enlightened trial and error succeeds over

The famous Ted Koppel Nightline story about IDEO and “The Deep Dive” begins with visits to a grocery store and interviews with people in the grocery store, and a request to redesign a shopping cart in just five days.īut it’s worth noting that these folks are Designers. But it’s occurred to me in the intervening six years, that while empathy is an important part of the thinking of Design Thinking, the real work of Design Thinking, the Design portion of the work, comes not from knowing about someone else’s problems, but knowing how to do things which might help those people arrive at a solution to those problems. It was all about having empathy for people, and solving problems. When I was asked to start up a design thinking program six years ago, I thought it was all about theory.

I’ve not been able to go to the Monday night knitting circle in a few weeks, but I’m looking forward to getting back into the string-theory work I’ve been doing with knitting a Hermetic scarf (like a Doctor Who scarf, but in the colors of the seven classical planets rather than the Doctor’s colors), and a few other projects, like making lucet cord for decorative purposes, and for finishing out a pair of medieval-style poof pants I made for myself….

And I’m getting back to these projects, of course, after weeks of experimenting with electricity and building motors for my Thursday teaching program. And on Friday I folded a trio of big origami boxes to wrap a present for a colleague, using giant paper and a pattern I learned during my summer experimentation. Before that, I worked on another automata that’s built from the box frame I built to practice dovetails, which will be a present for my mother. I first learned about the inkle loom while trying to assemble a system for card/tablet-weaving, and now I think I want to build a better loom that looks like this, anyway. I’ve just come upstairs from the basement workshop, where I’m assembling a pair of inkle looms as gifts for friends.

Enlightened trial and error succeeds over