Category: Design Thinking

  • Damn proud of the PM’s plane

    After publishing Keith Branscombe’s article about the PM’s plane, which quite honestly mirrored thousands of comments in the newspapers and on television albeit with far more flare, I was lucky enough to have the designer of The Government of Canada CC1-150 paint scheme email me a short but polite “Drop me a line”. So unlike…

  • Another federal design disaster

    My good friend Keith Branscombe is at it again. A couple of days ago he sent me a beautiful rant about the Canadian Government and its lack of thinking when it comes to branding our national image. This time it is about the new paint job on the Prime Minister’s military Airbus jet, the Polaris…

  • It has to be Readable

    There are so many key phrases in the design industry and for the last decade the technology industry has supplied the design industry with even more jargon. We now talk about sustainability, ROI, stakeholders, experiential design and usability as we have evolved from paper, to screen, to multitouch to gestural… and the list keeps growing.…

  • The Seven Laws of Interfaces

    On July 28th I attended a talk given by Dr. Carlos Scolari about the Seven Laws of Interfaces. Carlos is a professor at the University of Vic in Spain. He is a media ecologist and a semiotician; he is a teacher and researcher and also holds a position at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. For…

  • A Designer’s Many Hats

    Lately I have heard a lot of people describe and define what it means to be a leader, an entrepreneur, an innovator and a designer. Each of these requires various skills to succeed and each is hard to master. To an extent, each seems too complex to properly describe.

  • Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO

    I recently went to see Jane Fulton Suri speak at the Ontario College of Art and Design, she is the Chief Creative Director of IDEO which is a California-based design firm. She comes from a background in human factors psychology and architecture and is a one of the people championing and trying to evolve human-centred…

  • The Beginnings of a Plan

    Each day people have a great many articles to read. Whether it is for personal or professional consumption, the sources of information are virtually unlimited. Since there is so much information competing for our eyeballs, it is crucial for content providers to produce that information in a manner which is easy to find, read and…

  • Good foundations for eCRM

    Ever company talks about eCRM and in the late 90’s it used to be one of the industry’s most favourite buzzwords. Since then the hype has calmed down, possibly because there aren’t as many companies hopping on to the bandwagon. Nevertheless eCRM is just as important today but perhaps better understood. eCRM is basically a…