How often do you read a recently published business journal article? Or the summary document of some new research? How often do you buy a magazine that isn’t part of your normal reading selection? How many of you have an agreement with your friends or colleagues to share interesting factoids/articles/stories with you? And you with them?
Reading something out of your norm gives you the opportunity to discover something new. And to eventually make a connection you wouldn’t have made unless you read that article in Vogue or Field & Stream. Many job lives ago, a colleague and I traveled by plane constantly. To assist us in making new connections we would buy each other a magazine to read on the plane – something that we knew was different from our regular reads. One plane trip I was handed a copy of Popular Mechanics. As I learned about the new corvette engine I skimmed over an ad for a match making service. Fast forward three months, I am participating in a meeting to discuss the trials and tribulations of patient retention in healthcare, including matching patient preferences with the right doctor. The match making service ad flashes into my head and the project MatchMD was born.
So to start you off on your path of making new connections here is an article from Wired. In 2013, Wired did a great article on Why Human Centered Design Matters. The article gives some great examples of how Human Centered Design can not only shift your perspective but can also help you create a process/product that is truly disruptive. If you have already read this article, yay! I encourage you to challenge yourself and read/research one new thing this week. If you haven’t already read this article, I think you will find some of the examples quite enlightening.
http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/12/human-centered-design-matters/
Uptown Studios is here to help you discover your solutions through human-centered design techniques – shoot me an email and we can discover together – tina@uptownstudios.net
