Title: |
From the Individual to the Crowd: Re-inventing “Design Thinking” |
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Speaker: |
Dr. Mary Lou Maher |
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Affiliation: |
School of Information Studies, University of Maryland |
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When: |
Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 3:00:00 PM |
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Where: |
MRDC Building, Room 4211 |
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Host: |
Dr. David Rosen | |
Abstract Developments in interactive computing technologies and the widespread use of the internet for professional, social, and entertainment purposes are having a significant impact on design thinking. Cognitive studies of designers, with and without interaction and internet technologies, are revealing similarities and differences in creative and design cognition in individual designers, teams of designers, and more recently in design processes that incorporate crowdsourcing. “Design Thinking” is a phrase that has emerged from the Stanford d.school. The “design thinking” method includes concepts such as empathy and collaboration and has been influential in shaping design courses in engineering, business, and design schools. In this presentation, research results from studying designers as individuals, teams, and crowds lead to a framework that re-invents our understanding of design thinking, and a vision for developments in design curricula and design research. |
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Biography Mary Lou Maher is a Senior Research Scientist at the HCILab in the iSchool at the University of Maryland and Honorary Professor of Design Computing in the Design Lab at the University of Sydney. Mary Lou completed a Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering at Columbia University in 1979, and a Master of Science and PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, completing the PhD in 1984. As the Professor of Design Computing at the University of Sydney she was co-Director of the Key Centre of Design Computing and she established a new degree program: the Bachelor of Design Computing. She was Deputy Director of the Information and Intelligent Systems Division and a Program Director for 4 years at the National Science Foundation. While at NSF she established the CreativeIT program and helped manage the Human Centered Computing, Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation, Design Science, and Social-Computational Systems Programs. Her research interests span a broad area of design computing, specifically the study and development of novel HCI and communications technology in supporting designers, and models of design knowledge and creativity. Current research topics are: computational models of creativity, collective intelligence and crowdsourcing in design, impact of tangible interfaces on design cognition, agent-based design of virtual worlds, and intrinsic motivation as a model for curious agents. |