I recently completed the "Foundations of Design Research" course offered at Lynda.com. It was a great refresher that allowed me to review fundamentals and also introduced me to a few new tools to try in my work. The training host provided a thorough and engaging walk thru of various types of design research, and introduced research tools, planning considerations and frameworks for presenting results. If, like me, you appreciate insight into other designers ways of working or

Over the holidays I watched a few movies with the family, most of which were the customary Christmas classics but I was able to get some documentaries into the lineup as well. One that I really enjoyed, and that surprised my wife, was a documentary on the inventor Dean Kamen. “SlingShot” shares the story of the life and creations of the prolific inventor and focuses specifically on his SlingShot water distillation device. Kamen, a brilliant and eccentric visionary who wears a

Participating in an office brainstorming activity and working with difficult customers are two different but common activities in which interpersonal communication is vital for success. Without fail, however, misunderstandings and other factors lead to disagreements, bad feelings and undesirable outcomes. Often, these disagreements are born out of the feeling that one of the involved parties is not acting in good faith, that they are placing their own interests above an appro

I recently read the book "Design Like Apple” that I received from a friend at Lunar, a design agency in San Francisco. Written by the agency's president John Edson, the book uses Apple as an innovation bellwether but weaves in stories of successful and unsuccessful design scenarios from a variety of businesses, making this book much more than a discussion of Apple's design methodology. After blowing through the book I was left with a few pages of insights that both helped and