I love creativity in all things. As I look for creative ways to educate and train I happened upon this video. Here Tim Brown, from Ideo, discusses creativity in the workplace and how it breeds innovation. Yet, what I think I like best about his entire presentation is the way Tim got the audience involved in his talk. So, set aside 20 minutes and enjoy this TED Talk by Tim Brown.

BTW- Don’t you love the way his designers/thinkers get into the role of the user/client in order to deliver a more powerful solution?

Just a couple of weeks ago I read a great article called Design Thinking at Harvard Business Online. In that article, Tim Brown says, “Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products,
services, processes—and even strategy.”

As the article progresses, Brown goes on to discuss what it means to think like a designer through Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation. He also takes the reader through the Design Thinker’s Personality Profile to help us better identify these thinkers in a variety of organizations and roles.

That particular article by Tim Brown requires a nominal fee for downloading but there is a video presentation on the same topic available at MIT World.

If the visual display of content is something that you ponder over on a regular basis (and what good e-Learning developer or Instructional Designer doesn’t?), be sure to visit Visual Literacy today. There are all kinds of fun things to discover. One of my favorites was the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. Check it out!

I never wanted to be a teacher. My mom taught elementary school, my dad taught biology to high school kids, and just about everybody else in my family—cousins, aunts, uncles—eventually found their way into the education field (even my little sister’s a teacher now). But not me. I was going to be an artist.

So I went through college, majoring in art. When it came time to decide upon an emphasis, I picked graphic design—I joked that I chose design over fine art because I didn’t want to have to eat ramen noodles my whole life, but the real reason was that I felt like design played a more integral role within society than painting did (I don’t know if that was a commentary on contemporary art, or on culture in general… anyway). The general public actually saw design. Design communicated. Design persuaded. Design… taught? Oh man.

Of course, throughout my first few years as a graphic/web designer I was enamored with the flashy, hipper-than-thou, watch-the-logo-catch-on-fire visuals surrounding me. Design seemed to be all about creating something so interesting-looking that people said “wow.” Then the dot-com bubble burst, and that economic shift forced a lot of creative people to rediscover a fundamental design principle: design is more than pretty pictures. Good design not only inspires, but communicates. In other words, design should be both smart and compelling.

I started off spending all my design time on the compelling side of design; as I’ve gotten older (and hopefully wiser), I’ve become consumed with creating smart design. Here’s an example: We recently created a Change Management Primer for a client. While it’s a beautiful and engaging piece, my favorite part of it is how we were able to layer relatively large amounts of information into a non-threatening and easily digestible system. By making the information easier and less confusing to access, we’re raising the chances of the end user actually receiving the information we’re trying to communicate. We’re not making people say “wow” anymore; we’re getting them to say “aha!” (To see what I’m talking about, visit the Primer. The diagram in the “How” section illustrates my point.)

At our best, good designers really are a lot like teachers—the most important charge for both is to communicate information to their audience. It’s taken me almost thirteen years of studying design to realize it, but I have finally come to the conclusion that I’m just like my parents. Except I can’t give out detentions.