Innovation - 18th October 2012 - Dan Berry

"There are useful starting points and landmarks, but the road to innovation consists of overlapping 
spaces or paths, rather than a sequence of steps in one direction" - Tim Brown

The lecture started with the above quote. We then went on to discuss the starting points and landmarks of design. The questions we were faced with were what is it, how does it apply to me and why is it important. Some definitions are; blue sky thinking, thinking outside the box, lateral thinking, imaganeering, leveraging the USP and Best Foot Forwardability (BFFAbility). These terms are very vague and at first I did not understand until Dan went into more detail about these definitions. Repeatability was discussed. This is how we, as designers, need to repeat the successes we have had. We need to gain strength and iron out weaknesses to become repeatable.
   Innovation has a variety of meanings on the web. Wikipedia says that innovation is "the development of new customer value through solutions that meet new needs". However, Wikipedia is not a reliable source to get any information from. Anybody can add or remove information from Wikipedia. Dan says that he does not think this quote is applicable to his own work, thus making Wikipedia look less reliable. Also, according to the same source, innovation is numbers and rankings. After a discussion in the lecture, we concluded that this would be very difficult to apply to the innovation of our own creative practice.
  Gabriel Tarde made another attempt at approaching a definition of innovation in 1903.This consists of first knowledge. This is when the idea for a new product or design first comes to light, in the form of maybe a brief or job for a client. This is followed by forming an attitude. This is looking at the proposed plan for the product and forming ones own ideas and opinion on the matter. Next comes a decision to adopt or reject the idea. Simply put, this is the stage at which the designer decides whether or not to keep on going with the idea. If they do, the next stage would be implementation and use. This is where the manufacturing would begin. The process of innovation, according to Tarde, then ends with confirmation of the decision, the final product. This description goes some way to describing the innovation process but does not completely satisfy us as a description for innovative behaviours we see in contemporary and modern design. The truth is, there is no single definition that wholly describes innovation. It is to broad a subject matter. The facts we do know is that innovation comes from the Latin - innovares, which means to renew or change. This is innovation in a nutshell. After all this discussion, we came up with a solution. It doesn't matter if we can not find a definition for innovation as a whole, as long as we can define our individual creative practices.
   Next, we discussed theory and practise. I agree with Dan's views that it is silly to differentiate between the two. Like he said in the lecture, the two are mutually exclusive. Practise without any knowledge of the theory would not work and it would be pointless to do the theory without any real knowledge of how to put it into practise. One thing that I took from this lecture is that I should continue to practise alongside the theory to keep me at my best.