5-minute film festival: Resources for filmmaking in the classroom — from edutopia.org by Amy Erin Borovoy

Excerpt:

I’ll admit I’m a bit biased here since I’m a filmmaker by trade, but I truly believe the process of planning and making videos can offer tremendous learning opportunities for students of almost any age. Not only is the idea of telling stories with video really engaging for many kids, filmmaking is ripe with opportunities to connect to almost every academic subject area. As the technology to shoot and edit films becomes more ubiquitous, where is a teacher with no experience in video production to begin? I’ve shared some resources below to help you and your students get started on making blockbusters of your own.

 

 

Top 20 User Experience Blogs and Resources of 2015 — from usabilitygeek.com by Matt Ellis

Example resources from that posting:

 

ux-design-feb2016

 

 

ux-design2-feb2016

 

 

 

ux-design3-feb2016

BONUS: 15 Honorable Mentions

The following is a list of other excellent user experience blogs that did not make it in this list but are so good that they are still worth a mention. So please be sure to check them out as well!

 

From DSC:
Though I’m sure this list is missing many talented folks and firms, it’s a great place to start learning about user experience design, interface design, interaction design, prototyping, and usability testing.

 

 

 

TopIllustrators2015

 

 

New York Public Library shares digital archive of 180,000 restriction-free images — from itsnicethat.com by Alexander Hawkins

Excerpt:

180,000 restriction-free images are now available in the New York Public Library digital collections. Including high res photographs, illustrations and maps, images can be downloaded easily and are free to share and use without permission. The collection can be viewed by genre or colour.

 

 

Hypnotic New Kinetic Sculptures by Anthony Howe — from thisiscolossal.com

 

 

 

Artists evolve: The dangers of creatively typecasting yourself — from 99u.com by Elizabeth Saunders

Excerpt:

It’s a deeply emotional struggle whenever we shift our fundamental “brand” or style of creative output. Picasso, Monet, and all creatives before and since have had to wrestle with the reality that to stay fresh, enthusiastic, and authentic, you have to disrupt yourself.

That takes courage.

In short: You are more than your “brand.” As a living, breathing, developing human being, you don’t need to be ashamed to change. It’s vulnerable to let go of some of the roles you’ve held for a very long time and the persona you’re known for. But it’s also incredibly freeing and an opportunity to truly come alive. Now is the time to be who you are now instead of carrying around the shell of who you once were.

 

 

Editorial Type

 

 

 

 

Illustrator Spotlight: Simón Prades

 

 

 

 

Illustrussia: January 15, 2016 — from designcollector.net

 

 

 

The next phase of UX: Designing chatbot personalities — from fastcodesign.com by
When the conversation is the interface, experience design is all about crafting the right words.

Excerpt:

You may have heard that “conversational interfaces” are the new hotness in digital product design. Why open and close a bunch of apps on your phone to get stuff done when you can invoke a text-message-like window and just say what you want done to a chatbot? Well, here’s one reason: what if the bot is annoying or tedious to talk to? In conversational UIs, personality is the new UX.

 

 

Five ways businesses need to rethink UX in 2016 — from information-age.com by Chloe Green
How can businesses keep pace with customer expectations of their online experiences? Digital technologies are evolving fast, and with them user experience expectations.

Excerpt:

In today’s technology-driven world, the task of keeping customers happy is a constantly moving target. Not least because customer expectations of their digital interactions with a business are continually evolving.
Therefore, keeping pace with the changing expectations that customers have of their online user experience (UX), has never been more important.
Yet even digitally savvy organisations may not yet be prepared to make the necessary UX improvements to ensure they are meeting changing customer expectations in 2016. So, what are the five considerations that must be made to enable businesses to keep pace with customer expectations of their online experiences?

“Once the things in the IoT are connected and given a voice, they become more than just ‘things.’ They become part of a living experience shaped by interactions among people, places, and objects, among product, nature, and life,” said Olivier Ribet, VP of High Tech for Dassault Systemes. “They become contributors to what beckons just beyond the IoT: the Internet of Experiences. Earning a piece of the Internet of Experiences requires a higher level of strategic thinking-or Experience Thinking-but the returns promise to be higher as well.”

 

 

How the Internet of Things changes traditional design and user experience — from huffingtonpost by Phil Simon

Excerpt:

Make no mistake: Design is no longer an afterthought at progressive organizations. Companies are hiring highly paid user-experience experts en masse–a trend that will only intensify as the Internet of Things (IoT) arrives.

