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

Open positions in the project!

We’re opening positions in the project, to make it happen faster and better. Looking forward to enthusiastic people to join the organizing team!

School of Social Innovation – Open positions

What to teach, what to teach

I’ve started thinking about the methods we will need to be teaching. I came up with this draft, that I will be refining soon:

Since we want this as hands-on as possible, I’ll probably be using something like the Ideo method cards as an aid to the process.

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.

Project summary slides

Let the show begin!

It’s been some time I’ve been thinking about doing this project, and now finally it’s been kicked-off. The School for Social Innovation, how it’s now called. Also, my master thesis project for the Interaction Design program at Malmö University.

Let the show begin!