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I’ve been back in school for a little over a month now and, although it’s been a crazy transition, I really love everything about it. My classmates are awesome and the research, reading and projects so far have been thought-provoking and fun.
Our first project of the semester was on design thinking. In a nutshell, design thinking is innovation through designerly thinking- it is a process by which designers can use their specialty to reveal new ways of approaching anything from the pursuit of new business ventures, the revamping of products or businesses, or the designing of new experiences. It’s a way of taking into consideration what consumers want and need and how to effectively “design” goods toward their desires. Of course the practice is much broader than that, but that’s my basic idea of design thinking. Even though companies like IDEO and Red Hat have been practicing design thinking for years, it’s recently caught on as a buzz phrase within the business world. Stanford even has a school devoted to it.
For our project, each student was assigned a different aspect of design thinking to research and turn into an informative poster for a College of Design exhibition and later for a PDF to live on the Cooper-Hewitt’s ERC website. My topic was Morphological Thinking, which involves a systematic approach to design involving a structure in which all possible variations are laid out at once. This allows for quick trials of many different variations on form and can reveal new ideas.
The real value that I found in this project came when I first saw the finished posters together as a group. Each designer portrayed their poster both visually, through descriptive text and through a distinct applicable case study. The differences between pieces were evident, yet the exhibition still read as a cohesive group. There’s been a ton of great feedback within the COD and some interest in taking the project further!
Several classmates posted photos of the final exhibition. You can see some of them here. My final is pictured below. I will post the link to the Cooper-Hewitt once the PDFs are live.
You can find out more about design thinking by checking out Tim Brown’s blog.
My final poster for exhibition
Lately, I’ve become somewhat enticed by letterpress and printmaking. I think it’s something that I would like to look into in grad school and maybe carry into my career. At my school interview, they said that they have a new printmaking studio, but no one ever has time to use it (hmmm… well I’d at least like to check it out before the craziness begins).
The only printmaking I’ve ever done was in high school with linoleum blocks, but I really enjoyed it. (Interesting, given my later summer stint at the Speedball factory.)
I was googling letterpress looking for some companies that work in the field and hoping to find some artwork for my future home office, when I ran across Yee-Haw Industries. I really like their prints- so many of them, in fact, that I can’t decide which one I want to purchase.
