Design/Leadership Europe 16 Conference
COLLECTIVE DESIGN
consumer | citizen | community | society
April 25-26, 2012, Helsinki, Finland

Conference co-chairs:
Jaana Beidler, Creative Director, NOKIA
Marco Steinberg, Strategic Design Director, Finnish Innovation Fund
Karen Reuther, President, DMI

Collaboration is design’s competitive advantage in today’s world. Together with a laser focus on the user as part of a group or an individual, design leads solutions to an inclusive, integrated and inspiring process that transforms experiences for a better life. From the large to the small, visible to the invisible, group to the individual, COLLECTIVE DESIGN will surface and reveal the innermost workings in infrastructure, policy, planning, research, organization, innovation, and management that occur behind the scenes and on the front lines of design and business. What is the role of design leadership in this new world of collective design?
 
Day One: Society/Community/Organization — Who drives policy? What systems are in place to serve communities? How are multi-disciplinary, open source processes engaging in collaborative design? Who are the unexpected designers and what role do they play behind the scenes?
 
Day Two: Citizen/Consumer/Designer — How do we enable citizens to participate in design? How are experiences and services delivered to the end-user? How do we connect to the hearts and minds of the individuals? How does design deliver on the bigger promise?
 
Helsinki has been designated the ICSID/IDA World Design Capital 2012 and DMI’s conference will be part of a year-long roster of events.
 
Registration is now open for this world-class leadership event! Register by February 17 and save!
 
Register now!
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Optional pre-conference seminar:
 
Design Research and the Customer-driven Innovation Strategy
Darrel Rhea, CEO, 2nd Road, North America
April 23-24, 2012, Helsinki, Finland
 
 

Introducing DMI Night Out

February 1-10, 2012
Amsterdam, Boston, Boulder, Calgary, Cincinnati, Dallas, Dublin, Milan, Nairobi, New York City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Shanghai, Venice

This February, DMI will host our inaugural DMI NIGHT OUT, a series of more than a dozen locally-organized get-togethers all across the globe. Arranged by local DMI members, the meetings will provide a local source of support and partnership for today’s critical issues, and connect cross-disciplinary design and business leaders in their local communities. DMI NIGHT OUT is planned to grow into a quarterly local gathering of DMI members and the extended community of design leaders, with the goal of fostering community, collaboration, and content that informs and inspires. Look for more details and the complete list of local meetings soon on dmi.org, facebook or twitter.
 

Call for participation: DMI 2012 education conference

DMI has received a grant from the US National Endowment for the Arts to run an education conference in 2012. Planning is currently underway to create a world-class event that will provide a forum for the latest research and thinking on design leadership. Interested educators, practitioners, and students are invited to participate in a brief survey about this event. We are interested in your feedback, ideas, energy, and help. If you are interested in being a part of this groundbreaking symposium, please contact dmistaff@dmi.org.
 

DMI Partners with red dot

DMI and red dot are pleased to announce a cooperation between the two organizations around the red dot award. All DMI members are eligible for a 25% discount on entries to the product design 2012 award. The red dot design award is one of the world’s largest and most prestigious design awards. Last year, the competition received over 14,000 applications from more than 70 companies. The product award includes nearly 20 categories covering a wide variety of industries. The early bird deadline for registrations is December 9, 2011, with regular entries due by January 20, 1012. For more information on the red dot awards, visit en.red-dot.org. For information on obtaining the discount, please email DMI.
 

A New DMI Seminar:
 
Team Dynamics: Resourcing for Success
Dieter Reuther, Operations Consultant, Cast Collective
Sabrina Jetton, Design Consultant, Cast Collective
 
March 8-9, 2012, Chicago, USA
November 1-2, 2012, New York, USA
 
"People are our greatest assets"… Really? Are your project teams an asset or a liability? This seminar will teach you how to leverage team chemistry to orchestrate and grow high-performing teams, finish projects successfully, and achieve business success.
 
