Any help will be welcome - I am attempting to write an article about a topic I am expert in

Question

what is design thinking?design thinking is actually an oxymoron since design relies mostly on vision, intuition and instinct. To give you, my dear reader, a good analogy I would like to invite you on a visionary trip into the future. The rules of communication the greetings between people, the way the products interact with the user are all strange but you can see a residual but not quite what you know. So you can not rely upon your standard phrases, standard answers, the cliques you have grown up with your entire life. You have to in a manner of split second reality shift relearn everything. Are you able to see how the cars will look, are they even cars? Are you comfortable not knowing so many relationships, not being able to express yourself reliably because the reliable crutches of our society has changed radically enough to confuse someone. Now let's add a twist to this story. You took this trip to the future and together with you, your baby pet Sponky who ran away. We have force you to interact with this future world you kind of know but not understand. Read yourself and the choices you make. They will be simple, logically sound choices based on your intuition, instinct for improving your chances of survival. That is your understanding-my-surrounding vision. Your digestion of your realtime experiment and your clasification of test results give you the thinking, that darn design thinking that is soo elusive. I am not implying that we can all be designers, just like everyone who plays football is not an NFL player. What I want you to know is that good design costs, great design even more and leading the bleeding edge is very. Just like in our make-believe world of the future, the experience to be in unknown environments and quickly deduce a pattern that is life saving or life threatening, in the design world, having the ability to execute the right moves, look for the right answers (without expecting a certain answer) and knowing how to combine this low level cognition to a sophisticated end result is worth the survival. As you are well aware by now, I consider the need for new product design, new product development a critical path to survival of a company.

AlpheccaStars · Accepted Answer

chinda.rauldesign thinking is actually an oxymoron

I am puzzled by your statement. An oxymoron is a phrase where the terms are contradictory or incompatible. e.g. Living dead, deafening silence.

It seems to me that one needs to think a lot when designing and when one is thinking, they can be designing. Designing and thinking are neither contradictory nor incompatible.

chinda.raul Are you able to see how the cars will look, are they even cars?

Well, if a **** sapiens from the neolithic were to be transported to 2011, he would not even have the vocabulary to express the concept of "car." I suppose if a 2011 human would be transported 10,000 years into the future, it might be equally mystifying!

chinda.raul You took this trip to the future and together with you, your baby pet Sponky who ran away.

I have no idea what a Sponky is, and if my pet is with me, how could it have run away? I honestly don't get the point of Sponky.

chinda.raulYour digestion of your realtime experiment and your clasification of test results give you the thinking, that darn design thinking that is soo elusive.

What do you mean to say?

chinda.raulWhat I want you to know is that good design costs, great design even more and leading the bleeding edge is very.

I don't understand this. It does not follow logically the previous statements.

Articles need to be well-designed, well thought-out and structured so that readers can follow the argument.

There are many little spelling and grammatical errors in the text.

Anonymous · Answer

Hi AlpheccaStars.

Thank you for your time disecting my atempt at writing an article. I am hoping for help in the structure, gramar and hmmm, I thought spelling was already checked with the spell-checker. What do you suggest as far as structure, restructuring ... or was your point to just give up altogether? In either case, I welcome your thoughts

BarbaraPA · Answer

Perhaps you could start with an outline.

What are the points you want to make? What do you want the reader to DO with the information/opinions you are giving them?

(How does your commentary about a trip to the future support your point about the need for good design?)

Chinda.raul · Answer

well, here's the background on my story and attempt: there is a lot of talk about design thinking as it pertains to the design process. And there are a lot of designers right now, defining design thinking as a structured process. Much like the way one writes. You first do step one that will take you to step two and so on. I am good, dare I say very, at design and design thinking and I would to help people understand that design thinking is not so linear, is not so staged and the designer, while recieving structured instructions while learning design is, much like Neo in the Matrix, able to re-structure the parameters and definitions around her. The trip to the future analogy was ment as a illustration or immersion into the unknown much like a designer does when embarking a new project/product design. My atempt was to illustrate the shift from relying on well established etiquet set of rules, cliques to relying on one's instinct, logic deduction and on the fly analysis. obviously, the story did not help and I am very willing to remove it.

thank you for your questions GG - I hope this helps in explaining (maybe even the way I think/write)

BarbaraPA · Answer

Okay - I don't have much time right now, but here are some basic questions you must always ask yourself before you ever start to write:

1) What do I want people to DO with this information? (Utlimately, you want people to change the way they behave, but for now, what you want people to think?)

2) Who is my target audience? How much knowledge do they already have about my topic? Do they have any biases I need to address? Any major limitations in their thinking? Do they have the vocabulary for me to say what I want to say?

3) If my audience leaves with only ONE new idea, what should it be?

4) What are the three main messages, if I can get them past the ONE big idea?

Do you already have those answers sorted out in your head? If so, you can begin the strategy of figuring out how to achieve the goal identified in question 1 with the audience identified in question 2, so they get the idea identifed in question 3, and hopefully learn the three points identified in question 4.

Chinda.raul · Answer

thanks I'll return with something structured on your points above

Chinda.raul · Answer

thanks I'll return with something structured on your points above

AlpheccaStars · Answer

It is not uncommon for someone who does something well intuitively, or who can "out of thin air" come up with innovative answers, to be at a total loss when trying to explain how they do it to others.

I did get some understanding from Tim Brown's article. This taught me that one has to do a lot of design thinking to write an exceptional article on the subject (or perhaps, any subject).

The successful article itself is a design, with an audience (user community) and an elegant structure which meets its objective to achieve a purpose. As is oft quoted from Saint Augustine (Summa Theologica) who ascribed to Cicero: "to delight is sweetness, to instruct is necessity, and to persuade is victory."

That seems to me to sum up the end result of a good design, be it rendered in rhetoric, art, poetry, music, writing or an implement.

Chinda.raul · Answer

Thank you for searching out a topic outside your professional comfort and getting yourself familiar with. And I really appreciate all the input I am receiving. I know of Mr. Brown and IDEO and he is a splendid designer.

While I keep learning from Ms. Geek, or is that Ms. Grammar, I am not sure what you are trying to communicate, AlpheccaStars. Before I draw a conclusion that you might be out to offend me, someone you don't know past the willingness to put his mediocre skills out there for critiquing, what are you telling me? that I should go back to school? or should I adhere to Mr. Brown's teachings? Are you bent, or even qualified to critique the content of my knowledge? I read how to write better copy but surely would not have the illusion that I can critique your writing skills. Do you prefer I just pull my need for help from here? Please be kind and produce a sticky that delineates the ideal candidates otherwise, have you nothing to say, don't let your fingers dance on keyboard at my expense.

Cheerious!

AlpheccaStars · Answer

I mean no offence, only to encourage you to employ your design skills in writing, too.

I don't know what kinds of things you design, but image a design for your article. Take the same approach as you do when you design a chair, a building, a computer system, or a mobile phone.

A beautifully designed object delights, as a thing of beauty, it teaches or instructs, and it persuades someone to use it, and that is a victory (for the designer).

Any help will be welcome - I am attempting to write an article about a topic I am expert in

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