Stories

Two graphic designers turned software designers worked together for years at Etsy, where they helped build and scale the online marketplace that connects millions of buyers and sellers from nearly every country in the world today. In this dialogue, these two designers discuss their own career journeys and what they’ve learned about creating compelling shopping experiences online.

Associate Dean for the School of Design and Creative Technologies Doreen Lorenzo introduces the 2018 issue of the Journal of Design and Creative Technologies.

How should educators teach game design principles? The short answer is to teach the principles of play—specifically, play as a mechanism for exploring interactive systems and a means for designing game levels. 

Looking through the lens of American psychologist Sandra Bem’s definition of androgyny, human-centered design asks participants to take an androgynous approach and to adopt the best of both masculine and feminine traits to improve problem-solving outcomes.

Within, Above and Beyond is the recent interactive multimedia piece by multimedia artist Yulia Lanina. In the piece, Lanina interacts with projected animations of her paintings in a narrative that chronicles Lanina’s journey to find clarity amid the noise of disconcerting news, images and social media.

After a survey at Tulane University revealed startling sexual assault statistics, the senior administration hired design consultants to lead a student-centered qualitative research and design project to address campus-wide concerns. The Project IX team proposed a student-driven design thinking collaboration to address tough issues around sexual assault on campus with the goal of bringing the community together to positively change Tulane’s culture.

Design thinking has spread to many disciplines, businesses and cultures; however, the way design thinking is executed requires change. The “fail fast” mentality can sometimes cause more harm than good, but merging design thinking with principles from the scientific method may offer a more successful way forward.

Teaching design thinking for social innovation requires both the students and the teachers to step outside their comfort zones and outside of traditional teaching frameworks. While teaching a class as part of Southern Methodist University’s Design and Innovation Studio, Kate Canales and Gray Garmon share some of their strategies for navigating the fog of ambiguity. 

Today, entrepreneurship is about more than launching a new company. It’s a way of thinking and acting that can change your world and the world of others.

Fidelity Labs has had a growing Design Thinking team since 2005, helping people in all parts of the company adopt a design-forward approach to their work. More recently, the practice has evolved to focus on design strategy in the firm’s incubators, or small startups run by Fidelity tasked with exploring adjacent spaces to its core business. Fidelity’s design strategists apply a human-centered lens to uncover unmet needs and hidden opportunities.