A complexity-based understanding and provocation.
Hi everyone, Kevin here.
I often talk here about Design as a catalyst for organizations, businesses, and at a much smaller scale, teams. Design is to me, a means to instigate change and impact (positively) our environment. This is why I also think this not the job of one person.
Because of this, I consider innovation in many ways similar to Design in terms of purpose. “Innovation” — whatever it translates to in your context — is another way of designing our environment toward an intent.
As I recently explored in “The Multiples Design Thinking” and “The Ethics Of Design Sprint”, the multiplicity of Design practices and the various level of complexity we’re facing when designing requires us to use different thinking styles to approach the challenges. We, as communities, create or adopt paradigms that allow us to more easily anticipate and navigate our environment. …
The thing that prevents you to do “what should be done”.
Hi everyone, Kevin here.
Some times ago, I proposed the concept of “space-for-action barrier” as a potentially useful description of the conditions of a context that hinders your ability to act & learn in a “necessary space” because of imposed constraints.
I recently wanted to extend it a bit further and provide a path through it, in the light of 1) some words of wisdom from D. Snowden and; 2) my own, surely limited, understanding of his work at Cognitive Edge and my endeavor through Systems & Complexity themes.
The “necessary space” here is what we think/believe we ought to do in order to understand the context and discover possibilities that could lead to novelty. In my article “The Multiples Design Thinking”, I describe the concept as…
Join us for our first community event
UPDATE: If you missed it, here’s the recording of the opening session. Enjoy!
If you’re interested in sharing ideas and/or helping to organize future events or simply discuss with the community, feel free to join our Slack here 👇
Back in August, I shared my wish to create a space for a community to grow. After 3 months, a Slack group, and tons of very interesting discussions, we are happy to announce our first Design & Critical Thinking (D&CT) event on Tuesday 15, December 2020 at 6 PM CET.
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us” — Marshall…
Why Star Wars isn’t a desirable future
Hi, Kevin here.
I take the time to reflect on personal thoughts here, after watching this video.
Despite me being a (more or less) fan of the franchise, I can’t undermine the critical thoughts that came to my mind. Not that I never had any against these movies (or the Star Wars universe in general), but I never fully reflected on the whole system being narrated.
It has to be said that from a movie perspective, the coherence of the stories relies mainly upon the characters, their relationships, the struggles they overcome, and their evolution. …
Hi, Kevin here.
As you might have noticed, Human Centered Thinking changed its name and now becomes Design & Critical Thinking. No worries, the URL and all our previous articles’ links remain the same.
Behind the change, the idea is to align the publication with my recent community initiative. This allows a more seamless and clear connection between what the community discusses and what happens in the publication, to build this collective understanding at the intersection of design, innovation, tech, change, and more.
I think this evolution in purpose doesn’t betray what this publication was originally about: think about what we do, and how we do it. Crossing boundaries, broaden-up our views, and engage in conversations have always been part of the publication’s DNA. …
We need your help to create and engage in discussions that have the potential to cross boundaries.
Hi, Kevin here.
As you may know, Design & Critical Thinking is now a community slowly growing. Our aim is to build a shared understanding & collective knowledge that crosses over different disciplines, practices, and communities.
To reach that goal, we want to create and engage in discussions that have the potential to cross these boundaries. We need design, development, management, business, product, innovation people to join, share ideas, and participate in discussions.
We have created a small survey to capture discussion topics & ideas.
We would also need some motivated people to help us prepare and organize these online live discussions. …
Designing for meaningful human experiences, not vacuous simplicity.
Hi everyone, Kevin here.
I recently had a great conversation with Joel Marsh about the broad topic of UX design. We covered so much that we decided to break it down into smaller pieces (will release the full conversation later). Here are a few notes about that first part.
Joel Marsh is an experienced UX designer, Founder at Peekerton and author of UX for Beginners published by O’Reilly.
This conversation is part of a series of podcasts for Design & Critical Thinking, in which I aim to create shared & collective understanding around the topics of design, business, tech, society, complexity, and more. …
A discussion with Massimo Curatella
In this episode, we discuss with Massimo Curatella about our need as designers to understand & explain complex topics to enable collaboration while complexity cannot be reduced or simplified by definition.
- 0:00:00 Intro
- 0:01:05 Massimo’s self-introduction & topic
- 0:03:46 Easing the learn/act (thinking/doing) tension
- 0:05:39 A good designer is also a leader
- 0:10:25 Making complexity actionable
- 0:14:38 Sensing & changing a company’s culture
- 0:22:31 The need for persuasion
- 0:24:52 Becoming agent of change & collective intelligence
- 0:29:24 Overcoming the space-for-action barrier through complexity
- 0:39:15 Leading through uncertainty
- 0:51:14 The link between critical, systems, and design thinking
- 0:55:04 Is “metacognition” or “metathinking” undervalued in design? …
When communication is conflated with “sales pitch”, this is problematic.
Hi, Kevin here!
I recently came across an interesting article called “The one critical skill most designers overlook”, written by Alastair Simpson from the Atlassian design, and I wanted to give a quick reaction to it.
The author develops the idea that, as designers, we are probably not spending enough time on our communication skills. He goes on by saying that “communication skills can make or break any design projects that you working on”.
I think we can agree with this statement. I mean, communication is indeed an inherent and important part of our work.
Now, what is interesting here is the development he makes from this statement. Because he is presenting us with an approach to communication that I would qualify as “presentation skills”. He is, from his own words, conflating sales and presentation techniques with communication in the general & commonly shared meaning of the term: exchanging with others — and I think what we really mean here is a “mutually beneficial and meaningful exchange”. …
A discussion about Basecamp’s new book
A discussion with Emilijan Sekulovski and Kevin Richard.
For our first podcast in English, we discuss product development, production processes, organizational design, and team organization.
Basecamp’s book “Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters”
👉 Emilijan Sekulovski is the Head of User Experience at Pix4D, a Swiss company focused on delivering the best photogrammetry & drone mapping software for professionals. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
👉 Kevin Richard is a senior Designer & editor of “Design & Critical Thinking” through which he tries to popularize design and shares his thoughts. Find him on Medium, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Music: Skydive by Loxbeats
