Editor’s Resources
Dear Editors-in-Chief,
We are glad to have you on board at ThisIsDesignThinking.net. To make your life a little bit easier we compiled all the information you might need on this site. Please don’t hesitate to tell us if there are any resources/templates missing.
Getting Started Check-list For Our Editors
This is a rough visualization how a publishing process might look like. Every step in the process is numbered. For some of the numbered steps we have already prepared some files for you convenience. You can download them in the file repository below. Folders have the same numbers as the steps in the figure.
01) Reach out to prospective authors
We are looking for graduate or PhD students, faculty staff, friends from industry, etc. This can be done personally, via faculty newsletters, or the like. You might use our Call-for-Participation text snippet for your convenience.
01.2) Put us in contact with the authors
We will send them their login data for the blog.
02) Put authors in contact with respective interview partners from the industry
Alternatively let them choose a well-documented design story they can re-engineer via desk research (our list of DT companies might help here).
02.1) Provide students with our author support materials
See the author’s resource page here. We have prepared a little “Quick-Start-Guide / Story Template Document” for them. They can write their story into this template right away.
02.2) Help them in revising their story
To make the story more interesting, please also encourage them to collect media (images, links to videos, etc.), which could enrich the blog post later on.
03) Encourage them to set-up the story in WordPress
If they encounter any problem: The technical FAQ’s are here, our contact data is here. We are happy to help.
03.1) You or the author give us a ping once the blog post is set up
We will do the final styling and if needed provide help with inserting media files like images or videos.
Frequently Asked Questions of Editors-in-Chief
Typical FAQ's of our editors-in-chief
What kind of stories do you want to publish/see on the blog?
| Stories we want to see | Stories we don’t want to see |
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If you (or your authors) are looking for a case to write about, here is a list of design thinking organisations that is regularly updated.
How long should an article / case study be?
Articles on the blog have different lengths, and all of the following examples are good stories. If you like, you can model your own article after them in length.
- (Almost too) extensive case: https://thisisdesignthinking.net/2015/05/intuit-design-for-cultural-change/ (2068 words)
- Perfect length case: https://thisisdesignthinking.net/2015/05/the-rise-fall-of-design-thinking-at-oticon/ (1306 words)
- Short case: https://thisisdesignthinking.net/2015/05/airbnb-design-thinking-example/ (677 words)
What does the publishing process look like?
So far we use the following process:
What are your goals? What do you want achieve with the site?
We compiled a little presentation on this. You can view it in your browser or download it below.
Download ThisIsDesignThinking.net - Call for Participation
Which kind of authors do you want me to bring together for this site?
Authors can be from industry and academia alike. We believe that they need a certain level of seniority and reflection regarding the topic already, though. Thus we suggest that master students, PhD students, young professionals or senior (faculty) staff are a good fit. What’s most important is that they are intrinsically motivated to write their article. It’s no good idea to ‘force’ or ‘motivate’ them with credits or the like.
How many stories do we as an institution have to contribute every year?
We’d love to see 3-5 stories a year per institution but you are actually totally free regarding that. What’s more important is the quality of the stories, which is hard to maintain as we’ve experienced. Thus constructing one rich and informative story per year is worth more than having five ‘quick’n dirty stories’ in the same time range.
Do you have an example of how the case should be prepared in WORD before getting published on the blog?
Sure! Why don’t you have a look at these two examples. One was written by Caroline Szymanski, the other one by Jan Schmiedgen. Especially in the Mobisol draft (which is more recent) you can see how certain styles of the Word file correspond with styles in the later blog post. So it might gives you good idea, which layout elements you will have at hand.
| Preparation in the Word file (.doc, .docx) | Final styling in WordPress (the blog post) |
| Mobisol – Word Draft | Mobisol – Final Blog Post |
| AirBnB – Word Draft | AirBnB – Final Blog Post |
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Material For Your Authors
On this Author’s Resources Page we have collected all the material to get your circle of authors going. If you need anything, which isn’t listed there please drop us a line.
File Repository
Most likely you already got an invite to our shared Google Drive folder. In case you didn’t or you don’t use Google Drive, you have the opportunity to browse and download the most commonly used templates, text snippets and files you might need here. All the files you need to get your authors going are located in the folder “01_Author’s Resources”. Just send them this link: https://thisisdesignthinking.net/authors-resources/. Then they can also download those files themselves.
You can see the contents of this folder only if you have already been invited and accepted to the shared Google Drive folder for editors-in-chief. You might be prompted to sign into your Google account before viewing the files.
Author: Jan Schmiedgen | Last modified: April 25, 2016