On February 19th, students from the Otis College of Art and Design visited our Los Angeles studio. The students are part of a multi-disciplinary class called “Design for Social Impact.” In the class, the students work with local non-profits to focus their designs on specific and relevant needs.

With this in mind, we tailored our presentations to give the students a feel for Continuum’s social innovation process. The morning started out with a tour of the space and its project-specific installations, led by the studio principal Alex Hennen. Then, design strategist Brian Wen led a presentation and discussion on design strategy and ethnography in emerging markets.

Below are some impressions from the students:

“I began to realize all the types of people, methods, and practices that go into social design. It is a complex system.”
Alexandra Cantle

“[I got] a chance to see more ways that design can create social impact. It also was good to see the importance of video interviews and what they can reveal.”
Stephanie Treinen

 ”Being in product design, I’ve come to the realization (or more left the state of denial) that you really need to get out there and talk to people when doing research. Not just sit and google things on a computer.”
Ryan Robinson

“[I got] a better understanding of the effectiveness of systems thinking, the process involved, and the importance of beginning with people’s values, and how to work with and understand people in a ethnographic design context.”
Julian Rood

Does design have a role to play in the face of disaster? That’s the conversation the Cooper-Hewitt sparked through a panel they hosted the other week which I was invited to join. The conversation was moderated by Chris Hacker, CDO of J&J, and included panelists who have been on the frontlines of relief for some of the world’s most horrific disasters, Jean-Cedric Meeus, Emergency Coordinator of UNICEF Supply Division, Gerald Martone, Humanitarian Affairs Director for the International Rescue Committee, and Pierre Fouche, a Haitian earthquake engineer.

The conversation focused primarily on the disaster in Haiti. Frontline reports from Jean and Gerald underscored the extraordinary challenges the humanitarian community faces in delivering aid to a country hobbled by a threadbare infrastructure (including a lack of basic governance) and debilitating poverty. Taking a step back, we looked at a country that has been the recipient of over $4 billion in aid over the past 20 years. Pre-earthquake, there were over 10,000 private aid organizations working in Haiti, providing basic services in every arena of life. Depending on which source you choose to believe, the estimated cost of recovery hovers in the range of $7.2 to $13 billion. The main focus now is pure “rescue:” How to deliver and distribute it. This is the horse before the cart of reconstruction.

And it all reminded me of something I heard the founder of a social enterprise working in Haiti say, post-disaster: “Rescue is important, but doesn’t lead to anything more than rescue.” That’s not to say immediate relief isn’t a must have—but what’s the role design can play in the long-term recovery (and we’re talking decades) facing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? That’s the big question to ask—and some of what we touched on during the panel conversation.

You can view the video of the conversation here.

Yes, we all know: Change is here. It’s taken up residence in the White House (we hope). It’s having its way with every system—financial, housing, political—to which we faithfully subscribed and that kept our world running. And now change has come to Design Observer, one of the most authoritative blogs on design. Change Observer will be the new venue for Design Observer to highlight the activity, development, best and worse cases at the burgeoning intersection where design meets social impact. It’s a way for the contributors (specifically the new additions to the team, Julie Lasky of ID Magazine and Ernest Beck, a former Wall Street Journal reporter) to focus their keen editorial insight on important efforts underway in social innovation. It’s a way to begin to affect change through increased knowledge and understanding. And it’s much needed.

The need to drive awareness around the impact design can have when applied to some of the world’s most intractable problems is one of the insights that emerged this summer during a “Design for Social Impact” workshop Continuum led with support from The Rockefeller Foundation. The goal of the workshop was to think about how we could create the “infrastructure” to increase the design industry’s systematic contribution to the social sector. (The outcomes of this workshop can be read here)  Bill Drenttel from Design Observer was a key participant in these conversations—and took the lead in thinking about how a robust site—in his terms, an “uber site”—could most effectively report on the activities, knowledge and progress of the collaborations that emerge from this sector.  The belief is: If we can increase awareness about the efficacy of these collaborations, we’ll start to see an increase in involvement.
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I have just finished a book that has provoked the most unusual vision: The Temple of Apollo. Intoxicating vapors rise from the earth’s deep chasms. The Oracle of Delphi unleashes an unbridled stream of murmurings. The holy priests wait below, open-mouthed, to reshape these cryptic invocations into enigmatic prophecies. Fire and brimstone kind of stuff.

No William Gibson book is this. No manga of ancient Greek mythology, but rather Michael Kinsley’s new book-birthed-by-blog, “Creative Capitalism, A Conversation with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and other Economic Leaders.” So why the Delphic vision? Perhaps because this book is less a conversation (between the third richest man in the world and the richest man in the world) than a scramble by the modern day priests and priestesses of our economic system to make sense of the oracle-like proclamation by Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of 2008.

It is in this 2,774 worded speech or that Gates, a self-proclaimed impatient optimist, launched his provocative, compelling and, to some, cryptic call for a world where “creative capitalism” takes its turn at addressing some of our most intractable and pressing global inequities.

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