 

 

 

Web design trends: 6 designs to end 2015 — from webimp.com.sg

 

6designstoend2015-web-imp

 

 

 

Be careful about these 6 web design trends in 2016 — from awwwards.com
Are Hamburger Menus, Parallax Scrolling and Complex Typography a help or a hindrance?

Excerpt:

Trends in web design, like fashion trends, come and go. Sometimes trends are dictated by necessity (like responsive design). Other trends are industry shifts, such as the change from skeuomorphism to flat design.

The decision to follow a trend must depend on the needs of your users and your business. The decision should never be based solely on “it’s what the cool sites are doing”. Fads fade. A site built only on trends quickly becomes out of date.

With that in mind, let’s look at the design trends that you might want to think twice about using.

 

 

 

Top web design trends for 2016 — from creativebloq.com
We round up the hottest web design trends set to dominate 2016.

Excerpt:

Just like any other field of design, web design trends come and go with the passing of time. Unlike many other fields, however, web design has a relentless driver to change: technology. Because the basis of the platform is ever changing, some of the trends in design for the web are as a result of improvements to what’s possible as much as a reflection on changing taste.

2015 has been an interesting year in terms of web design. The visual landscape for web designers has remained largely as it was in 2014, with only a refinement of the minimalist approach that has become popular over the past few years. Underneath the aesthetic treatment of pages, however, the web has been quietly progressing.

 

 

Addendums:

  • The Most Important Design Jobs Of The Future — from fastcodesign.com
    Designers at Google, Microsoft, Autodesk, Ideo, Artefact, Teague, Lunar, Huge, New Deal, and fuseproject predict 18 new design jobs.
    Excerpt:
    Here are 18 of the most important design jobs of the future, as identified by the men and women who will no doubt do much of the hiring. Most looked three to five years out, but some peered farther into the future (see: organ designer).
  • 10 reasons to get excited about design in 2016 — from thenextweb.com
    Excerpt:
    It’s become more and more apparent that the number of screens with which designs must interact as well as the number of users is only going to grow. What’s more, the growth seems to be exponential. Equally compelling is the number of intersecting technologies for which a designer must prepare.Simply put, the challenges have never been greater, nor the solutions more complex.With such adversity comes inevitable excitement. To further enumerate the trends and techniques that are just starting to inspire widespread awe, we present to you this decennial diatribe: the top 10 reasons it’s going to be exciting to be a designer in 2016.
 

Introduction to Design Thinking — from experience.sap.com by Gerd Waloszek

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

A Design Methodology
Basically, Design Thinking is a design methodology. It differs from traditional design approaches in specific ways described below. For example, some authors characterize Design Thinking as more creative and user-centered than traditional design approaches.

A Problem-Solving Approach or Process
Design Thinking can be regarded as a problem solving method or, by some definitions, a process for the resolution of problems (but see below for the differences between methods and process).

As a solution-based approach to solving problems, Design Thinking is particularly useful for addressing so-called “wicked” problems. Wicked means that they are ill-defined or tricky. For ill-defined problems, both the problem and the solution are unknown at the outset of the problem-solving process (as opposed to “tame” or “well-defined” problems, where the problem is evident and the solution is possible with some technical knowledge.) Even when the general direction of the problem may be clear, considerable time and effort is spent on clarifying the requirements. Thus, in Design Thinking, a large part of the problem-solving activity is comprised of defining and shaping the problem.

The resulting problem resolution is regarded as creative, fluid, and open, and also as the search for an improved future result (this is in line with Herbert A. Simon’s (1969) definition of design as the “transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones.”)

 

designthinking-sap-2012

 

 

Design Thinking Comes of Age — from the September 2015 Issue of the Harvard Business Review by Jon Kolko

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

There’s a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work.

This new approach is in large part a response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and modern business. That complexity takes many forms. Sometimes software is at the center of a product and needs to be integrated with hardware (itself a complex task) and made intuitive and simple from the user’s point of view (another difficult challenge). Sometimes the problem being tackled is itself multi-faceted: Think about how much tougher it is to reinvent a health care delivery system than to design a shoe. And sometimes the business environment is so volatile that a company must experiment with multiple paths in order to survive.

I could list a dozen other types of complexity that businesses grapple with every day. But here’s what they all have in common: People need help making sense of them. Specifically, people need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.

A set of principles collectively known as design thinking—empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure chief among them—is the best tool we have for creating those kinds of interactions and developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture.

