What Should Businesses Know About Design?

Prof. Beckman

Senior Lecturer Sara Beckman posed that question to leading design thinkers at a celebration in November of her 2009 Accenture Best Paper Award.

 

Beckman and co-author Michael Barry of Stanford received the award for "Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking" in the Haas School‘s journal, California Management Review.

 

Rather than talk on the paper, Beckman organized the celebration similar to PechaKucha Night in Japan, an event started in 2003 for designers to show their work.

 

Each presenter gets to show 20 PowerPoint slides, paced at 20-second intervals, for a total of 6 minutes, 40 seconds.

 

The presenters included Autodesk CEO Carl Bass; John Jamieson, Clorox‘s lead design and innovation manager; and Elizabeth Windram, senior user experience designer at Google.

 

To watch a video of the event, visit www2.haas.berkeley.edu/Videos/Sara_Beckman.aspx.

From top to bottom: Clorox’s John Jamieson outlines his view of the design process. Autodesk CEO Carl Bass shows how nature inspires design. Google’s Elizabeth Windram stresses the importance of talking with potential users at the very beginning of product development.