Lily Kane/Winonan

The documentary “Design & Thinking” was presented by Winona State University’s graphic design program on Friday and Saturday last week.

The movie deals with a new issue that would relate to a wide variety of majors and interests. The basic point it tries to make is that interdisciplinary interests are the best solutions to problems.

The main focus of “Design  & Thinking” was to show examples of this new way of designing. Instead of having creative people on one side and business people over in another room and scientists in another building completely, they want to create a place where all these different focuses can come together and talk.

This would be a place where all the different majors can talk and learn what each other does and how they can work together to solve issues.

This new idea of “Design & Thinking” is being used already with most of the movies subjects not even realizing that they are doing it. But this new concept creates a way of coming together that can solve more than “design” issues in the typical sense. The communication of different perspectives can aid science experiments, companies and political issues. In general, the producers and other authors who have written about the issue think that this way of thinking can fix just about everything.

One thing this movie did well was to provide no shortage of concrete examples on how “Design Thinking” can be used.

However, the documentary wasn’t easy to follow. It didn’t have a strong story line that would make it easy for viewers to track. It did give each section of the movie a subtitle that helped describe what was going to happen. Unfortunately, that almost added to convolutedness and rather long and tired feeling of the movie.

Overall “Design & Thinking” was an interesting documentary with a fresh and fascinating concept could relate to many people’s personal interests. However, it is a bit long and repetitious.

Contact Lily at [email protected]