Some of you may know that one of the central components in my Code+Design class at York is the design thinking process. For those unfamiliar with that, it is a system developed out of Stanford University and other design studios to solve problems. This is Wikipedia’s definition : Design thinking encompasses processes such as context analysis, problem finding and framing, ideation and solution generating, creative thinking, sketching and drawing, modeling and prototyping, testing and evaluating. Core features of design thinking include the abilities to: resolve ill-defined or 'wicked' problems adopt solution-focused strategies use abductive and productive reasoning employ non-verbal, graphic/spatial modeling media, for example, sketching and prototyping. Wicked problems Design thinking is especially useful when addressing problems which are wickedly difficult, in the sense of being ill-defined or tricky, not malicious. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber contrasted these with "t...
Sorry, that was a click-bait headline, wasn't it? At least I won't make you click 17 times to get to the point. It's the "Add a note" feature that pops up when sharing a Google Doc. Is it useful,? Of course. Does it have a fatal flaw? I think so. When I provide comments, context, or instructions using this feature, I get no record that I sent it. So when I need to follow up to make sure a colleague has taken on a task, I can't tell for sure what I've sent using this method. Maybe I wrote poor instructions or failed to write the instructions at all. If I provide instructions here, I'll never be sure what I sent because there is no way to track these down. I guess I could share it with another account of mine, but that seems too clumsy. Instead, I just share and use the comments feature in the doc itself. I'm sure to tag the person in the comment to be sure they get a notification using the @ or + symbol before the email address. Google Docs ...