Webby Clare

Thoughts and other writings by Clare Conroy

Sticky Wisdom – Through or Around?

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#stickywisdom from Designing Your Life co-author Dave Evans on Jonathan Field’s Good Life Project podcast. Sometimes trying to change yourself isn’t worth the effort and it’s better to embrace your natural tendencies and work with/around them. It’s taken me a long time to realise that I need regular change and variety as well as flexibility in my work. Rather than beat myself up for consistently getting bored/burned out after 12-18 months, I’m going to acknowledge the ways in which I work best (and the ways that I don’t) and build a career based on freelance project and/or short-term contract based work.

Design Thinking – The Gift-Giving Experience

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A quick post (I’ve been putting it off for too long!) to share some observations, learnings and reflections from recently facilitating the Stanford Institute of Design‘s (the d.school) ‘gift-giving project‘ with a group of colleagues in the Australian Public Service.

I think that this session provides a fantastic, fun taster of what design thinking is all about and why building empathy, prototyping, seeking feedback and iterating are critical to reaching good design outcomes. But perhaps more importantly what I love about this course is that it helps people to uncover (or discover?) their own creative potential. People walk into the course thinking ‘I’m not a designer’, ‘I can’t draw’, ‘I’m not creative’, but through the course they do design, draw and generate creative solutions.

The d.school make it super easy for facilitators by providing them with pretty much all of the materials you need for the course – facilitator guide, participant worksheets, and post-course handouts (which you can download and use for free under the CC BY-NC-SA licence here) . Note – the recently released virtual crash course makes it even easier as they effectively provide the facilitator too! [Read more…]