THOUGHT DESIGNS: EXPAND MIND to match SCALE of our Challenges: 35 TOOLS 20 REPLACEMENTS that surpass Elites and China Paperback – November 12, 2025

There is "DESIGN THINKING" an idea from U Toronto for schools of business--that the Americans made a huge mistake by basing schools of business on economics (to raise status from business being a mere practice field to a theory field)l; INSTEAD business is a DESIGN ART. This launched waves of excited designers worldwide--NOW under this Prof. Martin's banner they could approach every corporation for lucrative Business as Design Art consults. Richard, the author of this THOUGHT DESIGN book thought those waves of designers and the corporations throwing money at them were likely to fail--overall zilch contribution most likely. Richard wrote a book THINKING DESIGN about getting designers out of their artsy craftsy and form function over-trodden avenue and into reading sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, systems science, computer science and the rest. Richard had raised charity funds from the 200 richest Americans, some of whom were famous fashion designers and architects. ALL of them had huge personal libraries only 1/4 of which were "design" books--the rest all sorts of fields. Richard later ran an Excellence Science Research Project at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business that interviewed and gave 44 page questionnaires to 8000 people atop 64 profession across 8 or so years. Many of these people too were designers and they all had personal libraries, big ones, with 1/4 of the books "design" ones and the rest all sorts of serious other fields. FROM THIS Richard deduced that the great designers in each of 22 genres of design, were well read in dozens of fields not merely design. THINKING DESIGN was a book seeing how mere ideas, mere algorithms, mere observations could be evolved into terrific genre changing designs. A subset of it is on amazon now as Updating Design Foundations. This book THOUGHT DESIGNS is about new kinds of thought someone somewhere designed and that the author, Richard, learned from those 8000 people atop 64 professions. These top people would read or hear one little tiny new idea and turn it into posters, devices, tools that got them mastery of applying that one little idea. Robust practice and tooling and application could work miracles with just a single new ideas as input. This book THOUGHT DESIGNS is 35 simple little new ideas that when practiced and applied propel anyone to the top of any profession. Richard has taught the ideas in this book at U Chicago, Temple U, Kwansei Gakuen U, Kansai Gaidai U, Keio U, Beijing U, TUDelft, ETH, Fudan U.among others. Richard counts about 70 of his former students that reached the very top of their chosen profession using 1 or 2 tools in this book. For example for many years Procter & Gamble's top single marketer in Asia was master of 2 tools in this book making him all new hires' most popular manager to work for. 17 of Richard's students founded design boutique firms now bought out by huge agencies enriching their designer founders greatly. Read more