Focus on users’ experiences, especially their emotional ones.

 


 

 


 

 


 

DesignThinkingMindShift-Dec2015

 


 

designthinking-twitter-dec2015

 

 

 

——————

Addendum on 1/6/16  (item #7)

 

figure 1

 

Figure 1. Design thinking’s five principles

Addendum:

Design thinking infiltrates K-12 education — from nextgenlearning.org by Michael Niehoff

Excerpts:

As education continues to evolve, many are looking outside the traditional classroom for new pedagogies to inform their instructional practice. One of these more recent schools of thought is design thinking: coming up with practical, creative solutions to current problems, with the intent of an improved future result.

Design thinking has been made famous by IDEO, a design firm that has taken the design thinking approach to create and innovate new products, services, spaces and interactive experiences. They have worked with education products and communities on a number of projects including redesigning online learning experiences, creating learning labs and even designing entirely new school programs.

Higher Education’s Torch Bearer:
The d. School at Stanford University including their efforts with the K12 Lab

K–12 Early Adopters:
Nueva Design Thinking Institute 
Design Tech High School

 

Web design trends of 2016: free ebook bundle — from creativebloq.com

Excerpt:

  • The first book, UX Design 2015 & 2016, explains the six most useful UX design trends of the past year, like advanced personalization, device-agnosticism, microinteractions, and the rebirth of gamification.
  • The second book, Web Design Book of Trends 2015 & 2016, explores the ten UI trends that gained traction this year including the cards layout, fluid animations, minimalism, and the new possibilities of typography.
  • Last, Mobile Design Book of Trends 2015 & 2016 gives the same treatment exclusively to mobile design, dissecting the best practices for gesture controls, layered interfaces, and how to apply the web trends for a smaller screen.

 

Also see:

 

USDesignTrendsBundle2015-2016

 

Top web design trends for 2016 — from creativebloq.com by Sam Hampton-Smith

Excerpt:

Just like any other field of design, web design trends come and go with the passing of time. Unlike many other fields, however, web design has a relentless driver to change: technology. Because the basis of the platform is ever changing, some of the trends in design for the web are as a result of improvements to what’s possible as much as a reflection on changing taste.

2015 has been an interesting year in terms of web design. The visual landscape for web designers has remained largely as it was in 2014, with only a refinement of the minimalist approach that has become popular over the past few years. Underneath the aesthetic treatment of pages, however, the web has been quietly progressing.

 

Tools We Like: Spotlight on IDEO’s EE Lab — from labs.ideo.com by Sara Breselor
Prototyping essentials from breadboards to toaster ovens

Excerpt:

Mark Harrison has been building stuff at IDEO for more than 15 years (see Mark’s post on his all-time favorite workarounds). He’s one of the most knowledgeable tinkerers around, and he’s just finished putting together an electrical engineering lab at IDEO Palo Alto, stocked with every useful tool and device he could get his hands on. He wants to encourage more people to start building, and the lab is open to anyone with an idea. “I don’t want people to think that it’s specialized. You don’t have to be an engineer to come use the lab,” he says. “We’ve stocked it so that anybody can come in here, pick up an arduino and start prototyping.

Here’s a quick tour of the tools Mark considers essential…

 

 

 

 

Creating Movies With Students — from ipadsammy.com by Jon Samuelson

Excerpt:

“Here’s looking at you, Kid” – Presentation From BSD Future Ready Summit

Getting students started creating videos can seem like a daunting task. There isn’t enough time in the day to get your regular subjects done, how are you supposed to give students time to create videos? I am here to tell you it can be done. I hope that this post/presentation will provide what you need to get started.

Students can create videos on a variety within the context of what they are learning right now. Video story problem for math, a how to science experiment, or a book trailer that covers important story traits are all good ideas. Here is a list of apps, PDF Templates, and equipment that can be helpful when creating movies.

 

Empowering Students Through Multimedia Storytelling — from edutopia.org by Michael Hernandez

 

Excerpt:

Recent studies have proven that stories can change perceptions and even make people more tolerant. Rather than wait to be defined by others, it’s important that students learn to create understanding by sharing their story, their worldview, their concerns, and their triumphs with others.

Groups like Youth Radio and Cause Beautiful are empowering teens in poor and minority-majority neighborhoods to become multimedia journalists. Kids in these programs learn how to tell and share their own stories with a local or national audience.

No matter your class demographics or grade level, ELA and social studies teachers should integrate similar projects in their own classrooms, because every student will benefit from learning to craft a compelling visual story backed by persuasive facts and ideas.

