Making Sense of Design / Design Thinking
The NextD Journal Archive (links below) contains downloadable versions of many NextD Journal documents from the early days of 2003 thru to today. Included are 30 + NextD Journal sensemaking conversations as well as other documents. What began as a community sensemaking intiative grew into early advocacy for recognition of the need to rethink designerly methods in the context of rising complexity.
NextD Journal readers would often tell us that we had created a new, still missing form of design related journalism focused, not on marketing spin, but rather on methods related sensemaking.
Ten+ years ahead of the complexity curve, what we were pointing out, and advocating beginning around 2003 was not always understood at the time, particularly in design education circles where defence of the status quo in methods and education was often encountered.
The arriving wave of interest in "design thinking" further postponed the acknowledgment, particularly in graduate design education that methods related change was indeed needed. Today there is finally more community understanding of the need and certainly growing interest in what is now more commonly being framed as Design for Complexity.
To better understand the history of NextD Journal and much of the community research that went into the Rethinking Design Thinking book as well as the now ongoing conversations see the documents in this archive. The archive has existed in parts on two sites; Issuu and edu for several years but we want to bring it closer to this renewed NextD Journal site.
Below are a few examples of documents in the archive:
NextD Barks: 2003: What Matters? Analysis of Proposal to Create a new Design School at the University of California, Irvine by GK VanPatter
NextD Journal: 2011: Rethinking Wicked Problems: Unpacking Paradigms, Bridging Universes (Part 1 of 2) GK VanPatter, Jeff Conklin & Min Basadur
NextD Journal: 2011: Rethinking Wicked Problems: Unpacking Paradigms, Bridging Universes (Part 2 of 2) GK VanPatter, Jeff Conklin & Min Basadur
NextD Journal: 2007: Special Issue: Beautiful Diversion: Response to Nussbaum's "Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?" 50 members of the Community Respond
NextD Journal 2008: Beyond UX: Making Sense of Human-Centered Design Now!: GK VanPatter & Julien McHardy
NextD Journal 2005: Frozen Pictures: Can Design Journalism be Reinvented? GK VanPatter & Julie Lasky
NextD Barks: 2007: Beyond [Roger Martin] Hostility: Finding and Creating Inclusive Models for Co-Creation
NextD Journal: 2011: Science in the Making: Understanding Generative Research Now! GK VanPatter & Liz Sanders
NextD Journal: 2011: Patterns in Motion: Examining Design’s Reconstruction, GK VanPatter & Harold Nelson
NextD Journal: 2011: Into the Immeasurable: Understanding the New Umbau School of Architecture, GK VanPatter & William Tate
NextD Journal: 2005: Design as Glue: Understanding the Stanford D. School GK VanPatter & David Kelley
NextD Journal: 2004: Envisioning Design: Understanding Domus Academy: GK VanPatter & Claudio Moderini
NextD Journal 2004: Understanding Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, GK VanPatter & Andrew Davidson
NextD Journal: 2007: The Sky Room: Four Views into Transformation GK VanPatter, Bob Goodman, Peter Jones & Eric Reiss
Many other documents can be found in the archive!
NextD Journal and NextDesign Leadership Network are sponsored by Humantific / SenseMaking for ChangeMaking in New York City.