Like it says on Thinkory’s site, we’re still writing our story—and we’re really taking our time with it. I’ve been a designer for some 11 years, various disciplines. With Thinkory though, I really wanted to shape our role as designers and design thinkers. I didn’t want to fall into the stereotypical role and function of a design agency by moving too quickly into areas that were too familiar. I think at the end of the day, Thinkory has to solve meaningful problems in meaningful (and sustainable) ways.

Thanks for that IDEO.org link. Didn’t know they had that going on. I’ll be spending some time on that site this week for sure. I very much admire IDEO.

+Ralston

@Ralston – Awesome to hear! Hope to see your site up soon. In the meantime, I’ll follow on twitter

Who I am becoming as a designer was hard to put into words. Articulating the ‘why’ of it. Then I read this and found my words in yours. Designers are meant to be more, do more. Change more. It’s actually this belief that inspires the namesake of our new and presently tiny group of design thinkers: Thinkory.

Thanks for renewing our charge this morning with your perspective.

+Ralston

Marcel – Why do you say ‘thinking’ is getting us stuck. I agree conditioning is getting us stuck, but to me, not thinking is keeping us stuck. If we can’t think, we can’t change. We just end up staying in our same spot. There is a good book on disruption called Disrupt that discusses turning conventional thinking on it’s head (to be clear, it’s written by an ex-frog, but I’m not advocating to buy it, look for articles, you can get the summary on the web and learn from that, hahaha). This link sums it up. http://mashable.com/2011/02/17/disruptive-thinking-innovation/
Find what you want to change, find the cliches, then form a hypothesis based on the opposite of those cliches. The miss-match socks example is genius. Of course it’s easy to find examples in hindsight, but I use this technique in small ways to get problems unstuck all the time.

This type of thinking is what led me to be unhappy with our current role. Asking what if we solved economic issues, and weren’t confined to a computer screen, graphic design, product design, and filling our eyes with advertisements.

I’m interested to hear a little more on how thinking causes us issues.

Wendy – I’m impatient I know it’s slowly happening, but at the same time, it’s something lacking in a lot of the basic education of design. Why not give students problems of solving high school drop out issues, economic issues, water conservation, the future of the music industry, tackling poor education issues… I think my head broke with that problem of tackling education within an educational class.

Sure things are starting to change, but the solution has to go back to the start. When you’re learning design, it’s not simply graphic, product, fonts, behaviors, but complex systems… of course people are at the center, but let students know they can solve so many things. Give them the inspiration. The Right Brain Initiative in Portland OR, USA is doing some interesting stuff with bringing more creative education into schools. Not quite the same, but it’s great to see these organizations pushing for change. It’s not going to happen without them, and each designer who joins in, helps push it faster and louder.
http://therightbraininitiative.org/

“Given the current power of CX at the C-level, UX practitioners must step up our game, otherwise we will lose progress we have made to be more deeply involved in strategy beyond just performing usability services. We need to act now to be part of the broader CX solution. If we don’t proactively collaborate across divisions and organizational
structures, we will be stuck playing in the corner by ourselves. If we don’t figure out how to manage partnerships with other departments in a collaborative, creative, customer focused way, the discipline of UX as we know it is at risk. CX management will take over….
We’ve reached the point of no more worshiping at the altar of our
cathedrals of business. The marginalization of design/UX is on its way to the rag pile.”