For a couple of months, at Big New Ideas, I’ve been tinkering about the idea of a weekend event that brought together creatives to use our skills to help a local non-profit. I believe in what many non-profits do and I believe that as designers we have a role to play. However, with our society is moving at an ever quicker pace, and time commitment is getting harder, something needed to be done.
That is when the idea of the “24 Hour Design Jam” (As it is currently called) came about. Where every month, we get 6-8 creatives together and over Friday and Saturday apply the creative process to develop an appropriate brand and plant the seeds for a nonprofit’s online presences. This weekend was the first 24 hour jam we did with a local non-profit in Providence, RI called Young Voices. They are a youth led advocacy group training young people to become leaders in their communities.
It was an amazing experience! I knew it was going to be fun and never so much fun, and on top of that it feels really good to have worked along side with other young people who believes in the sames things I do and is as passionate or even more passionate about help others. And Young Voices have a new website!
The big idea is for us to work with a couple more non-profits by assembling a different team each time, so that we can find a formula that can be scaled and done anywhere in the world. Follow us on Facebook.
Here is an interesting take on organization, hiding your valuables and everything else in plain sight. If you are as forgetful as I am, you might not remember where your secret compartment for you car keys are when you leave the house… imagine how frustrated that might be. In any case, this is a cool project and the video is full of little surprises.
Having grown up in Hong Kong, living in tight small spaces is very much part of life. I’ll paint a picture of how small these spaces are in the city: Many families share an apartment is nothing uncommon, 2 families of 4 can often be found sharing an 800 square feet apartment; the middle school that I went to had only half a basketball court; apartment buildings beyond 40 stories tall is a common sight; and there are virtually no alley ways in the city.
Gary Chang, a local architect, devised an ingenius way of organizing space by using portable walls and fold down tables and bed to maximize space. He uses reflective material in the apartment to reflect light and gives the illusion of space. Here is a great video of him demonstrating how the space can be used in his “Transformer” apartment.
As designers we are so protective of our work, some of us get offended by people saying that “everyone is a designer”, I met Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, last week in a round table discussion at RISD and he made a great comparison between designers and writers, “Writers always enough others to write, knowing that they are simple the best at it, whereas designers are so protective of our ‘work’ that we are afraid to allow people to design. Like writers, we, designers, should be encouraging everyone to design, we are simply the best at what we do.”
As Monthly Design Review continues to pick up momentum, we have recently started our twitter feed and already been having some very interesting conversation about the relationship between “Design” and “Design thinking”. Join our conversation and follow us on Twitter (@dreview) and on Facebook
@dreview: By labeling the thinking process behind design, “Design Thinking”, are we devaluating “Design”?
@renedesigns: Most people in business regarded ‘design’ as simply aesthetics, hence ‘design thinking.’
@neilbrown: I’d say so, since design=thinking. So, why state the obvious?
As our online community grows, we are still getting together every Thursday of month in New York City in Flatiron. Are upcoming meeting is on April 4, see details on our facebook event
Comments Off | Share posted on March 1, 2010 at 9:45 pm change, Design
Using this diagram to sum it up, what I do and Big New Ideas does is to use strategy, design and story telling to bring a community together around ideas to help change the world. This is the power of design, this is what it can do and this is how it can change the world.
