Jack Carroll at Penn State brought together a score of researchers with backgrounds and interests in design rationale, creativity and design to consider their intersections.

Creativity and rationale connote the complementary natures of design: creating new worlds through lightning bolts of innovation versus analyzing the underlying tradeoffs in current artifacts and systems to guide the incremental development of new ones. The workshop premise is that these poles should not be merely opposed world-views, and that coordinating them and integrating them is a key to ever having a serious Science of Design.

Creativity and Rationale in Software Design

You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affiirmative
Don't mess with Mister in-Between

Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen

Michel Avital, Jurgen Faust and others put together a wonderful workshop that took place in Monterrey, Mexico last week. It expanded the positive design movement (in which appreciative inquiry meets design thinking) in interesting ways. Perhaps the most substantial of these was in the direction of the southern hemisphere. Personally I find this direction exciting and hope that we do more with new friends at the Technologico de Monterrey.

I spent some time looking around the web to see how the idea of Managing as Designing is fairing in the blogosphere. Here are some of the entries I can across. (When you jump to the page, just do a search for "Managing as Designing".)

A June 13, 2005 article by David Dunne titled Grand Designs mentions the book as part of a growing body of evidence for "the power of design thinking to change business, and our lives."

CLEVELAND – The Weatherhead School of Management is pleased to announce a $2.44 million gift from an anonymous benefactor that will assist Weatherhead’s on-going work in “Managing as Designing.” This concept brings ideas from the world of art into management thought and takes management best practices into the world of art and the nonprofit sector.

On September 26, 2007 I gave a lecture Managing as designing: An opportunity for graduate education. I described the historical relationship between design and business and some of the design skills that are being integrated into management education.