Big Ideas: Most companies are designed for efficiency not creativity.
Use games to brainstorm creative solutions to problems.

Dave Gray of Xplane shares some of the ideas and techniques of his latest book Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers in this UX Week 2010 conference video (below).

Gamestorming combines games with brainstorming. Gray explains that most corporations are designed like factories with a focus on efficiency rather than creativity. He suggests that we need to move from “factories to collaboratories or environments for collaboration.”

The video below demonstrates several games and activities designed to engage and stimulate creative solutions to difficult problems. All the games use only commonly available office supplies so that they are easy to implement.

Gray says, “design problems aren’t static. That’s where game storming helps us move faster. ” He further explains the,

“Paradox of Discovery
You find things your not looking for when your not looking.
But if your not looking for something then you won’t find anything.”

The video is a great introduction to what I am sure will be a fun and inspiring book. I can’t wait to read it.

UX Week 2010 | Dave Gray | Gamestorming: Design Practices for Co-creation and Engagement from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

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Alex Tabarrok on How Ideas Trump Crises

“On the cutting edge today it’s new ideas which are driving growth. And by that I mean it’s products for which the research and development costs are really high, and the manufacturing costs are low. More than ever before it is these types of ideas which are driving growth on the cutting edge.”

Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From

“The English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment.”

Matt Ridley: When Ideas Have Sex

“How human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate.”

Tim Brown on Creativity and Play

“You can be a serious professional adult, and, at times, be playful. It’s not an either/or, it’s an and. You can be serious and play. So to kind of sum it up, we need trust to play, and we need trust to be creative, so there’s a connection. And there are a series of behaviors that we’ve learnt as kids, and that turn out to be quite useful to us as designers. They include exploration, which is about going for quantity. Building and thinking with their hands. And role play, where acting it out helps us both have more empathy for the situations in which we’re designing, and to create services and experiences that are seamless and authentic.”

Amy Tan on Creativity

“I get these hints, these clues, and I realize that they’ve been obvious, and yet they have not been. And what I need, in effect, is a focus. And when I have the question, it is a focus. And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question, and what happens is those particular things become relevant. And it seems like it’s happening all the time. You think there’s a sort of coincidence going on, a serendipity, in which you’re getting all this help from the universe. And it may also be explained that now you have a focus. And you are noticing it more often.”

Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity

“I’m a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?”

Ken Robinson says Schools Kill Creativity

“My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Flow

“When you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, as this man does, he doesn’t have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels, or his problems at home.”

Stefan Sagmeister: The Power of Time Off

“I run a design studio in New York. Every seven years I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. In that year we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.”

David Kelley on Human-Centered Design

“Human-centeredness in an approach to design. That really involves designing behaviors and personality into products.”

Chris Anderson: How Web Video Powers Global Innovation

“There’s millions connected. And amazingly, you can still see what the best can do, because the crowd itself shines a light on them, either directly, through comments, ratings, email, Facebook, Twitter, or indirectly, through numbers of views, through links that point Google there. So, it’s easy to find the good stuff, and when you’ve found it, you can watch it in close-up repeatedly and read what hundreds of people have written about it.”

Charles Leadbeater on Innovation

“I think … creativity has been highly collaborative. and it’s probably been largely interactive. … ideas are flowing back up the pipeline. The ideas are coming back from the consumers, and they’re often ahead of the producers.”

Richard Florida On Economic Transformation Through Creativity

“For the first time in history we are no  longer critically dependent on physical resources or physical labor, large factories and simple technology to generate wealth. Those things are all important but they can be done more cheaply in the emerging economies.”

Disruptive Creativity

David Brooks and Paul Romer on the consequences of human potential.

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Are corporations applying design thinking as a superficial band-aid without addresses the underlying disease of modern management?

Youngjin Yoo on in an iPod World (via Putting People First) makes a convincing argument;

The evolution of capitalism thus can be seen as continuing pursuit of higher return on capital through a series of separations: production, management and finance. Each of these separations brought a new form of “leverage” that amplifies the potential return on investment. Yet, at the same time, they brought greater degree of complexity, unforeseen systemic risks, and alienation of labor and consumers alike.

Design thinking, as it is currently popularized with the emphasis on human-centered product and service design, deals only with the problems from the separation of production and consumption, leaving other and possibly far more serious challenges that today’s management is facing. Many of these challenges arose as a result of separations of management and finance from production. For example, design thinking has little to say about the recent financial crisis that raised many fundamental questions about the continuing viability of the current form of capitalism and the role of management schools. The demise of the Big Three is the result of institutionalized “scientific” management and toxic financial products as much as the lack of human-centered design in their products.

My concern is that the current obsession with the design thinking can have unintended harmful consequences on the future of management in the long run. As it is currently being applied, design is seen as a quick fix of profitability problems, new product developments, and consumer satisfactions, rather than dealing with more systemic and serious issues. Indeed, it might lead us to the emergence of new form of capitalism, design capitalism, where creativity is separated from production and consumption. Just as management was for the sake of management during the managerial capitalism, and finance was for the sake of finance during the financial capitalism, we may see the creativity for the sake of creativity in this new form of design capitalism. If that happens, instead of finding its panacea, management might have discovered the most powerful painkiller it has ever found. And, alas, that is design.

As the world gets more complex and corporations continue to bloat in search of economies of scale, there is a growing disconnect between production and consumption. Production of everything is so distant and foreign to consumers that US children have trouble identifying common vegetables. Consumers have almost no idea how the goods we consume are produced, nor where they are from. Nicer packages and brighter colors might look prettier and sell more products but how many more marginally differentiated products do we really need?

Real design is about rebuilding the connections between consumers and producers that has been forgotten in financial and management circles.

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