Solving Critical Design Problems


Book Description

Solving Critical Design Problems demonstrates both how design is increasingly used to solve large, complex, modern-day problems and, as a result, how the role of the designer continues to develop in response. With 13 case studies from various fields, including program and product design, Tania Allen shows how types of design thinking, such as systems thinking, metaphorical thinking, and empathy, can be used together with methods, such as brainstorming, design fiction, and prototyping. This book helps you find ways out of your design problems by giving you other ways to look at your ideas, so that your designs make sense in their setting. Solving Critical Design Problems encourages a design approach that challenges assumptions and allows designers to take on a more critical and creative role. With over 100 images, this book will appeal to students in design studios, industrial and product design, as well as landscape and urban design.




Problem Solving and Critical Thinking for Designers


Book Description

The essential guide to decision making and problem solving for the interior designer The interior design profession requires effective problem solving and critical thinking, as they impact all phases of the design project and most work activities of the interior designer. Whether you are a student or professional designer, much of what you do involves these skills. Although most of us do not even think about what we do in terms of these activities, they are a constant part of design. They are also skills that must be performed successfully outside a professional career. Improving these skills makes you a more sought-after employee and designer, effective business owner, and fulfilled individual. Problem Solving and Critical Thinking for Designers will put the reader on the correct path to a solutions-oriented practice. Using her trademark accessible and conversational approach, Christine Piotrowski guides readers through the process of how the working designer solves problems and makes decisions. Some of the topics she discusses are: Design process Communication Asking questions Problem definition and analysis Decision-making process Negotiation Working with others Ethical decision making This book also features real-life scenarios and design problems that guide the reader toward making correct decisions in real-life situations.




Designing Your Organization


Book Description

Designing Your Organization is a hands-on guide that provides managers with a set of practical tools to use when making organization design decisions. Based on Jay Galbraith’s widely used Star Model, the book covers the fundamentals of organization design and offers frameworks and tools to help leaders execute their strategy. The authors address the five specific design challenges that confront most of today’s organizations: · Designing around the customer · Organizing across borders · Making a matrix work · Solving the centralization—and decentralization dilemma · Organizing for innovation




Solving Problems with Design Thinking


Book Description

Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated how design thinking can directly affect business results. Yet most managers lack a real sense of how to put this new approach to use for issues other than product development and sales growth. Solving Problems with Design Thinking details ten real-world examples of managers who successfully applied design methods at 3M, Toyota, IBM, Intuit, and SAP; entrepreneurial start-ups such as MeYou Health; and government and social sector organizations including the City of Dublin and Denmark’s The Good Kitchen. Using design skills such as ethnography, visualization, storytelling, and experimentation, these managers produced innovative solutions to problems concerning strategy implementation, sales force support, internal process redesign, feeding the elderly, engaging citizens, and the trade show experience. Here they elaborate on the challenges they faced and the processes and tools they used, offering their personal perspectives and providing a clear path to implementation based on the principles and practices laid out in Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie’s Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers.




Problem Solving 101


Book Description

The fun and simple problem-solving guide that took Japan by storm Ken Watanabe originally wrote Problem Solving 101 for Japanese schoolchildren. His goal was to help shift the focus in Japanese education from memorization to critical thinking, by adapting some of the techniques he had learned as an elite McKinsey consultant. He was amazed to discover that adults were hungry for his fun and easy guide to problem solving and decision making. The book became a surprise Japanese bestseller, with more than 370,000 in print after six months. Now American businesspeople can also use it to master some powerful skills. Watanabe uses sample scenarios to illustrate his techniques, which include logic trees and matrixes. A rock band figures out how to drive up concert attendance. An aspiring animator budgets for a new computer purchase. Students decide which high school they will attend. Illustrated with diagrams and quirky drawings, the book is simple enough for a middleschooler to understand but sophisticated enough for business leaders to apply to their most challenging problems.




Interaction Design for Complex Problem Solving


Book Description

This book presents a groundbreaking approach to interaction design for complex problem solving applications.




