an they will need to begin looking at every problem–from adult illiteracy to global warming–as a design problem. pg 38

us with them. pg 58

…design education draws in equal measure upon art and engineering. The process of the design thinker, rather, looks like a rhythmic exchange between the divergent and convergent phases, with each subsequent iteration less broad and more detailed than the previous one. pg 69

…design thinking is neither art nor science nor religion. It is the capacity, ultimately, for integrative thinking. pg 85

The skills that make for a great design thinker–the ability to spot patterns in the mess of complex inputs; to synthesize new ideas from fragmented parts; to emphasize with people different from ourselves. pg 86

Design can help to improve our lives in the present. Design thinking can help us chart a path into the future. pg 149

Good design thinkers observe. Great design thinkers observe the ordinary. pg 237

a few thoughts on what is interdisciplinary

In 2011 the boundaries that were once drawn between disciplines are dissolving and deteriorating. This past static perspective is getting turned on it’s head as we face new modes of communication, immigration, and environmental challenges… Within all this change new problems arise. Designers are well positioned as creative problem solvers to face these challenges but they cannot do it alone, collaborative teams of diverse thinkers are often brought together. The borders of the design field have become so far reaching, at what point do you call a project interdisciplinary? What is within and what is outside the borders of graphic design?

>>other areas where borders are dissolving
gender
country borders as people migrate

“Students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have learned to speak each other’s language in a generative effort to create a truly innovative home that furthers the discourse of green-tech housing.”

http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20110928/an-opportunity-for-innovation