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Essay: Andrew Shea

Flies in Urinals: The Value of Design Disruptions

Many designers and educators are dubious of the recent surge of design altruism, noting that they rarely see evidence of social impact projects that lead to real behavior change. While it is well documented that public awareness campaigns generally work for actions that people perform infrequently, like donating to a disaster, it is much harder to change habitual actions in a meaningful way. Since daily habits are profoundly shaped by our environment, perhaps designers must disrupt the environment itself to change behaviors?

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Essay: William Drenttel

Designing for Social Change

Designing for Social Change is a toolkit of strategies, case studies, and stories, offering new opportunities for approaching social design in our communities. It presents students and schools as active participants, designers and design firms as social innovators, and communities as both rich laboratories for experimentation and receptive locations for creative approaches and new ideas.

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Review: David Stairs

Demythologizing Design: Another View of "Design with the Other 90%: CITIES"

The show itself isn't bad as such things go, and better attended than Mark Lamster suggested. It's a compilation, and suffers the decontextualized slings and arrows of such an approach.

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Opinion: John Cary

Architecture's Internship Requirement Needs a Redesign

Over three decades old, the Intern Development Program is more an exercise in arithmetic than experience, with aspiring architects required to pay hundreds of dollars and record a staggering 5,600 hours across various tasks. They’re asked to do so in lieu of demonstrating creativity, competence or any other attribute one would associate with their profession.

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Miscellaneous: John Cary and William Drenttel

Give the Gift of Design this Holiday Season

There are countless holiday gift guides circulating this year, including many aimed at design lovers. We’d like to recommend ten opportunities to donate to worthy endeavors and growing organizations. Give a gift that can have impact.

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Interview: The Editors

Designing an Educational Breakthrough

"Breaker’s goal is to drive alternative learning and social innovation by mobilizing interdisciplinary teams of young creative collaborators to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems," says education innovator Juliette LaMontagne. "We connect our teams of 18- to 24-year-olds with global thought leaders and industry experts to answer major challenges like, in the case of our summer pilot, the future of the book and its impact on literacy."

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Opinion: John Cary

Shelter for Those Who Served

Out of work for more than two decades, my uncle Tom, a Vietnam veteran whom I idolized as a kid, somehow made ends meet. Our family was never quite sure how, and we were too polite to ask. Over a cryptic phone call with my mom one gray fall day, Tom divulged that he was severely in debt. Creditors were calling him constantly. This uncle, with whom we shot hoops and played catch, rapidly declined into a shell of his former self. Tom stopped eating, resisted the efforts of compassionate VA caregivers we summoned to help, and ultimately holed up in his dark apartment.

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Report: Phil Patton

Audi Urban Future Summit 2011

The event gathered together some 500 planners, architects, engineers, designers, scientists and futurists. It grew from the recognition that — especially among the urban young — automobiles have a negative image. One Wall Street analyst even describes the industry’s reputation as a “tobacco-like” problem.

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Essay: Laura Weiss

Better Service Through Consultmanship

Any role that requires engagement with other human beings can benefit from sensitivity to good service — communicating clearly, keeping projects on schedule, providing appropriate feedback. And yet such capabilities are colloquially characterized in MBA programs as “soft skills.”

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Case Studies

Design and Social Enterprise Case Studies

A new series of cases focused on design and social innovation created by Yale School of Management in collaboration with Winterhouse Institute, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
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This case study about the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation provides an opportunity to examine sustained work towards healthcare and in a context where designers and design thinking are critical components.
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This case study about SELCO, a solar energy company in India, provides an opportunity to examine the strategy of a business with a social purpose and a heavy reliance on innovative design.
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Gallery: Chaz Maviyane-Davies

Occupy America 2011

Prisoners of Conscience: The Series>>

Project: Julie Lasky

Faraday Utility Bike

Nothing on the road is more prosaic than a vehicle designed for hauling loads. Unless, of course, the vehicle has been imagined by a leading industrial design firm working in partnership with an innovative American bicycle manufacturer.>>

Miscellaneous: The Editors

10 Things Acumen Fund Has Learned About Tackling Global Poverty

A new website, with a clear framing of principles, marks the organization's first decade.>>

Gallery: Photo by Jason Orton

London 2012

Northern Parklands, Olympic Park (2011)>>

Project: John Foster

DART St. Louis

Last April, more than 250 designers, art directors, photographers and illustrators took turns throwing darts at a map of St. Louis. The intersection where the dart landed became their destination. The dart-thrower had a month to find his or her assigned corner of the city and return with a photograph that made that spot come to vivid life.>>

Miscellaneous: The Editors

Sappi Ideas That Matter

Back in the last century (1999 to be precise), the paper company Sappi launched a program to distribute grants for social design and innovation. Since then, Ideas That Matter has funded $11 million in efforts to improve the health, education and prosperity of the world’s citizens.>>

Project: Julie Lasky

Ringing in the New Air

Isetan, the venerable Tokyo department store, is doing its bit for the atmosphere.>>

Project: Ernest Beck

Project Mwana

For mothers and newborns, early medical testing is critical to health, especially for detecting HIV/AIDS. But in some developing countries, sending and receiving a blood sample from an extremely remote location can take between two and five months. Project Mwana is changing that.>>