FYI: There's a cool little e-book for all of you design addicts out there: "Thought Leadership By Design," by Nate Burgos. It's a great compilation of quotations about design, so you can easily infect yourself - or others - with some design-inspired insights. Good stuff. Here are some sample bits and pieces from the book:

"When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from
design. The philosophy in design shops is 'try it, prototype it, and improve
it.' Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is
largely inductive - proving that something actually operates - and deductive -
proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to
the fray - which involves suggesting that something may be, and
reaching out to explore it."

- Roger Martin

"Now, where I believe 'user experience' is still valuable
is indescribing an emergent quality of product development. A product or
service can have good or bad user experience. But it's foolish to
think that the user experience can be owned by any one group in an
organization - it's a result of of the accumulation of actions taken by an
organization."

- Peter Merholtz

"User-Centered Design means understanding what your users
need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding
into every aspect of your process."

- Jesse James Garrett

Labels: design, design thinking