News and blog posts from our students and faculty

Maybe your company shouldn’t scale. Maybe you shouldn’t focus on making things that are different, new, novel, disruptive, and with broad appeal. Maybe, instead, your company should try to be appropriate, simple, quiet, useful, and focused. It’s a difference in aspiration. Often, I aspire for both, and when I do, I’m in conflict. I want my school to be wildly successful, and to have a massive impact, and to be well known, and to change the world. And at the same time,…
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I’m advising a startup that’s in a fairly typical “starting” position: they have a team, a good idea of a high level topic (“We’re focusing on financial markets, not on baking bread”), and a series of product features that they know they want to include in the company. They have a timeframe for success, driven by the amount of money they have, their perspective on how fast their competition will work, and, as is usually the case, a bit of…
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I wrote, previously, that it’s important to “… be extraordinarily diligent about file management. I maintain a rigid file structure of every document, artifact, presentation, and design deliverable, organized by client, project, project phase, and so on. When I enter a new context, I can immediately change my work space to ensure I’m ready to work; there’s no searching for files, or locating old emails. It’s just ready to go.” I want to describe in more detail how this works. Files…
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Most designers acknowledge that having a sense of playfulness is important to their work. But what does it mean, and why does it work? The word itself is light; it implies a lack of care for repercussions, outcomes, or intent. There’s a sense of doing something as an end in itself – of trying things for the sake of trying them, or simply to see what happens. For me, play means being “light-hearted”: taking things less seriously, re-casting things from…
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We’re please to announce a new design event in Austin, Texas: A Mingle-Mangle Razzle-Dazzle Ragtag Design Extravaganza! Join us October 5th and 6th, 2012 in Austin, Texas, for 2 days of thought-provoking and inspirational conversations about the role of design, technology, and “user experience” in shaping the fabric of society. This design event is a conference not to be missed. Confirmed speakers include: Allan Chochinov, Chair, Products of Design, School of Visual Arts Bryony Gomez-Palacio, Co-Founder, UnderConsideration Anya Kamenetz, Senior…
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Here in Mexico, I’m teaching a course in innovation. The focus of my class is on “customer relevance” – what makes a product have emotional and lasting resonance with a customer? We’re working through eight or nine methods that can be applied in the context of research, synthesis, and prototyping. All of the ideas fall back on the core themes of Framing, Empathy, Play, Insights, Constraints and Synthesis. To me, these are the ingredients of design – the structures upon which…
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I’m teaching class this weekend at CEDIM, a school in Monterrey. CEDIM, like Savannah College of Art and Design, was founded in 1978. The program has undergraduate degrees in Animation, Architecture, Digital Arts, Fashion Design, Graphic Design, Marketing, and Product Design. It has a unique model for education: students fly in once a month to learn. That’s not that dissimilar from other schools that offer e-MBA programs. The difference is that CEDIM brings in all of the professors, too. We…
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Here’s our public presentation of GirlsGuild, a community of makers in apprenticeship. Check it out and let us know what you think by liking our Facebook page and commenting, or signing up for our Newsletter! We’ll keep you posted on our exciting plans for this Summer! ~xoxo Cheyenne & Diana

I fly a lot, and each time, I can’t help but reflect on the experience of flying as a dual representation: a powerful indication of the technological abilities of man, and a dramatic illustration of a lack of humanism. In many ways, flying is the ideal research subject for a systems-oriented designer; it’s got it all: Advanced technology, in the form of planes, people movers, back-scatter x-ray machines, giant advertising displays, QR codes everywhere, and even police on Segways Legacy…
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A theory of change is a generally accepted way for Social Entrepreneurs to identify the impact they hope to achieve in the world, and to work backwards from that desired impact in order to identify actions and activities to take to make it happen. You can read more about theory of change here. I thought I would describe Austin Center for Design’s theory of change. I have three long-term, lofty goals for the school. The first is to have a…
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