In today’s challenging economy, it’s harder to get a job as a designer in a company. Therefore, I tell my students to open their minds to different business models that they can conquer using their talent and education in design, such as working as a freelance designer or establishing design start-ups. Many of today’s big […]
Download Our Free Business Model Canvas Template
Achieving innovation in business requires deep understanding of the aspects of the business. This understanding is what separates success from failure, yet the focus on essential business elements may be distracted by a 50-pages business plan, as our minds are able to focus on the ideas when they are visually presented, rather than written in long […]
Co-Creation: Placing the Consumer in the Heart of the Open Innovation Process
Companies claim that adopting user experience research as part of their process to achieve innovation puts consumers in the heart of the process, yet many of them fail to achieve this goal and end up with a product full of unused or even frustrating features. While user experience research tends to implement both quantitative and […]
Exploring Human-Centered Innovation: NEST CASE STUDY
As RIBA’s policy officer, Emillia Plotka stated, "Access to energy consumption data at a larger scale could help identify energy-use hotspots and point to areas that could benefit from community energy or retrofitting schemes.”, a more need to innovation and creativity to build smarter homes and intelligent devices that can contribute to sustainability. Founded in 2010 […]
Five Product Designs Against Crime
Crime has a significant negative impact of economy and society, both from physical and physiological approaches. Prison population has increased in the UK from 44,000 to 83,000 between 1993 and 2007, which loaded the UK government with an extra GBP 3.8 billion to build 20,000 more prison places. Costs average around GBP 10,407 per unit […]
8 Tips to Finance Your Design Business
One of the major challenges facing designers and creative people seeking to start their own business—or moving their creative idea from their art studio labs to the market as a manufactured project—is finding the proper method to finance their business. While designers get the chance to learn creative courses and how to develop their ideas […]
Tracing the Open Design Practice
The term “open” is added to different fields such as design, innovation, and software in order to reflect co-creation principles with users contributing to the final design, either by assembling the product, customizing it, or adding more functions to it. A good example of open design is IKEA’s products that can be bought in separate […]
Using Value Stream Maps to Improve User Experience
Designing in its holistic approach is a method for solving problems through creativity and innovation by designing a better product or service experience. In-depth research and exploration for the end user should be conducted at an early stage of the design process in order to understand how consumers use the product or service and what […]
Design Drivers in the Middle East
Design has been agreed as a driver for success among design scholars and practitioners. However, outside the creative and innovation community, an uncertain vision about design can be identified – especially in developed countries – which leads to the questions, what are the design drivers in developed counters and how can these drivers be adapted […]
80/20 Rule: From Economics to Design
Observing consumer behavior can teach us a lot of information about the features implied within the design and how users will interact with those features. An interesting observation indicated by research is that users do not interact equally with all features offered in a design. When visiting a Facebook profile, only a limited number of […]
How New Google Logo Will Change Old Design Rules
Two days ago, Google surprised the world with its new logo design after 17 years of using the same logo for their branding. The previous logo featured minor alterations from time to time, but nothing that could be called a real change. As expected, debates about loving and hating the new logo stormed the […]
How Designers Can Achieve Disruptive Innovation
As people who continuously pursue creative change, designers need to understand the type of change that they are pursuing as well as how to achieve it. Change can be achieved through two types of innovation processes: Sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovation change is unlikely to create new markets or values, such as evolution […]
Five Lessons Designers Should Learn From Failure
Nothing is worse for designers than failing in a project, especially after spending time and effort in the development of ideas and turning them into a final product. When dealing with failure, most designers respond in one of two ways: they either neglect it and move forward to the next project, or get depressed and […]
How IDEO Creates the Future of Automobility
Today’s car designs are based on the same design concepts of decades past; we can’t declare that there is disruptive innovation in the car manufacturing industry, only a few changes that are added along with the launch of new models such as adding features or altering the design lines. However, designers’ roles are not limited […]
CLIP: The New Game-Changing Layerless 3D Printing Technology
The 3D printing technology is evolving very rapidly as companies and startups continue to develop new innovative ideas to take new technology from the prototyping phase to the industrial and mass production levels. Investigations and research are taking place not only in the implementations of 3D printing technology but also in overcoming the barriers faced […]
10 Top Creative Countries in the World
Both scholars and practitioners agree on the important of design as a key player in the government’s economy, and this can be observed in many countries that have applied national design strategies. This leads us to number of questions, such as; what are the most creative countries in the world? And how can we evaluate […]
Five Lessons to Turn Design into Business Success
Design value now has a broader definition inside the organizational structure and companies’ viewpoints on strategic thinking. Leading companies can provide an example of how design can improve the business position in the market. A recent study incorporated sponsored projects at Stanford University, Art Center College of Design and other elite educational institutions around the […]
Creative Diversity: Doblin’s 10 Types of Innovation
In a previous article, we discussed Why Creative Companies Can’t Innovate, and we explored the reasons behind the failure of the innovation process in different companies working within the creative sector. One of the reasons behind this failure is the limited understanding of innovation. Most companies tend to innovate is one direction rather than thinking […]
The Inspiring Life of Typography Icon Hermann Zapf
On the 4th of June 2015, Hermann Zapf died at the age of 96 after a legendary career as a typographer, calligrapher, and book designer. Hermann Zapf’s typeface design can be seen in his projects including Optima (1958), Aldus (1954), Palatino (1950), Sistina (1950), Venture (1969), and Zapfino (1998). During his versatile life, Zapf invented […]
How Social Media Affects Your Creativity
Social media has become a part of our daily life. Although the debate about how social media may affect the quality of life, users of different social media have increased over time. Facebook users for example increased from 75 million to 600 million in the between 2008 and 2011. LinkedIn users increased from 20 million […]