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 […]

Method Ocean Plastic Initiative

Method is known as an indus­try inno­va­tor with its eco-con­s­cious line of house­hold and per­son­al care prod­ucts. The company’s lat­est inno­va­tion in sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing is a bot­tle made out of plas­tic that washed up on beach­es from the North Pacif­ic Gyre, often referred to as the Great Pacif­ic Garbage Patch or the Pacif­ic Trash Vor­tex.

Designing A Difference: Part 2

Design­ing A Dif­fer­ence — Small­bean Part 2 on Vimeo Almost one year ago, I wrote about a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Design Muse­um Boston and Small­bean to devel­op the next gen­er­a­tion of Smallbean’s solar suit­case in a post titled Design­ing A Dif­fer­ence: Smallbean’s Solar Suit­case. Here is phase two of the project, which focused on refin­ing con­cepts […]

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 […]

Idea Visualization: sketch vs. prototype

So far in all my class­es, pro­fes­sors have con­stant­ly said things like “just idea viz it up!” My inter­nal response was always some­thing like, “what the hell does that even mean?!” So, here it is – my first group attempt at real­ly idea vizzing it up!

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 […]