Design Thinking: Actively Creating the FutureDesign Thinking Put to Practice in the Alps
I recently read Warren Berger’s, Glimmer, a book that details how design thinking can transform lives. So you can understand my interest in an article about a group of Utah State University students who went to Switzerland to study creative thinking. I must add that the article was tweeted by my colleague, James, a very talented graphic designer.
Many (like Berger) refer to this cultivation of right brain (or creative thinking) to solve problems and advance innovation as “design thinking”. And students are calling on the right sides of their brains, not only to solve problems, but out of necessity as well—to get a job when they graduate.
“There’s a new field emerging,” says Bob Winward, the graphic design professor who led the trip, “…today’s successful businesses are driven by innovation and creativity. The world is undergoing a huge shift—from a largely informational economy to a conceptual one where intuition thought will replace logic.”
I think Berger would agree wholeheartedly!
At this point you might be thinking that design thinking is a bunch of conceptual mumbo-jumbo, all well and good in theory, but not applicable to real life. Well the students found out otherwise as they traversed the Swiss Alps on snowshoes to the Great St. Bernard Hospice. Here monks tasked them with reconstructing gigantic kennels for the St. Bernard dogs—bred to rescue avalanche victims. The harsh conditions, risk of snow slides and 60-pound steel beams used to construct the kennels all had to be figured into the course of action.
But according to graphic design student Rich Wills, the students might have learned the most important lesson from the monks, “You have to learn how to understand other people if you’re going to design things for people.”
