This document discusses lessons learned from a year spent building a culture of design at Akoha. It describes Akoha's design process, which involves exploring problems, understanding customer needs, ideating solutions, and prototyping. The process uses both divergent and convergent thinking and activities. It emphasizes that design is a collaborative and continuous process. The document also provides tips for participatory design and insights into challenges of building a design culture.
5. On Today’s Show: Chef Alex!
1. Talk About Akoha
2. Talk About Design
3. Talk About Learning Design
4. Talk About What We Learned
5. Talk About How Painful Fun it Was
28. Show picture of Dubberly PDF here and talk about
all the different descriptions of design - 1 min
99+ Ways To Look At Design
http://www.dubberly.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/ddo_designprocess.pdf
32. What is our design platform?
• Our design platform articulates the way that
Akoha thinks about and manages design activities
33. What is the Akoha design
vision?
• Our design vision is to “improve the world by
improving people”
• All of the design and implementation activities we
undertake are focused on achieving this goal.
34. What are our design criteria?
• Everything we design must:
1. Be measurable
2. Solve tangible problems
3. Help people to feel better about themselves.
35. Why the vision and criteria?
1. Our vision communicates what we do as a
business. This is our value proposition.
2. Our criteria communicate how we make things.
This is how we create our value.
36. What is the Akoha design
process?
• Our design process is customer centered,
evidence based and focused on learning from our
actions.
• It is inclusive, collaborative and accountable.
• Everything we do is focused on achieving our
vision, and grounded in our core criteria.
37. What is the Akoha design
process?
• Our process, and everything we design is situated
within the frame of a playful experience.
• Our product is a playful experience, and it is
produced through a playful experience.
• Our work is the product of how we work.
46. What is a divergent activity?
To “diverge” means to
head in different
directions. Divergent
activities allow us
explore options
47. Our process is based on two
types of activities
Divergent Convergent
48. What is a divergent activity?
Divergent activities
allow us generate
possibilities
49. What are some examples of
divergent activities?
Brainstorming
Backcasting
Sketching (sometimes!)
50. What is a convergent
activity?
To “converge” means to
bring together.
Convergent activities
allow us to focus our
thinking
51. What is a convergent
activity?
Convergent activities
allow us integrate
perspectives
52. What are examples of
convergent activities?
Mental models
Sketching (sometimes!)
Creating personas
53. How does divergence help
our thinking?
Divergent thinking helps
us understand our
customers from many
different perspectives
54. How does convergence help
our thinking?
Convergent thinking
helps us develop
insights that we can use
to understand the needs
of our customers
55. How does divergence help
our making?
Divergent creativity
helps us generate a
wide range of ideas.
56. How does convergence help
our making?
Convergent creativity
helps us integrate the
best elements of our
ideas into a focused
solution
57. What does our design
process look like?
1. Explore 2. Understand 3. Ideate 4. Prototype
58. Our process is simple and
adaptable.
1. Explore 2. Understand 3. Ideate 4. Prototype
Divergent Convergent Divergent Convergent
59. Framing the process
Our process helps us to work on answering the
challenge laid out in our design vision:
How do we improve the world by improving
people?