Marty Neumeier the president of Neutron and author of such books as The Brand Gap and Zag has written a nice article for DMI as a preview of his upcoming book The Designful Company.

Marty polled top executives to find out the wicked problems that their organizations face.

The results are as follows:

2008 Survey of Wicked Problems*
(Sponsored by Neutron and Stanford University)
1. Balancing long-term goals with short-term demands
2. Predicting returns on innovative concepts
3. Innovating at the increasing speed of change
4. Winning the war for world-class talent
5. Combining profitability with social responsibility
6. Protecting margins in a commoditizing industry
7. Multiplying success by collaborating across silos
8. Finding unclaimed yet profitable market space
9. Addressing the challenge of eco-sustainability
10. Aligning strategy with customer experience
*A wicked problem is a puzzle so persistent, pervasive, and slippery
that it can seem insoluble.

In his article Marty advocates for business folks who live and breath the language of design. Not necessarily surrounding themselves with and hiring designers but embodying the process and thinking that is involved with design. He also mentions that the rise of eco-sustainability as an issue that will only gain in prominence and that it will provide many opportunities for innovation creating products and services for guilt free affluence of the mass market.

Stephen P. Anderson recently put together a primer on this topic. What business leaders are slowly becoming aware of is that it’s not good enough to be more efficient or feature rich. They need a new tool for a post-industrial world. One that leads to innovation. Design thinking is traditionally a part of the process that delivers great products and artifacts. Take that to a higher level and you can be designing ecosystems where many products and services live. This is knowledge that is vital for companies in a new frontier of competition.

This is why we’re seeing traditional B.Schools like Rotman promote their integrative thinking toolkit as a main differentiator.

Anyway have a breeze through these slides you should come out of it with a better understanding of “design” as a verb not a noun

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I’ve been following Worldchanging for about 2 years ever since GK had a conversation with Jamais Cascio over at NextD.

I love the work they do over at Worldchanging just because they are very solution orientated. They present their work in a very non biased way and express it well showing working examples of sustainable design all over the world. Alex Steffen spoke briefly about the new book: Worldchanging : A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. It was great to see the turnout and know that we can easily be change agents for a better future. One of Alex’s main points is to try and create a world where the incumbents can’t survive doing business in a backwards and careless way. We need to put the pressure as consumers and as entrepreneurs to shift the market focus to a new green future.

Anyway if you go back to my Inconvienent Truth Post you can see some steps to make a difference right now! Don’t forget to buy the book

As a side note, I’ll be fixing my side links shortly to give you some more useful links like before. (those aren’t my real friends )

And I’ll leave you a few photos from my evening at Workspace:

Synectics have been on my mind ever since I read the discussion between John Chris Jones and GK Vanpatter at NextD. It’s best known as, ‘making the familiar strange and the strange familiar’ and it is the result of decades of research by William JJ Gordon which culminated into his book Synectics: The Development of Creative Capacity in 1961.

The basis of Synectics is trying to draw connections from seemingly unrelated topics to drive creative response. I know I find a lot of times when I’m brainstorming on my own it’s difficult to come up with anything that deviates from the normal conventions. It’s always attractive to follow a linear thought process (and faster) but it can be more rewarding to follow a process that promotes more lateral thinking. For example, if I simply do a competitive analysis I might do some hybrid of a couple of concepts and try to mix some new type of element but it’s not really a substantial leap forward other than keeping on par with competitors.

In many situations this method is all that time will permit but if you are trying to rethink complex problems, on paper, Synectics looks like a good way to stimulate thinking. I think a lot people’s creative process integrate some of the elements from Synetics but actually formalizing the process can be helpful in a group setting.

Some key tools when using Synectics are:

1. Subtract: Remove parts of your current approach, or simplify it.
2. Repeat: Duplicate parts of it, or significantly increase resources so that you can take existing approaches to a new level;
3. Combine: Mix existing approaches with other approaches;
4. Add: Make existing approaches bigger or stronger, or add other elements;
5. Transfer: Move existing approaches into different situations, and look at how they would change to cope with these approaches;
6. Empathize: Put yourself in the minds of your customers, or pretend that you are the problem: From this perspective, how would you do things differently?
7. Animate: Bring the problem to life. Think about it as a living thing;
8. Superimpose: Overlay the situation with new meanings or ideas, possibly randomly generated (see random input);
9. Change Scale: Think about what would happen if you radically expanded the scale of the problem, or if you reduced it substantially;
10. Substitute: Switch out and replace elements of your current approach. Switch in parts of alternative approaches;
11. Fragment: Take the problem or your current approach apart. If you solve some parts of the problem, does this help solve others? Or can other people help you solve parts more effectively?
12. Isolate: And is there value in only looking at part of the problem? Are people really that concerned about other parts?
13. Distort: Change the “shape” of your current product, solution or service: Extend it or stretch it, think about it as a different, distorted shape;
14. Disguise: Think about whether you can eliminate the problem by hiding it or camouflaging it (in some cases this may be a legitimate solution);
15. Contradict: Think about doing the opposite of what you want to do (for example, how you would make the problem worse?), then reverse this;
16. Parody: Think about what you’d ridicule about your problem or solution. See if this changes the context or suggests alterations;
17. Prevaricate: Fantasize about your service. Think about what it would be like in your wildest dreams;
18. Analogize: Think about analogies for your product or service, and what you can compare it to in other disciplines. How do people deal with analogous problems? (We’ll look at this in more detail later…)
19. Hybridize: Think about what would happen if you crossed your current approach with something wildly different. Does this suggest any ideas?
20. Metamorphose: Think about how your product or service will be affected if current trends continue – will the problem get worse, or will it fade away in significance?
21. Symbolize: How can you strip your product or service back to its bare essentials? How can you convert it into something this is immediately easy to grasp?
22. Mythologize: Taking this further, how could you give it symbolic, “iconic” or “mythological” status?

On a completely unrelated note I leave you with a concept called Teddy by Takeo Igarashi that was presented at SIGGRAPH in 1999. (Creates a 3D object from your 2D lines)