CISI news and resources

CISI resources

CISIX – The Creative Intelligence and Strategic Innovation Exchange

CISIX fosters a community and ecosystem of lifelong learners and creative change makers. On the CISIX site, you will find inspirational stories, resources and a community of like-minded people looking to. expand how we see and do by accessing creativity.

CISI books

Creative Reboot

by Barbara Doran

Catalyse creative intelligence with a game-changing kit to ignite insights and innovations. A practical guide for change-makers wanting to tap imagination and amp-up creativity. Whether you are a rigid analytical thinker or an accomplished creative mind, over the course of these pages, you'll learn to use creativity to create, diverge from, and converge into new inventive pathways, finding innovative approaches to complex problems. By providing a sequential pathway of interdisciplinary creative exercises, Creative Reboot is the all-in-one toolkit that helps facilitate the building of your creative confidence.

Design. Think. Make. Break. Repeat

by Martin Tomisch, Madeleine Borthwick, Naseem Ahmadpour, Clare Cooper, Jessica Frawley, Leigh-Anne Hepburn, A. Baki Kocaballi, Lian Loke, Claudia Núñez-Pacheco, Karla Straker, Cara Wrigley

This design methodology book provides over 80 different methods of design and is the perfect resource for design educators, students, and practitioners.

Think of this resource as a sort of ‘refer to’ handbook when you’re stuck or need some inspiration for your latest design project or lesson. It considers the world outside of design where products are applied, to fully consider every possible factor that can affect design.

This book not only provides skilled guidance and methods of design to help designers with solving problems, but it also helps readers to break down the challenging problems they are faced with, by introducing them to different ways of thinking and approaching the field of design.

But that’s not all! In a world of shifting methods and rapidly developing technologies, this book is kept up to date and supplemented by the very latest new templates and design methods that are included on the publisher's website. 

Designing for the Common Good

by Kees Dorst

Our societies are becoming more complex, dynamic, and networked every day. Public organisations and companies alike are learning the hard way that the societal challenges before us cannot be resolved as they were in the past. We need new approaches to these problems.

Over the past ten years, an increasing number of government organisations, companies, and individuals have realised that special practices from design can help us rise to the challenge. At the core of this book are twenty case studies from around the world that demonstrate how design approaches can be used for societal change. These extensive case descriptions are interspersed with reflections, lessons learned, and tricks and tips for the practitioner, culminating in a vision of how design can revolutionise society.

Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design

by Kees Dorst

When organisations apply old methods of problem-solving to new kinds of problems, they may accomplish only temporary fixes or some ineffectual tinkering around the edges. Today's problems are a new breed—open, complex, dynamic, and networked—and require a radically different response. In this book, Kees Dorst describes a new, innovation-centered approach to problem-solving in organisations: frame creation. It applies “design thinking,” but it goes beyond the borrowed tricks and techniques that usually characterise that term. Frame creation focuses not on the generation of solutions but on the ability to create new approaches to the problem situation itself.

Notes on Design

by Kees Dorst

For designers, and beyond! These 185 mini-essays together create a panoramic overview of what designers do, and how creative practice works. Each one-page note thoroughly reflects on a design practice, showing professionals what they can learn from expert designers for innovating in their own field. These reflections are based on the knowledge and insights that have been gathered in over fifty years of design research, and on the author’s own experiences as a designer, researcher and educator.

Over the last ten years, design has developed far beyond its original disciplinary boundaries, creating great opportunities for designers to work on issues in many disciplines right across society. And designing, these days, is not just for designers – many different fields are learning from design to build their own creative practices. This book aims to open up key design practices for general use through thoughtful reflections. Each one-page essay deals with a particular aspect of design as a creative practice and offers some foothold for understanding. All the pieces can be read independently, but they are bundled together in chapters to deal with a topic more thoroughly and completely. The issues raised are made very concrete by linking them directly to experiences – the essays should ideally be read at the moment you have encountered a specific issue yourself, and are open to contemplation.