Gretchen Chern | Design Research & Strategy

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 […]

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 […]

Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

Today I final­ly fin­ished read­ing Tim Brown’s Change by Design, after start­ing the book at the end of April and tak­ing a long break. I was too dis­tract­ed by my future plans— fig­ur­ing out where I would be mov­ing this fall and how I would get there— so I just put the book aside. I’m […]

We Need a Mind Shift

In this video, Lewis Pugh dis­cuss­es his jour­ney to com­plete a swim in a melt­wa­ter lake on the slopes of Mount Ever­est. This jour­ney taught him a rad­i­cal new way to approach swim­ming as well as a new way to think about glob­al cli­mate change.Pugh learned two impor­tant lessons on Mt. Ever­est: Just because some­thing […]

The Launch of OpenIDEO

Intro­duc­tion to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo. This week, IDEO launched an open idea gen­er­a­tion plat­form called OpenIDEO. It is a place where any­one, not just design­ers, can con­tribute ideas, become inspired and eval­u­ate the ideas of oth­ers. The thing I like most about OpenIDEO is the fact that it uses col­lab­o­ra­tion to […]

Inspiration, Brainstorming and the Creative Process

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