Gretchen Chern | Design Research & Strategy

Debate: How to Brainstorm Effectively

In my recent post Susan Cain: The pow­er of intro­verts, I men­tioned that I agreed with Cain’s view on brain­storm­ing — that it is ben­e­fi­cial to allow par­tic­i­pants to brain­storm on their own before dis­cussing ideas in a group set­ting. Then last week I came across more arti­cles dis­cussing the pro­ce­dure of brain­storm­ing.

Susan Cain: The power of introverts | Video on TED.com

Susan Cain: The pow­er of intro­verts | Video on TED.com. As some­one who would describe her­self as nat­u­ral­ly more intro­vert­ed, I real­ly love this video high­light­ing the pow­er of intro­verts in a cul­ture that tends to val­ue extro­ver­sion. This video goes along with a long list of arti­cles I’ve read over the past few months […]

Website Strategy and Design for Finished Art, Inc.

Objec­tive Fin­ished Art was con­sid­er­ing cre­at­ing a blog, but the com­pa­ny was not sure whether it was worth the effort or how the blog would actu­al­ly work. Dur­ing some free time, I decid­ed to sit down and think about whether a blog could be a good idea for the com­pa­ny and what ben­e­fits and chal­lenges […]

5 Rules for a Creative Culture

5 Rules for a Cre­ative Cul­ture Ben Chest­nut, CEO of MailChimp Avoid rules. Avoid order. Don’t just embrace chaos, but cre­ate a lit­tle bit of it. Con­stant change, from the top-down, keeps peo­ple nim­ble and flex­i­ble (and shows that you want con­stant change). Give your­self and your team per­mis­sion to be cre­ative. Per­mis­sion to try […]

Synectics & Pughsion™

Synec­tics Class Exer­cise As I’m fin­ish­ing up with an online Finan­cial Man­age­ment class that is all num­bers, I was just think­ing how I’d rather be facil­i­tat­ing cre­ative think­ing right now. Then I start­ed think­ing back about a pre­sen­ta­tion my for­mer class­mate Rebec­ca Mahl and I did on the prob­lem solv­ing method­ol­o­gy synec­tics, as well as […]

Facilitating Creative Thinking

Facil­i­tat­ing the Cre­ation and Eval­u­a­tion of Video Projects in Edu­ca­tion Back­ground We live in a media sat­u­rat­ed soci­ety where media affects the way that we inter­act with and under­stand the world around us. While the con­cept of media lit­er­a­cy has been around since the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, its only in the past 10 years that […]

V720 Midterm Update

V720 Midterm Update from Sarah Tolz­mann on Vimeo. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled How Do We Cre­ate Val­ue for the Design Com­mu­ni­ty? This was a ques­tion I was explor­ing at the start of this project in our Design Inno­va­tion Devel­op­ment and Mar­ket­ing Strate­gies class (aka V720). Our class also looked at […]

How Do We Create Value for the Design Community?

This is the ques­tion I am try­ing to answer this week­end. The Design Man­age­ment pro­gram at SCAD is con­sid­er­ing cre­at­ing some type of pub­li­ca­tion. One of my class assign­ments is to fig­ure out the best way for this to be done. I am very inter­est­ed in how we can cre­ate val­ue in the design com­mu­ni­ty […]

Designing A Difference: Smallbean’s Solar Suitcase

Design­ing A Dif­fer­ence: Small­bean Part 1 from Design Muse­um Boston on Vimeo. A team at Design Muse­um Boston is col­lab­o­rat­ing with Small­bean, a non­prof­it cor­po­ra­tion based in Boston, to devel­op the next gen­er­a­tion of Smallbean’s solar suit­case. This video doc­u­ments phase one of the redesign, which is still in progress. Phase one focused on under­stand­ing […]

Inspiration, Brainstorming and the Creative Process

A col­lec­tion of arti­cles and videos cov­er­ing the top­ics of inspi­ra­tion, brain­storm­ing and the cre­ative process.