Watching Ideo CEO Tim Brown's presentation of IDEO's design approach (here) threw up some interesting approaches to problem solving

- Analagous situations : When working on how to improve a hospital emergency room operations, Ideo spent time with a grand prix pit-stop crew to see how their team dealt with frequent emergency situations.

- Insights come from extreme users, lovers and haters, age of users, experience of product etc.

- Do something. Build-to-think. This elevates quick and dirty prototyping over big. Average project at Ideo goes through more than 100 prototypes. Don't need to be physical - but must be tangible.

-Use story-telling to develop, express and sell ideas through large organizations. Nike always produce a ripomatic ad when they design a new shoe to sell it to the rest of organization. The story needs to be there from the start. Ideo once built a 'stragetic expreince' for Motorola execs so they could 'live' the changes they were suggesting.

-Ideawall/Project Rooms - Visually recording scraps of inspiration allows them evolve as they are shared with collaborators and built up through layers of contribution. Can a blog serve this function, i think so.