Riitta and Spinning Joy

A short while ago I was in a short meeting with Riitta–a previous student of SSI–and Tiina, the director of elderly home Sofia. Riitta wanted some feedback and advice on a new project she’s trying to put together. The project, called Spinning Joy, is a sort of continuation to SSI, but specially adapted to fit elderly care homes, and focusing a bit more on participation, and social aspects. I find the project very relevant, Riita’s approach quite adequate, and the knowledge to be obtained extremely interesting. The only challenge, of course, will be financial: how to get buy-in from elderly homes and/or some kind of funding, so that all the work put into the project gets paid. Well, I really hope Riitta somehow pulls through, and I’m looking forward to her starting to spin out joy in different elderly homes in Finland!

Jon Kolko: The Strange Connection between Entitlement, Social Innovation, and Interaction Design

Found this really interesting article through @twitter today, in which Jon Kolko talks about the thinking behind his Austin Center for Design:

The Strange Connection between Entitlement, Social Innovation, and Interaction Design
This is very relevant to the School of Social Innovation, and (who knows?) could even support the thesis.

Austin Center for Design

The Austin Center for Design looks a lot like the direction I want the School of Social Innovation to take. The philosophy is quite similar, too:

The Austin Center for Design exists to transform society through design and design education. This transformation occurs through the development of design knowledge directed towards all forms of social and humanitarian problems. The center explicitly tackles problems related to:

* Homelessness and transient housing solutions
* Healthcare access, affordability, and comprehension
* Nutrition, personal wellness, and consumption
* Education and job placement
* Poverty, as a general state of being
* Sustainability and environmental impact

The Hub

This looks like a great project, and I definitely hope to meet some of the Hub people soon. Here’s a quote from The Hub About section:

We’re a social enterprise with the ambition to inspire and support imaginative and enterprising initiatives for a better world. The Hub is a global community of people from every profession, background and culture working at ‘new frontiers’ to tackle the world’s most pressing social, cultural and environmental challenges.

SoundBites

The Soundbites approach is very interesting. It proposes to start small (3-4 friends) and spread from there (each friend finds other 3-4 friends, and so on). It is a “social conversation on steroids”, and how it works is that everyone can propose a social problem to be solved, and then everyone, in teams, attempts to solve the chosen problems through brainstorming and discussion, using a precise process given in advance. The process is quite interesting and well-defined (and a good source for inspiration), but what was missing compared to the School of Social Innovation was a way to reach concrete problems and target-groups for the teams to work with, and the ability to create direct results. I have yet to meet with the author to understand his concept better.

View more presentations from Oannes.

Future Search

Future Search is an approach aimed primarily at enabling cooperation between stakeholders in a social project and helping them to take concrete action.