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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