The Future of Design, Global Product Innovation in a Complex World, by Lorraine Justice, PhD,(Nicholas Brealey/Hachette Publishers) will be available for pre-order on Amazon.com in the coming week. This book was written for those who are currently, and in the future, designing products and services for other parts of the world. Global product development and design have become complex. It is not just about the sales and product experience today. Rather, it’s about everything you provide to your customers through their purchases. This book, while not exhaustive, is meant to provide new ways of thinking about products and services in the future. There is so much more coming in the way of consumer demands. We will see rapid changes to the design profession as technology advances, but much of this technology will be used to enhance or augment the designer and the design team. Designers will know the content of this book but my hope is that it will get designers thinking about the future and how they can play a part in designing the technological tools that we will need for future work. For futurists and artificial intelligence experts, and other technologists, you will know the specifics of what...

Design thinking is a broad term that covers the design process. The thinking may diverge and converge as it is used in different parts of the design process. But when we examine aspects of design thinking we know there is an intense period of reasoning that the designer and design team goes through to handle large amounts of data, opportunities, and solutions related to the problem. For me, design reasoning is the term that comes to my mind when describing the back and forth accepting or rejecting of ideas, parts of ideas, along with new pieces of information that may influence a decision. Design reasoning is often completely immersive for the designer and the design team. They may even reach a state of mental ‘flow’ when they are in the ideation stage of the design process. It can be exhilarating, frustrating, or fun or perplexing but it is a state of reasoning in the process that often brings the new ideas. How designers and design teams reason during the process is often a mystery to clients and consumers. I can be the ‘magic’ part of what designers do during the process because it can be elusive and difficult to retrace thoughts...

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