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Image courtesy Michael Edson, Smithsonian Institution

Design Thinking for Museums: one year and counting

I launched this blog, Design Thinking for Museums, exactly one year ago at the 2013 Museums and the Web conference in Portland. It was an experiment that UX designer and Stanford d.school fellow Molly Wilson and I built in a day at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art cafe, armed with coffee and Wordpress. The blog was developed as a resource for the field and accompanied a paper documenting a partnership between SFMOMA and the Stanford d.school. When the site launched, I wasn’t sure how long we would keep it up, if we’d get any readers, and what kind of response we’d receive from the museum community.

I’m happy to report that now, one year later, there are small but significant signs of enthusiasm for and adoption of design thinking in the museum sector. I’ve just returned from the 2014 Museums and the Web conference, where I presented a paper with co-authors from the Getty and the Queensland Museum about how those institutions are using design thinking and prototyping to tackle challenges ranging from designing new digital publications to re-envisioning organizational structures.
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Design ≠ design thinking

This guest post is from Molly Clare Wilson, an experience designer and teacher in San Francisco.  When we confuse “design” and “design thinking,” everyone loses. Designers get their backs up at the […]

Selling the benefits of design thinking to your organization

This guest post is from Jack Ludden, Head of the Web Group and New Media Development at the J. Paul Getty Trust. Jack and his team help the entire Getty organization better manage, transform and present content on a multitude of digital distribution channels.

You can’t innovate innovation

You can’t innovate in the abstract. This should be obvious by analogy: you don’t learn to bake in the abstract. You learn by baking blueberry muffins, devils food cake, popovers, meringues, sourdough bread, and cherry pie, getting better and more inventive as you start to understand how baking works. You’ll only get better and better at your innovation process, whether it’s design thinking or something else, as you try pointing it at different problems.