Academy of Management award for Best Published Paper 2008
from the Organizational and Communication and Information Systems (OCIS) Division

The 2007 issues of 11 top journals were surveyed for nominations. The paper was recognized by the judges as one which would "change the ways that we think about design and innovation from now forward".

The paper reports on the first of our three year studies of design and innovation in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. The study focused on Frank Gehry's use of 3-D technologies in his architectural design of the PBL Building, the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and several other projects. It showed the wakes of innovation that was stimulated throughout the construction and engineering professions, especially as driven by the design images of Frank O. Gehry.

The complete paper is available under 'Resources'.

Helen Walters of Business Week gave a brief summary of some of the things that Apple does to insure design excellence. I found 10 to 3 to 1 particularly interesting.

Her post is at http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2008/03/apples_design...

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."

Agile programming advocate Glen Alleman's Herding Cats blog has a brief yet positive review.

On Chris Martin's Innovative Eye blog he described a talk that Bill Buxton gave at The Front End of Innovation Converence in May 2007 at which he pointed to our book on Managing as Designing as evidence of the trend toward design thinking in management.