First day back at the Mac after 10 days off over the holidays. If anybody can find me some of these – as I seem to have all the symptoms – you’ll be handsomely rewarded. Apologies for the reflections off the glass….it appears the sun was out. Can’t rely on anything, it seems.

In 1770, the British Parliament passed a law condemning lipstick for inciting lust ; women found guilty of  ”seducing men into matrimony by a cosmetic means” could be tried for witchcraft. In the previous century, Thomas Hall, an English Pastor and author of  ’The Loathsomeness of Long Haire’ (1653), called lipstick “the Devil’s work” becuase it “ignited the flame of lust”. Maybe that is why the names for early lipsticks were so off-putting ; popular shades from 1580-1620 included ‘Smoked Ox’, ‘Chimney Sweep’ and ‘Dying Monkey’. Even today some lipsticks contain fish scales for the pearly shine and crushed insects (Kermes ilicis) for the red colouring.

(taken from a column called ‘Quite Interesting’ in a recent copy of  ‘The Saturday Telegraph’ newspaper)

I was intrigued by this cocktail of legislation, religion, public opinion, (anti-)marketing, human nature and animal instinct that have fought publically over the last 400 years to give us the products we know so well today…

I use to use an image of a tightrope walker to express the nature of design, the image juggled budget, manufacturing, time-scale and all the things that design projects take on board.

By their nature these tend to be ‘written’ documents meant to be published or presented, as an example, as the capture of a moment in time like a set of accounts, available to be reread but not actually used, something at ‘the end’.   In my experience this makes them interesting but of less value than they could be.

Part of the proposal to the RAEng. when I first went to Leeds University was to follow their outline and use transferable case studies for teaching.  I quickly found I could not use anyone else’s case studies and the ones I could use of my own only had meaning with my personal background knowledge.

How could these be transferable?  How could they be used creatively?

We changed direction and use ‘the process we used’ as the case study, which was transferable, and the work we did with the students as examples of that process in action. [the process will be online shortly]

When case studies are presented, as at the recent Design Council presentation in Leeds, though often inspiring, the audience has to make the jump to connecting it to their own needs and aspirations, a jump they often cannot make because the ‘case study’ is presented as a story [good point] but it is someone else’s story [weaker point].

Though this is not catchy, what about “case experience” – where the process is clear, the experience of doing – that the ‘case/cases’ are examples of the process in action with the key outcomes highlighted and it is shown that the process is flexible and transferable to the audiences individual cares.

It is left like an open question – this process helped these ‘cases’ – can it help you?

How can this work for you?  Think about your own problems/issues/opportunites taken through this – what do you imagine would happen?

Why don’t we try?  Where do you want to go?

Put the initial information from some audience members into the process as part the ‘case experience’ presentation. That connects the audience to the idea so that they can see that they too can gain from this process – the ’study’ becomes a transferable idea.

Just a thought.

Case studies tend to polish all the rough bits out of the actual experience of organisations using design. The approach I took in telling the stories coming out of the Innovation by Design programme in Ireland was to let the companies do most of the talking.

It would also be refreshing to come up with a better label than “case study” for these types of publications. Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks again to those members of networkd that helped develop and deliver the programme.

Download Innovation by Design [PDF, 2.4MB]

Seeing Justin’s post reminded me of this. I literally stumbled upon it whilst doing some desk research recently on a client project in the area of dementia care. Really great use of simple but powerful thinking to try to lessen the fear and ’sting’ of serious medical procedures on young children. Very touching and inspiring too……

Children draw their experiences of airline travel

Since my days at Crayola, this has always been one of my favourite design research tools, Drawing the Experience. It works particularly well with children who often resort to single word answers to questions. Armed with a box of crayons, they’ll give you some pretty deep insights into how they feel about anything. While working with an airport in Ireland, we asked passenger’s children to draw what they liked and didn’t like about airports, and what would their perfect airport would have in it. All of this was geared toward helping to create a more family-friendly user experience.

Armed with some simple tools you can better understand the needs of the people you’re trying to create better products and services for.

Related: See how children created their own paper laptops. Are any computer manufacturers listening?