100+ open source innovation tools from the greatest design & strategy agencies in the world. ​ Ideal for both offline or online workshops. All tools are pixel perfectly packaged in a vectorized PDF or PNG and can be downloaded for free.

visual representations of things that can be described by various adjectives

1. Shadowing; 2. Seeing; 3. Studying the solution that already exists

Protobot generates random product and service ideas.

The most common tool, methods, processes, and deliverables that designers use throughout the digital product design process.

The Journey Chart is an overview of the different elements of a project juxtaposed to show how they work together over the duration of the player/audience/reader experience. I’m sharing the Journey Chart Method because I’ve found it to be a nifty way to externalise, discover, inspire, unify, direct, and communicate the various elements of a project and how they are all connected.

5Es of Experience Design: ENTICE, ENTER, ENGAGE, EXIT, EXTEND When you design a meeting as an experience, keep the 5Es framework as 5 “phases” of the experience in mind. Ask yourself: How might I entice people to join the meeting, how to get them to enter the conversation, how best to engage the participants, how to exit on the right note and how to extend the action to maintain momentum. I’ll guide you through these five phases with tools and case studies, so you can apply them at your work.

Through a series of workshops in 2017–18, we’ve been exploring a process for generating new kinds of metaphors, and then using those metaphors to inspire concepts for new kinds of interface design which could potentially help people understand things in different ways. The intention of the workshops is that the process might be something designers can use or adapt for idea generation, or to provoke new kinds of thinking about interface design. The extent to which the metaphors merely provide initial ‘seed’ inspiration, or actually form the basis of the resulting design, varies. Download the New Metaphors cards, v.0.3 (February 2018) — 129 MB PDF, 300 dpi Download a poster/leaflet from Interaction 18 including thumbnails of all the cards, and a shortened version of this article — 2 MB PDF Download templates / worksheets — 400 kB PDF

Free PDF chapter of my book! ⬇️ The theory and neuroscience of applying vision, optimism, imagination, and creativity to solving big environmental and social problems.

The Humanitarian Innovation Guide is a growing online resource to help individuals and organisations find their starting point and navigate the humanitarian innovation journey.

Toolkits for design, research, creativity

At Dropbox, we’ve found that metaphors are a powerful tool to help people explore and share their experiences in more creative and meaningful ways. We use metaphors in research so people can talk about their experiences through a different lens. We can do this simply by inviting people to make a comparison through a single question. Or we can facilitate entire interviews by using tools to symbolize and explore meaning together.

Here’s one way to deal with things : show them a clip from the film Apollo 13. Specifically, the bit where the crew on board the lunar module are facing imminent suffocation due to a faulty air filter, so the scientists on the ground are forced to make a ‘square peg fit a round hole’ with whatever is available to the astronauts. I showed the clip to one client team I was working with, who were all blockers and no action. Before watching the clip the team was fatalistically resigned to business as usual. They didn’t like it, but they accepted it. Business as usual was a six month requirement gathering phase leading to a £1.5m bet on an unproven concept. After watching the clip, they built a working proof of concept within two hours, a fully fledged beta test within 6 weeks and ended up with an award-winning product that delights customers and is incredibly valuable to the business.

Design trend predictions for 2013