This post is part of blogging a new publication “Opportunity Mapping: A Working through Screens Sketchbook.”

Three opening thoughts that will kick off the sketchbook:

Research has become a new normal for designing powerful, engaging, and productive technologies. It’s generally accepted that researching users, systems, activities, behaviors, motivations, and attitudes can help technologists of all stripes build empathy for design problems. But how can teams better examine, distill, and communicate what they learn so that they generate more compelling design ideas — ideas that can make a real difference in peoples’ working lives?

“…solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”
Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“We are not starting from scratch here. Many affective representations of complex phenomena have been developed in recent times. Physicists have illustrated quarks. Biologists have mapped the genome. Doctors have found ways to represent immune systems in the body. Network designers have mapped communication flows in buildings. Managers have charted the locations of expertise in their organizations. Our world is filled with representations of invisible or complex phenomena… So the design challenge… [is] how to deploy new representations in such a way that they influence wider groups of people.”
Jon Thackara, In the Bubble

More to come on this topic, eventually to culminate in a new Application Concepting Series book.

@J_Burghardt