We Design Thinking: true hands-on visual thinking
As some of you might know, I (Niels Hoogendoorn) have founded Creatlr.com years ago. Creatlr has grown from an ideological idea to – really – make visual thinking easier for everybody into a platform where visual thinkers can meet, collaborate, create, innovate, share and use visual thinking tools. The indispensable toolbox that truly fits the way you think.
Over the past years we have helped universities design education, trained consultants, coached startups, designed tools for companies, brainstormed with governmental organizations and welcomed everybody to join the Creatlr community. Because Creatlr has grown into a mature platform, we have made (and will make) some changes. One of those changes is to split all activities and services in two.
- Core things – running a global platform, helping people collaborate and share – will of course remain within Creatlr.
- The other things – the true hands-on visual thinking part including all consultancy-related services – will be We Design Thinking!
So what are these ‘other things’? Well, from the early years of Creatlr up untill now, we developed visual thinking tools, from card decks to templates (also known as canvases, maps and posters). Hundreds. We also developed and facilitated training sessions, workshops, events, basically everything to get our hands dirty with visual thinking. A great way to build a platform, understand customers and partly finance the thing that’s grown into Creatlr. For those of you familiar with Lean Startup: this was great way to discover ‘problem-solution-fit’ and ‘product-market-fit’. Not a great way to scale your product. Creatlr has come to this last stage.
We want to continue this work while giving it the focus it deserves! Keep getting our hands dirty. We Design Thinking will be the new kid in town with all of the experience from our previous journey. Combined with visual thinkers and Creatlr front-runners from our network.
Great! What does all this mean?
- Are you using the templates we created over the years? All 43+ visual design thinking tools created by us are rebranded to We Design Thinking and will remain free to download and use both online and offline under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 Unported License.
- Some services formerly provided by Creatlr.com are now further improved with fresh ideas and new skills from great visual-design-thinking-minds. Our services will stretch from toolkit development to visual design thinking workshops and training.
- We Design Thinking will be a different name, but we will keep a close partnership with Creatlr.com. Afterall, it’s the best way to find, share and put your visual design thinking tools into action.
- With www.wedesignthinking.com we will be able to share even more stories, tools and brainstorm techniques with you.
The overarching mission remains the same: help people around the world make a difference through visual design thinking! In 2018 we will continue to help schools & universities design education, train consultants, coach startups, design tools for companies, brainstorm with governmental organizations and share our knowledge with incubators and accelerators. For every challenge we will use our – soon to be launched – innovation map to put your organization or team to the test. Can we help you design and improve the way you think and collaborate? We design thinking!
We wish you a very happy and creative 2018,
