Power of Design at Appy State

Yesterday I spent the day in Boone, North Carolina at Appalachian State University. Boone is about 50 miles from where I grew up so I jumped at the chance to inspire students in my old neighborhood. I was invited by Associate Professor of Interior Design (and fellow Elizabethton High School alumni), Tim Dolan, on behalf of the Design Council, an inter-college faculty group organized to promote multidisciplinary design, for their third annual Power of Design symposium. One cool thing Tim and I learned from one another yesterday was that we were both separately inspired to study design by our drafting teacher, Mr. Fink!

I led an afternoon workshop with about 140 students to design a campus that relied exclusively on human-powered transportation. Students from the Interior Design, Architecture, Graphic Design, Industrial Design and Fine Arts programs got a crash course in Design Thinking and a basic IDEO design process then went to work. The photos below showcase the exciting energy from the afternoon and the great enthusiasm these young designers have to change their environment — from prototyping means to harvest kinetic energy, to making the campus more pedestrian and bike friendly, to outfitting people with better climate-neutralizing gear.



After a quick dinner with ASU faculty I presented a lecture called "Big D, Little D" which shared my own professional evolution from discipline-based design to inter-disciplinary design thinking using Tricycle and IDEO projects as case studies. Thank you to the 300 of you that showed up despite the halo effect of 24-hour rain from Ida!

High Moon

I'm in the Windy City for an IDEO regional discussion (the new Chicago studio is great!) Caught this shot of the moon on top of the Willis (Sears) Tower.


.... and Klaus signed Lisbon today.

-- Posted from my iPhone