Month: October 2010

Guest critiques graced the halls of our studios this week. The experience allowed new perspective into our group projects on the AMS food service businesses. It also introduced me to the idea of 7 for market research. By the time you have interviewed 7 people you will begin to notice patterns about your consumer.

What I learned in 4

A running theme with design professionals is “dream big or go home.” Innovation is about growing/building/stretching an idea to its limits.

Go with an idea until everyone in the room starts giggling, then take the idea and shrink it down.

Dreaming big is the romantic side of design. It draws innovators in and feeds the fire of creativity, but what happens when the scale and scope is out of your reach?

Unfortunately, you dilute and make compromises. So at what concentration does an innovation become linear?

David vs. Goliath

Then there are the David ideas: small, seemingly insignificant, but pack a punch. If they were crafted and tempered with design thinking, can we call these design innovations or are they just linear business paradigms wrapped in sheeps clothing?

My intuition says yes and no.

The distinction requires a critical voice which can look at the obvious and non-obvious. If visualization of observations within a design framework  is able to shed light on patterns and stimulate REthink on a problem

Is a cover of a song innovative?

I have been recently introduced to MindNode, an ingenious way to electronically mind map anything you can think of. Through my anecdotal experience and what I know of the brian I have decided this is the best thing since sliced bread.

Semantic memory refers to the memory of meanings, understandings, and other concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experience.

One theory of how the brain stores and process non-experential based information is semantics. Semantically storing an idea of a chair may go something like this:

When retrieving the idea of a comfy chair you may go through the process of semantically picking if the chair has 3 or 4 legs –> From there you may then decide if this chair will be made with wood, metal, or plastic –> then if it will have cushions or no cushions —-> until you get to an image of a comfy chair.

Basically your brain is one big mind node. Making a visual representation of the information allows us to store and retrieve facts in an intuitive way; therefore, increasing our capacity to remember.

The REthink involves taking a current organic biological process (semantic memory) and applying it to an everyday task (note taking). When we align with nature as opposed to fighting it, we see enhanced results.

In this example, the model of the brian is oversimplified. The mind is not just a semantic repository of linearly defined features. The mind is a relational database with many multifaceted connections, but the design idea still makes for an interesting read. Hope you enjoyed!