What Is Multimedia Storytelling?
Students use video, audio, photography, web, and social media to craft documentaries and nonfiction stories about the world around them. These interdisciplinary projects allow students to focus on creating an authentic product that many people outside the classroom and their neighborhoods will see.

 

From DSC:
I am passionate about multimedia because the components of it — digital audio, digital video, text, graphics, animations, digital photography, and more — can create hugely powerful pieces of communication. Students need to be able to communicate — online. But it’s not just students. Each one of us needs to have an online-based footprint now in order to remain marketable.  Multimedia can help relay our stories, our work, our dreams.  It unleashes enormous amounts of energy and creativity inside of us.

I wish that more teachers and faculty members would seek to integrate multimedia-based assignments into their courses — or at least encourage the idea that this can be one of the acceptable ways that assignments can be turned in. At the same time, it can be one of the more interesting ways to assess learning and comprehension. Online-based resources like Lynda.com can help get students, teachers, and professors up the learning curves.

 

Ikea’s incredibly futuristic table replaces your stove, your cookbook, and your brain — from techinsider.io by Drake Baer

Excerpt:

Ikea’s plans for the table are, to say the least, ambitious. For EXPO Milano 2015, the company previewed a concept table called the Table For Living, which tells you what you can make with various ingredients and heats your food, no stove required.

Ikea created the prototype with the help of the global design consultancy Ideo, which recently gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the table was brought into the world.

Here’s how it happened.

 

 

This would require two main technologies: induction heating to cook with wood …

This would require two main technologies: induction heating to cook with wood ...

… and computer vision to recognize ingredients.

... and computer vision to recognize ingredients.

 

The prototype only had three ingredients, each readily distinguishable by color — a red tomato, a green head of broccoli, and rice in a blue bowl.

The design team — along with members from Ikea, Ideo, Lund University, and Eindhoven University of Technology — wanted to create a table that would help people become more confident cooks and lead more sustainable lives.

The induction technology could keep your coffee hot — and even charge your phone, which Ikea products like the Riggad Lamp already do.

 

Augmented reality is the future of design — from thenextweb.com by Jessica Lowry

Excerpt:

That’s why there’s more to AR than just wearable devices.

In this piece, I’ll explain the benefits and challenges of designing for augmented reality, then dive into why we must start thinking of products as connected services instead of standalone items.

 

Screen Shot 2015-08-31 at 14.55.23

Photo credit: Peter Morville. Creative Commons.

 

27 superb sites with royalty free stock images for commercial use — from verveuk.eu by Dave Lane

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

For my own benefit, I wanted a ‘go to’ list of sites that offered royalty free stock images for commercial use. There did not seem to be much available that wholly offered what I was looking for. There are articles that list ‘free stock image’ sites but I found that 99% of these did not clearly state the licensing rules with regards to commercial use of the images.

All of the photographs featured on the sites on this list are free from copyright restrictions and can be used on your web sites, blogs and for any other commercial use.

The list is split into 2 sections and an overview of the license for each site is included within block quotes along with a link to the full license details (if applicable).

 

light spiral free stock image

Creativity 103

 
 

Hackathons as a new pedagogy — from edutopia.org by Brandon Zoras

Excerpts:

Students are coming out of school expected to solve 21st-century problems and enter into occupations that haven’t even been imagined yet. Schooling is not designed in this manner, so we wanted to give students an opportunity to solve problems in authentic contexts, using 21st-century skills and collaboration techniques. We wanted to break down walls between classrooms and have students use interdisciplinary skills to solve problems with teams of their peers, with mentors, and with industry professionals.

Why a Hackathon?
Hackathons have become a new way of doing business, creating products, advancing healthcare, and innovation. The energy is high, and so are the stakes. Can you turn an idea into a product over the course of a weekend? But let’s move beyond that. Let’s look at the teaching and learning within a hackathon. Hackathons are really the ultimate classroom.

It is within hackathons that students are utilizing their skills and knowledge to solve problems. It’s project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, and STEM all wrapped up into one activity! It’s about design thinking and truly a 21st-century learning opportunity. Students are working collaboratively within mixed-ability groups to examine problems and come up with solutions.

Benefits For Students
A huge learning factor is failure. Often, school protects students from failure, and students always manage to mix A with B to get C. The hackathon, though, enables a support system where, once an obstacle or failure throws a wrench in students’ plans, they work as a team to get around it.

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian