Basic Skills **Creativity** – Strategies for escaping traps, locks on imagination and legacy thinking, practice skills for making yourself open, with other people, begin broadening your areas of awareness. Verbal, Written and Visual Communication – Thinking with, explaining, and convincing others as separate things which reinforce each other. Communication is a process of refining your thinking, prototyping and sharing ideas, gaining feedback. Research (Library, Tools, Context, Social, Material) – Know how to evaluate reliability and utility, continually expand your familiarity with resources to use if you need them. Learn to question everything and realize that even if it doesn’t answer the question it claims to speak to it is still information in and about the world, but it isn’t a problem to think of everything as complicated, complexity is exciting. Planning, Organization and Structured Inquiry – You handle big tasks and complexity by working at it and understanding it little pieces at a time, but little pieces only come together when you have a plan for the big picture. Iteration as Process – Each step is partial, each step repeated adds more parts, doing things again isn’t failing the first time it is building the last step one step at a time. Critical interpretation and engagement – Pattern and Gap recognition, Disloyalty/Skepticism/Flexibility, Excitement/Communalism, think Structurally not superficially, connect things - do not isolate information, start learning more about the world (read the paper, think about everything around you as part of the world in which you design things). Evaluation: Concern, Capability, Capacity and Correction – Expressing concern and commitment to the subject getting better, having the capability to measure progress success and problems, learning where capacities exist or can exist and not using something outside of its appropriate use, and correcting at each step how you make, use, understand, and communicate. Team & Group Project Negotiation – Being part of something big requires patience, concern, empathy, awareness and tools to manage bringing people together in a constructive way. A mob is not a team, a group is not multiple individuals, leadership is not letting others “do their things” but is enabling each to accomplish more together and assisting create a shared vision and space for collaboration. Structured Questioning – No “Closed” questions, Cascading questions, snowball resources, recognize that understanding is layered. Context defines the way things work, functions and resources within the context may have many meanings and uses outside that context so always look for multiplicity of meanings and do not accept things in context that could limit answers found. Design Sensibility – Synthesis of Social Awareness and Technical Capability in conceiving a project, critical engagement with context and other participants, clear vision of goal and flexibility of response, creativity and ambition are used Values Recognition and Design Ambition – All the other skills are important because they let you do what you intend to do, decision from the outset, not of what to do in a small project but what sort of world you want to see at the end. Each object, paper, prototype is a part of the world and changes it - no matter how small that change is it should be something that you want to see added to the world for a reason. A paycheck doesn’t justify itself, a project isn’t innovation because it is new- know what your values are and remember to push towards them. Consider a heuristic of your own, or the “Triple Bottom Line”, Win, win, win- People, Planet and Profits
**Creativity**
– Strategies for escaping traps, locks on imagination and legacy thinking, practice skills for making yourself open, with other people, begin broadening your areas of awareness.
Verbal, Written and Visual Communication
– Thinking with, explaining, and convincing others as separate things which reinforce each other. Communication is a process of refining your thinking, prototyping and sharing ideas, gaining feedback.
Research (Library, Tools, Context, Social, Material)
– Know how to evaluate reliability and utility, continually expand your familiarity with resources to use if you need them. Learn to question everything and realize that even if it doesn’t answer the question it claims to speak to it is still information in and about the world, but it isn’t a problem to think of everything as complicated, complexity is exciting.
Planning, Organization and Structured Inquiry
– You handle big tasks and complexity by working at it and understanding it little pieces at a time, but little pieces only come together when you have a plan for the big picture.
Iteration as Process
– Each step is partial, each step repeated adds more parts, doing things again isn’t failing the first time it is building the last step one step at a time.
Critical interpretation and engagement
– Pattern and Gap recognition, Disloyalty/Skepticism/Flexibility, Excitement/Communalism, think Structurally not superficially, connect things - do not isolate information, start learning more about the world (read the paper, think about everything around you as part of the world in which you design things).
Evaluation: Concern, Capability, Capacity and Correction
– Expressing concern and commitment to the subject getting better, having the capability to measure progress success and problems, learning where capacities exist or can exist and not using something outside of its appropriate use, and correcting at each step how you make, use, understand, and communicate.
Team & Group Project Negotiation
– Being part of something big requires patience, concern, empathy, awareness and tools to manage bringing people together in a constructive way. A mob is not a team, a group is not multiple individuals, leadership is not letting others “do their things” but is enabling each to accomplish more together and assisting create a shared vision and space for collaboration.
Structured Questioning
– No “Closed” questions, Cascading questions, snowball resources, recognize that understanding is layered. Context defines the way things work, functions and resources within the context may have many meanings and uses outside that context so always look for multiplicity of meanings and do not accept things in context that could limit answers found.
Design Sensibility
– Synthesis of Social Awareness and Technical Capability in conceiving a project, critical engagement with context and other participants, clear vision of goal and flexibility of response, creativity and ambition are used
Values Recognition and Design Ambition
– All the other skills are important because they let you do what you intend to do, decision from the outset, not of what to do in a small project but what sort of world you want to see at the end. Each object, paper, prototype is a part of the world and changes it - no matter how small that change is it should be something that you want to see added to the world for a reason. A paycheck doesn’t justify itself, a project isn’t innovation because it is new- know what your values are and remember to push towards them. Consider a heuristic of your own, or the “Triple Bottom Line”, Win, win, win- People, Planet and Profits