Erik Stolterman, Professor in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, has a great post about design thinking inspired by Tim Brown of IDEO’s recent TED talk.
Stolterman says that he’s all for design thinking, but says:
But what I don’t really like with the presentation is that Brown makes this proposition as if it is something new and something that has not been understood until now. This is not at all the case.
Stolterman mentions a whole bunch of people who have been at the forefront of talking about and researching design (and designerly) thinking. Some of them aren’t from “design” fields per se. Some wouldn’t even call themselves designers.
Stolterman, again:
My point is not to critique Brown in particular, instead I see this as a sign of something more interesting. The developments of design thinking that I mentioned above have almost all been done within fields not traditionally identified as design disciplines[.]
Stolterman’s post is short. Go and read it.
Wow! thanks for pointing that out, ben! I posted a response on there. interesting thing is, I just started an internship at ideo, so i’ll have a lot to say from that corner in a month or so. but in the meantime, i’ve been ordering a ton of books on amazon, trying to get more “academic” in my understanding of design, now that i’ve had some experience with the practice of design. also, i subscribed to your blog via rss because i’ve realized that the tumblr dashboard is way too intimidating these days, and i’d rather not miss any of your posts. (:
