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Throughout Change by Design, I tried to show that the designer’s skills can be applied to a wide range of problems—and also that these skills are accessible to a far greater range of people than may be commonly supposed.

What other kinds of challenges might benefit from similar approaches?Butaro Hospital image courtesy of MASS Design Group and Iwan Baan.(posted also on my LinkedIn Thought Leader blog)

This week TED published a playlist called 10 Talks About the Beauty—and Difficulty—of Being Creative.

"Education provides the foundation of our global possibilities.

Are you an in-the-trenches innovator?

(Above: image from Gov.uk/designprinciples — Principle 10, Make things open: it makes things better.)The UK government is leading the way in using design to create simpler digital services for its citizens.A 2010 report commissioned by the government made a series of strong recommendations, including creating a single ‘front end’ for all government digital services, releasing API’s to government data, creating a central team with absolute control over all interaction experiences for digital services, and appointing a CEO of Digital with absolute authority over user experiences across all digital channels.Under the direction of Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude, the government followed these recommendations—and they followed them very well.The result is the Government Digital Service under the directorship of Mike Bracken and the design leadership of Ben Terrett.

If you talk to people at the Santa Fe Institute, or read any of their books, you'll learn that a key characteristic of a complex system is that the more complex a system is, the more information flows through it.

A recent article by Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Perils of Always Ignoring the Bright Side" got me thinking.

“When I walked into Heath it sounded so different from my office."nIt was this visceral difference between the sounds of a small ceramics manufacturer and those of a consulting design studio that got Cathy Bailey started on the path to co-leading Heath Ceramics.

I spoke with writer Warren Berger recently for his Harvard Business Review post on "the secret phrase top innovators use." What's the phrase?