Through insightful presentations, interactive dialogues, and hands-on activities, you will learn how to analyze, diagnose, and improve the chemistry of your project teams. By understanding key team structures and applying cognitive models and team-building tools, you will be able to better leverage the creativity and the talent of your employees, harness their collective mind, and build agile and smart teams. We’ll define the factors that encourage high performance and improve team communication. We will show you how to resource and manage your project team to optimize quality, time and resource usage, as well as creativity, passion and fun. Most importantly, you will be able to optimize project outcomes and increase profitability. Only high-performing teams lead to success.
 
These are not business as usual times. The new normal is about complexity, innovation and global competition. Today, highly-sophisticated interaction concepts, digital user interfaces, brand guidelines, and global markets add complexity to the development of products and services, which no longer can be addressed by individuals. We have to do more with less, produce better quality and come to market ever-faster. The make-up of a team and the resulting chemistry can make or break a project; friction and dysfunction can derail the outcome of a project. Traditional project management methods typically do not take team make-up into account and projects frequently fail. Norman’s Law of Product Development states that a project is behind schedule and over its budget the day it is started. Together, we can change this.
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Seminars:
 
Building Great Internal Design Organizations
Thomas Lockwood, PhD, Editor, DMI Review; Founding Partner, Lockwood Resource
April 12-13, 2012, San Francisco, USA
 
"Excellent packaging of all the relevant elements of design management that experienced design managers are looking for."
—John L. Guenther, LWS Industrial Design Competency Manager, Hewlett-Packard
More information
 
Design Research and the Customer-Driven Strategy
Darrel Rhea, CEO, 2nd Road, North America
April 23-24, 2012, Helsinki, Finland
 
"This is the single most valuable, relevant, timely and enabling seminar that I have ever attended. In just two days, we learned tools and methods that will be immediately usable in my job."
—Jeff Lopes, UX Director, Autodesk, Inc.
More information
 
 

Design in a Social World
Riley Gibson, Co-founder and CEO, Napkin Labs

Originally presented during DMI's Design Management Annual 36 Conference, Design at Scale, October 25-26, 2011, in New York City.
 

 
New tools and technologies are breaking down the physical barriers to effective and scalable collaboration and co-creation. In this session, Riley Gibson tackles the new paradigm of social innovation and explores how the Web can promote lateral thinking, customer-centric design, and accelerate the process of innovation.
View the video
 
Look for another Editor's Choice video mid-December! Check dmi.org, facebook or twitter for updates.
 

Nurturing Creativity Through Cognitive Design Therapy

By Gary Whitlock, Executive Creative Director, Marsh Brand Partners
DMI Review, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2011
 
If design managers want to nurture creativity, they need to know what motivates individuals. The insights of psychologies Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May offer alternatives related to this issue.
View complete article
 

Call for DMI Review Article Submissions:
June 2012 Issue: Solutions to Complexity
We live in a complex world, yet oftentimes the best solutions are the simplest. However, creating simple solutions can be a challenge unto itself. The June 2012 issue of the DMI Review will look into design as a strategy to deal with complexity and how design/designers are capable of adding value by solving the right problems. Please send article proposals by December 14 to editor@dmi.org.

September 2012 Issue: Design Entrepreneurship
To what degree is design providing an entrepreneurial approach to problem solving? Who leads the process of design for change, and who is responsible for the results? What is the overlap between design, business strategy and change management? To what extent should design managers be supporting entrepreneurship, business transformation, and seek to become "business engineers?" Please send article proposals by March 1 to editor@dmi.org.
 

Call for Papers: 2012 Design Management Journal
Theme: Design Leadership
The 2012 issue of DMI’s annual peer-reviewed publication, the Design Management Journal, will focus on Design Leadership. We are now seeking submissions of a broad range of papers within this overarching theme.
 
How is design being led; by executives, design managers, staff, external partners, or by consumers? How has design thinking evolved within organizations, in relation to formal design departments? What are effective ways to structure and source design in distributed and collaborative environments? Abstracts are due January 15, 2012. Please submit your proposals to editor@dmi.org.
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