Tim Brown urges designers to think big

Tim Brown says the design profession is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects — even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory “design thinking.”

3 Comments leave a comment below

  1. I appreciate it so much every time you post things about design thinking! It gives me new firepower to send to my parents to help them understand what I’m studying at school (in my MFA in design thinking and leadership program).

  2. I liked this one, but the talk recently which is thoughtful is carolyn steel: how food shapes our cities… and being architect and product designer, i know how important it is to think big. Problem is all that architects learn from great books like pattern languages cant put into practice and product designers somewhere just get stuck in making products and fail to think bigger in context of cities or even broader boundary.

  3. Hmm, frankly, I think in order to solve to problems of today we need good engineers and scientists and to a lesser extent designers. Kingdom Brunel of course is an engineer. His work demonstrates the beauty of a technical solution – no designer needed. I think this is a rather weak TED talk.