Articles May 3, 2009 "Spend It Wisely: A Market Research Primer for Designers", by Brianna Sylver Market research is expensive--not only for the time and money required to execute it, but also for the opportunity cost it represents to the organization sponsoring it. Learn how to be deliberate in choosing both the projects you pursue and the methods you leverage to solicit customer insight. November 6, 2007 "Instituting Innovation: Tell-all advice from 4 leading practitioners", by Brianna Sylver Four leading practitioners from ING Direct, McDonalds, Motorola and Shimano offer advice on how best to bring innovative thinking into your organization. June 1, 2007 "Que significa realmente "Innovacion"?", by Brianna Sylver A reprint of the "What Does Innovation Really Mean?" article in Spanish. Discusses a process for identifying each company's unique definition of innovation. August 1, 2006 "Classroom Case Study: Drug Marketing. What can designers offer in the face of a direct-to-consumer advertising ban?", by Brianna Sylver "Effective May 15, 2006, Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) advertising by U.S. pharmaceutical companies is banned." This was the scenario provided to her students of the Communication Design Workshop at the Institute of Design, IIT, at the start of the Spring 2006 class. The article highlights various design solutions that the students developed to respond to this fictitious scenario. January 31, 2006 "What Does Innovation Really Mean?", by Brianna Sylver It is critical to establish a baseline read of what innovation really means to an organization, so that the "innovation process" can be uniquely and appropriately tailored to address the specific challenges and requirements of that organization. This article presents a position and proposes a process for defining each company's unique definition of innovation. Papers September 2007 "Misdiagnosed: The Story of how NASA's International Space Station Planning Team Thought They Needed a Collaboration Tool to Solve Their Problems When What They Really Needed was Better Planning Tools", by Brianna Sylver and Cori Schauer Discusses some of the primary findings of the Collaboration research completed with NASA in 2006. The paper was presented at the 16th International Conference for Automated Planning Systems (ICAPS) in Providence, RI in 2007. September 2005 "Affordances in Product Architecture: Linking Technical Functions and Users' Tasks", by Adriano Galvao and Kei Sato Proposes a method for integrating user needs into the product architecture development process. Paper received the Xerox Best Paper Award at the 17th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology, ASME, Long Beach, CA, 2005. Books November 2007 Design Relationships, by Adriano Galvao Design Relationships: Integrating User Information into Product Development (Paperback) proposes a new method for integrating user needs into the product architecture development process.   Return to News & Views