Hasta La Ideas

Portugal’s newest daily newspaper, i, was launched in early May and has attracted a significant amount of attention due to its rising circulation figures and innovative approach. It recently won a design award from the Society of News Design.

The Editors Weblog spoke to editor-in-chief Martim Avillez Figueiredo, managing editor for online Mónica Bello and art director Nick Mrozowski, to find out more about i‘s approach and the reasons behind its success.

“I is not structured like a traditional paper. The paper’s team worked with media consultancy Innovation to come up with a new way to organise the product. “Our feeling was,” said Figueiredo, who came on board at an early stage, moving from Diário Económico, “that people were not concerned about traditional sections any more. Traditionally, journalists have to fill a politics section even if there is nothing relevant going on in politics. We wanted to come up with something different.” So the team came up with five key needs that they wanted the paper to address, with five key words.”

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(via Haddock blogs)

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SEE is a network of eleven European partners sharing knowledge and experience on how design can be integrated into regional and national policies to boost innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability and social and economic development.

In a new policy document, they highlight six priorities for European innovation policy:

Stimulating demand for innovation can be achieved through ‘public procurement‘ and public services as catalysts for ‘innovation in services‘.
Fostering an innovative environment requires policy intervention in order to provide protection through ‘intellectual property rights‘ and forging closer links between academia and industry by promoting ‘collaborative clusters and networks‘.
Removing market barriers to innovation refers to creating favourable conditions for ‘lead markets‘ to emerge, for example ‘eco-innovation’ and sustainability, as well as ‘broadening the scope of innovation‘ in order to address societal challenges and champion a user-centred approach to innovation.

SEE is operating from September 2008 to June 2011, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the INTERREG IVC programme.

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Some big architecture business news this week. It’s been announced that the Kansas City-based firm Ellerbe Becket, has been acquired by the massive California company AECOM Technology Corp. Becket, you might recall, has come to more prominence recently for seemingly being Populous‘ only rival in the stadium building game, most recently getting handed the high-profile commission to design the New Jersey Nets Arena at Atlantic Yards after Frank Gehry got booted. The sale will apparently be good for both sides, with Becket, who will be keeping its name, having a much larger financial backing behind it, and AECOM buying a presence in the Midwest. Here’s a bit:

“One of the big-picture issues now is the global marketplace,” [managing principal Steve Duethman] said. “We have to figure out the best way to serve that marketplace and be a player in it. Joining AECOM allows us to do that.”

For instance, Duethman said, in the sports and health care design fields, which are among the Kansas City office’s strengths, the merger will allow Ellerbe Becket to expand into geographic markets that it previously didn’t have the financial resources to enter.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The results of the European Commission’s public consultation on its working document “Design as a driver of user-centred innovation,” which provides an analysis of the rationale for making design an integral part of European innovation policy, are now online.

The response was very good. In total, the Commission received 535 online replies – 309 from organisations, 226 from individuals.

91 percent of responding organisations consider that design is very important for the future competitiveness of the EU economy. 96 percent consider that initiatives in support of design should be an integral part of innovation policy in general, 91 percent that initiatives in support of design should be taken at EU level in addition to Member State and regional level.

On this basis, the Commission is now considering its next steps in better integrating design into European innovation policy and support.

For those of you interested in contributing further to EU policy development, the Commission recently launched a similar consultation on the broader question of future innovation policy.

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Among the slew of “Design Thinking Is Magic” hoopla we hear these days, Peter Merholz offers a refreshingly honest little piece in the Harvard Business Review entitled: “Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You.”

In it he warns business folk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. He proposes that right-brained tactics should be brought in to an organization to enhance left-brained thinking, not replace it.

Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing “creatives,” “ideating” tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth.

Merholz also claims that Design Thinking is not new but that it is, simply, a new name for sociology and anthropology.

A not-so-secret truth about “design thinking” is that a big chunk of it is actually “social science thinking.” Design thinkers talk about being “human-centered” and “empathic,” and the tools they use to achieve that are methods borrowed from anthropology and sociology. Believe me, until very recently, they didn’t teach customer research at design schools.

He makes many interesting points – each of them surrounded by many interesting counter-arguments. So let us ask you: What distinguishes Design Thinking from other types of social science thinking?

Read the entire piece here

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