A practical guide to prototyping as a way to revolutionize your work and creative life, from Stanford University's world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka the d.school.Prototyping is a way to test an idea to see if it can be successful before investing too much time and too many resources. But it's not only designers who "prototype" as they work. A skateboarder tries a new trick; that's a prototype experience. A chef experiments with a new dish and n...

A practical guide to prototyping as a way to revolutionize your work and creative life, from Stanford University's world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka the d.school.Prototyping is a way to test an idea to see if it can be successful before investing too much time and too many resources. But it's not only designers who "prototype" as they work. A skateboarder tries a new trick; that's a prototype experience. A chef experiments with a new dish and n...

Notice what matters, sharpen your intuition, and grow personally and professionally by honing your skills of reflection in this illustrated guide from Stanford University's d.school.While we often think of reflection as a way to consider what is or was, it can also be a powerful tool for imagining and shaping what could be. Through activities based on the science, art, and practice of reflection, this book guides you through simple experi...

Discover design strategies for using your own unique social identities and experiences as inspiration to challenge the status quo and create the kind of lasting change that leads to greater equity and social justice, from Stanford University's d.school.Who are you? What motivates you as a changemaker? What forces are preventing you (and others) from thriving? These questions are essential to the work of creating social change, and they are exactly what Design S...

An essential how-to for crafting a guiding motto that sets intentions, increases creativity, and helps accomplish your goals, from Stanford University's world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka the d.school.We all need agency to feel the power and joy of acting in the face of challenge and opportunity. But we also need humility and restraint to ensure that we guard against hubris and harm. We need trusted and testable navigation tools to give us confi...

Use eye-popping visual tools to energize your people!Just as social networking has reclaimed the Internet for human interactivity and co-creation, the visual meetings movement is reclaiming creativity, productivity, and playful exchange for serious work in groups.Visual Meetings explains how anyone can implement powerful visual tools, and how these tools are being used in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to facilitate both face-to-face and virtual group work. This dyna...

What Visual Meetings did for meetings and Visual Teams did for teams, this book does for leadersVisual Leaders explores how leaders can support visioning and strategy formation, planning and management, and organizationchange through the application of visual meeting and visual team methodologies organization wide—literally "trans-forming" communications and people's sense of what is possible. It describes seven essential tools for visual leaders—mental mo...

Building products and services that people interact with is the big challenge of the 21st century. Dan Saffer has done an amazing job synthesizing the chaos into an understandable, ordered reference that is a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs.”— Jared Spool, CEO of User Interface EngineeringInteraction design is all around us. If you’ve ever wondered why your mobile phone looks pretty but doesn’t work well, you’ve confronted bad interaction desi...

Welcome to a new era of business in which your brand is defined by those who experience it.Do you know how your customers experience your brand today?Do you know how they really feel?Do you know what they say when you re not around?In an always-on world where everyone is connected to information and also one another, customer experience is your brand. And, without defining experiences, brands become victim to whatever people feel and share....

Explore the new design discipline that is behind such products as the iPod and innovative Web sites like Flickr. While other books on this subject are either aimed at more seasoned practitioners or else are too focused on a particular medium like software, this guide will take a more holistic approach to the discipline, looking at interaction design for the Web, software, and devices. It is the only interaction design book that is coming from a designers point of view rather than that of a...

An effective and engaging way employees can learn Six Sigma and put its concepts into playPart of the popular Big Book of Games series, which capitalizes on the proven effective method for workplace training, this first book of training games for Six Sigma ensures that employees will better retain Six Sigma's complex topics.This invaluable tool offers 50 experiential activities that teach the core improvement approach of Six Sigma, called DMAIC (Define, Mea...

Feeling uninspired? That shouldn’t keep you from creating great design work. Design is not about luck, inspiration, or personal expression. Design is a disciplined pursuit aimed at producing sensible, functional work for clients. In The Design Method, you’ll learn how to create quality design work on a regular basis that consistently pleases your clients using the same method that Creative Director Eric Karjaluoto uses at his creative agency, smashLAB. The Design Method w...