This week, Elisave, the leading design school in Barcelona, is organizing the Design Thinking Week, or better said: 1a jornada Design Thinking e Innovacion from the first till the third of Februari 2011. I will be attending two days of talks and workshops and will also be present at the UnConference on Thursday, organized by Wenovski Design Thinking Network and Claro Partners. I am sure I will learn a lot from the experienced professionals and scholars that will be presenting or leading workshops. One of the themes I especially look forward to get more insights of is the financial viability of the use of design thinking in business. Rich Radka of Claro Partners will speak about this on the first of February.
The UnConference on Thursday will have as a theme ‘Society 2.0′. Personally I like this theme as it encapsulates all aspects of human life. We are all part of a changing society and it is perhaps necessary to guide this society into certain directions. With big changes in our climate, in the way we communicate with other people, and in our economic systems there is a clear need to that experts from different fields put their heads together. On a larger scale, I hope that more and more companies and organizations will make use of the ideas and input of the individuals who are the single parts society’s made of. Crowd sourcing and co-creation are ‘hot’ words within marketing research, and consumer actions like the #UnCut demonstrations in the UK are a clear indication that people want to have influence on big companies and decision makers. How far this influence should go is of course debatable. Within innovation processes my current belief is that the idea generation phase should be open, with a co-operative insight generating creative process engaging potential users or target groups within the process. But the selection of favourable and valuable ideas would be something for designers, experts, innovation managers. Perhaps my ideas are perfectly fitting in a Society 1.0 framework and will be proven old-fashioned during the UnConference. I hope that the discussion will provide insights in how processes where users are included in the fuzzy front end, and work there together with designers and problem-owners, can be streamlined and optimized to deliver solutions for Society 2.0.
I’m really curious what kind of solutions or themes will appear during this UnConference and will post details about the outcome when I’ll be back from Barcelona.
