PeaceTXT: Using the design process to decrease violence

photo credit: Mr.Montrose

Our tour guide points to a nightclub with a brown awning and the windows sealed up with cinderblocks.

He points as we roll by in the minivan. "That's where a lot of things start that end up with someone getting shot." 

After scanning the intersection, he slowly turns right. "The nightclub and the high school, stuff starts in those two places and ends up getting finished in the street."

Our guide is a "violence interrupter" for Cease Fire. 

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WARNING: Designers Tend to Fall Prey to Ideas!

"Designer vs. Dinosaur" by Lillian (6) and Peter (40)

Robert "Fabi G" Fabricant is inspiring jealousy (in me) by being in East Africa, blogging, and hobnobbing with the globally challenged superheroes and villains at the World Economic Forum.

His observations in his Fast Company post examine the long shadow cast by the rise of Design Thinking.

Specifically, Fabricant calls out the dirty little secret that designers--while clever, innovative and unafraid of funky footwear--don't actually know how to get stuff done within complex systems.

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Personal Design Kaizen: 15 Tips for your continuous improvement

from Presentation Zen:

Kaizen.slide

Kaizen (改善) means "improvement" — "kai" (改) means change/make better, and "zen" (善) means good — but as the term is used as a business process it more closely resembles in English “continuous improvement.”

Kaizen is one of the keys to the steady improvement and innovation found at successful companies in Japan such as Toyota. Says Matthew May, in his book The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation, “Kaizen is one of those magical concepts that is at once a philosophy, a principle, a practice, and a tool.”

Though Kaizen is a tool used by corporations to achieve greater innovation, productivity, and general excellence, it’s also an approach, an approach that we can learn from and apply to our own lives as we strive for continuous improvement on a more personal level. We can call this “Personal Kaizen.” Others have applied the personal kaizen approach to personal efficiency or GTD. You too can take the spirit of kaizen and apply it to your own unique personal kaizen approach to improve — step-by-step, little-by-little — your design mindfulness, knowledge, and skill. READ MORE >>

Hybrid Thinking at P&G: Design meets Strategy

 

Procter and Gamble

When A.G. Lafley was named CEO of Procter & Gamble during the summer of 2000, her job was remarkably ambitious: Make innovation happen at P&G.

To remain the world's preeminent maker of useful stuff for the house, P&G needed to make a lot of changes very quickly and appointed Claudia Kotchka as the company's first-ever VP for design strategy and innovation in 2002.

Her job was remarkably ambitious: Make innovation happen at P&G!

And she did through up-endeding the status quo in P&G's product development process. She made several bold moves that any company may want to consider.

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