From Problem Solving to Solution Design


Book Description

From Problem Solving To Solution Design Creating solutions to solve problems can often prove very difficult to accomplish, even for seasoned Solution Designers. Complex organizational problems have several stakeholders, endless variables, and a myriad of possible solutions. It's hard enough to figure out where to start, and even harder to realize what the perfect, mutually-beneficial solution is. With their combined tenure of over fifty years, J. Eduardo Campos and Erica W. Campos present their Solution-Designing expertise in From Problem Solving to Solution Design so that you can learn from their successes (and their failures) to craft sustainable solutions for complex problems. Specifically, you will learn how to implement the I.D.E.A.S. framework that they have been perfecting over the years, which includes five critical checkpoints that any Solution Designer must hit to create solutions that are successfully envisioned, negotiated with stakeholders, and implemented to last over time. - IDENTIFY THE ESSENTIAL PROBLEM AND PRIORITIZE YOUR ACTIONS TO SOLVE IT. - DESIGN SOLUTION OPTIONS ALIGNED TO YOUR GOALS. - ENGAGE YOUR STAKEHOLDERS IN THE SOLUTION AND INFLUENCE THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS. - ACT ON THE AGREED-UPON RECOMMENDATIONS AND EXECUTE YOUR GOVERNANCE MODEL. - SUSTAIN THE IMPLEMENTED SOLUTION BY CREATING A FEEDBACK LOOP. Treat this book as your field guide: it offers clear checkpoints for you to assist your organization in designing effective solutions for complex problems.




Design Thinking in Technical Communication


Book Description

This book explicates the relationships between design thinking, critical making, and socially responsive technical communication. It leverages the recent technology-powered DIY culture called "the Maker Movement" to identify how citizen innovation can inform cutting-edge social innovation that advocates for equitable change and progress on today’s "wicked" problems. After offering a succinct account of the origin and recent history of design thinking, along with its connections to the design paradigm in writing studies, the book analyzes maker culture and its influences on innovation and education through an ethnographic study of three academic makerspaces. It offers opportunities to cultivate a sense of critical changemaking in technical communication students and practitioners, showcasing examples of socially responsive innovation and expert interviews that urge a disciplinary attention to social justice advocacy and an embrace of the design-thinking principle of radical collaboration. The value of design thinking methodologies for teaching and practicing socially responsible technical communication are demonstrated as the author argues for a future in the field that sees its constituents as leaders in radical innovation to solve wicked social problems. This book is essential reading for instructors, students, and practitioners of technical communication, and can be used as a supplemental text for graduate and undergraduate courses in usability and user-centered design and research.




Solving 25 Problems in Unit Design


Book Description

Curriculum design experts Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins have reviewed thousands of curriculum documents and unit plans across a range of subjects and grades. In this book, they identify and describe the 25 most common problems in unit design and recommend how to fix them--and avoid them when planning new units. McTighe and Wiggins, creators of the Understanding by Design® framework, help you use the process of backward design to troubleshoot your units and achieve tighter alignment and focus on learning priorities. Whether you're working with local or national standards or with other learning goals, you can rely on their practical and proven solutions to promote deeper and better learning for your students.




Think Like An Architect


Book Description

Do you know how to think like an architect? Do you know why you should? How do you make sure that you have the critical thinking tools necessary to prosper in your academic and professional career? This book gives you the answers. Architects have a valuable and critical set of multiple thinking types that they develop throughout the design process. In this book, Randy Deutsch shows readers how to access those thinking types and use them outside pure design thinking – showing how they can both solve problems but also identify the problems that need solving. To think the way the best architects do. With a clear, driving narrative, peppered with anecdote, stories and real-life scenarios, this book will future-proof the architectural student. Change is coming in the architecture profession, and this is a much-needed exploration of the critical thinking skills that architects have in abundance, but that are not taught well enough within architecture schools. These skills are crucial in being able to respond agilely to a future that nobody is quite sure of.