Once again XPLANE | Dachis Group has teamed up with Dr. Scott McLeod of Iowa State University to create a thought-provoking video. The brand-new “Iowa, Did You Know?” kicked off the School Administrators of Iowa Conference yesterday morning. This DYK video contrasts the world’s exponential growth in technology and learning with Iowa’s struggles to best prepare K-12 students for this new future.
Intended as a forceful wake-up call for Iowa educators, the video stresses the importance of an educational approach that moves away from “low-level mental work” and towards stronger development in critical thinking and problem solving.
This is a guest post by Jeff Manuel, Assistant Professor of History at SIUE.
As a history professor, I work with words. Pages and pages of them, in fact. Words to write, words to read, words to speak. I use pictures and images too, but they usually play second fiddle to the words. So it was challenging and humbling to visit XPLANE | Dachis Group for a recent Visual Thinking School (VTS) because it forced me to think deeply about using visual thinking to communicate history. It was also enlightening, as I came away convinced that history instructors should incorporate more visual thinking tools into our classrooms.
We started by creating empathy maps for students and teachers to help us get into their heads regarding what they’re seeing, hearing, thinking and doing while in class.
I recently came across this really great six week program happening this summer in NYC. Impact: Design for Social Change is for a great place for creatives and all professionals who are seeking for ways to create social change within design strategies. It’s really good to look into initiatives like this — not just because it’s obviously inspiring, but also it pushes us proactively.
This is from a PDF you can download on their site:
This is a program at a level on par with graduate studies. The intensive offers advanced students and working professionals a unique opportunity to study with faculty composed of leading designers and social entrepreneurs. In addition, weekly lectures and field trips will allow students to directly interact with a dynamic range of innovators in the field.
This is a rapidly growing area of design. This program will instill in participants the confidence, self-motivation and collaborative spirit which will be needed as they continue on to work as design activists.
Professionals, educators and advanced students in the following disciplines are invited to participate: advertising, graphic design, product design, information design, interactive design, fashion design, photography and illustration. The program is oriented towards these design disciplines but we have had architects and social entrepreneurs participate
Hang around the designers’ corner of the internet for any amount of time and you quickly are overwhelmed with great work and lame work, sound advice and bad advice, rules, ideas, maxims, quotes, plagiarism, inspiration and inanity.
Over the last few years all of these things have been getting mashed up and spread around, especially on Tumblr, Posterous and sites like FFFFOUND. I can’t even count the number of simple but lovely posters, graphics and sketches featuring an inspirational quote or a set of rules or a piece of advice set in a condensed gothic font and overlayed on a moody photograph. Don’t get me wrong — for the most part I like them. Sometimes they make you think or give you a needed kick in the butt — or at the very least give you a peek into another creative person’s head.
I’ve had the above poster hanging in my home workspace for several years now. It’s a constant reminder, and I like that.
But it seems that pretty much everywhere I go online lately I am being told what to do…
As you may remember, a few months ago Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers hit shelves. Today, I’m excited to share with you a new XPLANE video that offers a sneak peek into the inner-makings of the book and why it is so unique, and useful, in today’s business world. The three-minute video, created by our ever-brilliant creative team, can be seen on both Vimeo and YouTube:
For the most part, the video was created with markers, whiteboards, sticky notes, paper and other “low-tech” tools commonly used in Gamestorming.
Written by XPLANE founder and business design mastermind, Dave Gray, XPLANE consultant James Macanufo and Sunni Brown of Bright Spot Information Design, Gamestorming is a collection of 80 games to help teams break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies.
We’re all familiar with the problem of the rising tide of information.
But how do you wrestle with that wave? The growing magnitude and complexity of information is not going away, and yet by most accounts the bandwidth we possess to process that information is going to remain fairly constant (barring any long-overdue cybernetic enhancements.) How do you parse that wave into a channel fit for human consumption?
There are plenty of ways, but I’m only going to focus on one theory here. I’m also going to have some problems with it. Read more »
The Interaction Design Pilot Year is a collaborative initiative between Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) and The Danish Design School (DKDS). Our aim is for students, faculty and staff to work together in a multi-cultural, multidisciplinary studio environment to co-create a new kind of education that is relevant for academia and industry.
“Dear Members of the Cult of Done, I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.”
Dave Gray’s Free The Facts presentation is a must-read, must-share for anyone who cares about either science or open access.
It’s also a masterpiece of presentation economy, and a fantastic demonstration of how to make a text-heavy presentation into something magical. Reminiscent of the work of Michael Wesch. (It’s also a fascinating demonstration of the convergence of YouTube, Flickr, and Slideshare as communication and teaching tools, and a foretaste of the generational change that the New York Times hinted at a few weeks ago.
I’m a project guy. As an artist, entrepreneur, educator and amateur philosopher, I always have a number of projects going, both personal and professional. Sometimes they go somewhere, sometimes I get bored and abandon them. One of the beauties of the internet is that even abandoned projects continue to exist and can be picked up or reenergized at any moment. Here’s the definitive list of projects that I am working on or have worked on in the past (A work in progress). The list is alphabetical because I don’t work on these projects in any kind of linear way. They are like a busy kitchen: there is always something simmering, something boiling, something set aside to cool for awhile, something in the deep freeze, and something being served. In fact I am still working on this list. If you see something with no explanation it’s because I haven’t finished writing the description yet :)
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.
Azure poster
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.
Hang around the designers’ corner of the internet for any amount of time and you quickly are overwhelmed with great work and lame work, sound advice and bad advice, rules, ideas, maxims, quotes, plagiarism, inspiration and inanity.
this gallery of student work:
