Assignment 7: Due 4/6

The assignment over break will focus on getting a handle on where you are on your research for the final project.

Please email me, subject: "DESE Org Update" a brief update on the following:

1) Topic / Community that you are focusing on
2) List possible partner organizations

2a) Brief description of each organization
2b) How interested are you in this organization?
2c) Have you contacted them? If so, when?
2d) Have you heard back from them? If so, when?
3) Describe possible project ideas.
4) Do you prefer to consult for an organization or propose a new organization of your own?

Also please read the following article, Introduction to Green Design, by Hendrickson, et al, and watch Majora Carter's TED Talk from 2006 on Sustainable South Bronx

See you guys in a few weeks!

Tips for Contacting Organizations

1. When contacting organizations or companies, you should be up front about the fact that you are also working on a research project and make certain that they are willing to provide support in return for your volunteer time
2. Be clear about both what you will realistically contribute to the organization, as well as the commitment you will expect from the organization.
3. Consider framing your volunteer proposal around making the organization you are contacting more competitive (can you volunteer in a way that is useful to the organization but also indirectly feeds into your project?)
4. You could, for instance, use your skills as designers to produce ethnographic research that acts as evidence of the efficacy of the organization
5. Consider conducting ethnographic research with the communities being served and providing this data to the organization
6. Or, you could help communicate the message of the organization better to donors and the public (a good precedent here is Art Center's "Design Matters" program)

Design Project 1 Team Presentations

It was great to see your work last week and hear some excellent feedback from our panelists! Attending were Chris Bull from Brown Engineering and Rene Chen, Scot Frank and Yi Zhang of One Earth Designs.

Below are presentations from RISD DeSE 2010 Design Project 1, which focused on design to sustainably improve the quality of life for Himalayan communities. Here is a link to a brief for the project.

Team Presentations:
RISD DeSE 2010 Womens Health Team Presentation (Kathleen O'Donnel, Soomi Lee, Esther An)

RISD DeSE 2010 Stove Innovation Team Presentation (Justin DeSilva, Saba Ahmed, Jason Lee)

RISD DeSE 2010 Solar Energy Team (Cassie Mauer, David Zacher, Peter Simon)

RISD DeSE 2010 Sanitation Team Presentation (Flo Delgado, Louie Rigano, Annemarie Gugelmann, Felipe Sarmiento)

RISD DeSE 2010 Ergonomics Team Presentation (Ji Yae Park, Gazal Goenka, Lucy Stein, Hyun Ju Lee)

Human Centered Design Workshop with IDEO

Beto Lopez of IDEO's Boston location will be visiting during the afternoon of 3/25 to run a workshop with our studio in the ID Gallery. In advance of the workshop, please read the Human Centered Design Toolkit, which can be downloaded in sections here.

Here is his bio from the 2009 Better World Conference:

Beto Lopez IDEO UPDATE

Beto Lopez is a systems designer at IDEO Boston, leading IDEO's east coast sustainability initiative working to integrate tenets of considered design across IDEO's project work.

Internally, Beto serves as a regional content guide, contributing to the way IDEO values design alternatives in the development of products and services by looking at the broader environmental and social context of their realization. Externally, he helps IDEO clients advance their social and environmental responsibility through design thinking that promotes positive impact in the made world. He regularly speaks and teaches on topics related to the intersection of design and sustainable development.

Beto came to IDEO in 2004 as an engineer, bringing experience from automotive design and research, architectural engineering and construction, and research in sustainable development. His portfolio spans work in both products and services ranging from the technical design of drug delivery devices to strategic thinking around the future of transportation.

Beto earned a BSME and an MS in Dynamic Systems and Control from the University of Texas at Austin.

Global warming: Indians decide to make their own glaciers

Felipe posted up this link to a CS Monitor article dealing with the looming water crisis in the Himalayas and surrounding environs. The writing is strangely poor for this publication, but the video attached to the article is quite clear and succinct. Take a look!

Presentation Deliverables for 3/23

Dear DeSE students - it was exciting to see your progress earlier today, and I'm really looking forward to discussing your projects in the crit next week. Team presentations will be delivered starting at 1:10pm on Tuesday 3/23 in the BEB Lecture Hall, first floor.

At least one member of each team must show up at 9:50am to test out your presentation on the projection system and sign up for a presentation time slot. If you plan to include audio, please tell me so I can have speakers on hand for you.

Presentation format

1. Presentations will run 30 minutes each with 15 minutes of Q&A and consist of a Powerpoint or PDF along with models and any other tangible objects that your team will demonstrate.

2. All members must contribute drawings, graphs and other content to the presentation while maintaining a visual style and layout that is consistent across slides.

3. The sections of the presentation should be as follows:

• Problem Statement / Description of Status Quo: Introduce your area of study by providing visuals that depict or diagram the problem you are focusing. Wherever possible present a clear sequence of events via drawings illustrating scenarios in which community members presently encounter these problems, and what the repercussions are in terms of quality of life, environment, health, etc. Highlight causal relationships and explain your interest in the particular aspects of the problem scenario you have chosen to focus on.
• Precedents: You will provide evidence from prior projects that are directly or indirectly related to the design(s) you are proposing. Briefly discuss the communities being served in these precedents, the methodology they employed and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the projects overall. Highlight any areas that you specifically adopt or reject in your design(s).
• Design(s): Present visuals that demonstrate the key features and performance of one or more designs that address the problem by building upon precedents as well as your own research and ingenuity. Emphasize the way that the designs fit into the lives of your users, directly illustrating use whenever possible to help bring the audience into the scenario you are presenting.
• Plan for Implementation (formerly called "Support"): This section should address your plan for the implementation of your project, including proposals for navigating the web of constraints that form the structure of any social venture. Please propose at least one concept for each of the following areas, if they are applicable to your project: funding mechanism, training plans (in the case of DIY projects), market research, user testing of prototypes, distribution, maintenance, promotion, measuring the impact of your project and evaluating the success of a given design (metrics and evaluation).
• Proposal for Future Research: Describe your pending research questions, the impact that the result of this research could have on your design proposals and the tools you would propose using to address collect this information.

Design Project 2 Details

Design for Local Social Entrepreneurship

3/25 through 5/25 (9 weeks)

• Overview Students will work individually or in pairs over nine weeks to create new social entrepreneurial ventures built around products, services or systems for communities in the New England region. Students will work in partnership with local social organizations, which will act as either client institutions (for students expanding the entrepreneurial capacity of the existing organization) or peer institutions (for students starting entirely new ventures). Mentorship will be provided by experienced members of the design community from for-profit firms like IDEO, Sustainable Minds and KVA, as well as social entrepreneurs from excellent local non-profit organizations.
• Objectives Starting at the beginning of the semester, students will partner with local social organizations in order to understand and research their mission, the communities they serve and opportunities for using design and entrepreneurship to address unmet needs. Students will present designs of new social ventures based on products, services and systems along with comprehensive plans for the implementation of these ventures. Mid-way through the project students will present to their partner organizations to Final output will include an oral/visual presentation, a business plan, a brochure, as well as publish-quality design models, drawings and diagrams.
• Final review during Spring Crit week, 5/23 - 5/28, exact date and time TBD

Agenda for 3/16 - 3/25

This week will be focused on the production of your work for the team reviews on 3/23. I'm really excited to see what you all present, and I am looking forward to helping you get to a higher level of development in your ideas and presentation this week.

Tuesday 3/16 Desk Crits

9:50-11:10

Local social organization contact progress update

1:10-5:30

Team desk crits (30 min - 1 hour depending on your preference)

Thursday 3/18 Portfolio Review

9:50-11:10

Team presentation Q&A, Sami Nerenberg visit

1:00-4:00

ID Portfolio review in the Met

4:00-5:30

Team desk crits (15 - 30 mins)

Tuesday 3/23 Project Crit

9:50-11:10

Teams do a test run-through of presentations on projector in BEB Lecture Hall (first floor)

1:10-5:10

Project crit in BEB Lecture Hall, 45 minutes per team

Thursday 3/25 Workshop with IDEO

9:50-11:10

Kickoff Discussion for "mini-thesis" design project

1:10-5:10

Workshop with Beto Lopez of IDEO on scaling up social ventures

Assignment 6: due 3/16

As a recap of our discussion on Thursday, please complete the following by this Tuesday 3/16:

Teams

1. Meet for at least one substantial sketching and brainstorming session focused on the problem/benefit that you have chosen for the Western China community design project. Produce evidence of your progress that can be reviewed and discussed during desk crits on Tuesday. Please continue to share your skillsets and make sure to communicate to me during desk crits whether or not you are practicing the skills that you stated you are interested in improving.

2. Look up precedent projects in which social entrepreneurs have worked on similar types of problems in the past, and be prepared to discuss the successes and failures of these efforts with the class.

Individuals

1. Draft letters of intent (describing why you are contacting them, what your interests are, how you would like to try to assist them) to at least 5 local organizations. Share these letters with Peter Hocking and/or myself for review.

2. Sign up for a Dropbox account here. I will add you to the class Dropbox folder. For new accounts, please use your RISD email address so that I can easily keep track of which address to send email invites to.

Assignment 5: Due 3/11

Good work on Design Project 1 so far - please scan and post up your boards from today on your individual blogs. Also, post a few of the key sketchbook pages and brainstorming sheets that your team generated over the weekend.

For this coming Thursday please complete the following:

1. Based on the work that we critiqued in studio today, each team should meet and select one area to focus on for further development. Produce an informal array of sketches, brainstorm notes, and evidence of your research on this topic for desk-crits on Thursday.

2. On Thursday morning we will have a skype call with Drolgar Jyid, my colleague in Qinghai. Please think of one or two key questions per team that you would like to ask her during the conversation about local conditions and culture.

3. Read these case studies from The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, by C.K. Prahalad. Also read this extract from The Power of Unreasonable People, by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan, and write a brief paragraph response on your blog.

Lastly, let me know if you have any questions about the project, and good luck!

Assignment 4: Due 3/9

Nice work during the team division process- you guys were able to handle a quite complicated procedure very smoothly. Here is are the Project 1 topics and team rosters:

• Stove Innovation: Justin, Saba, Jason
• Solar: Cassie, David, Peter
• Sanitation: Flo, Louie, Annemarie, Felipe
• Women's Ergonomics: Ji, Gazal, Lucy, Ju
• Women's Reproductive Health: Kathleen, Soomi, Esther

For this coming Tuesday, please complete the following:

1. Prior to the team meeting, individually produce a list of specific problem areas you are interested in working on. For instance, if you are working on stoves, what problems related to stoves would you like to address. Each team member must also produce a short list of skills they would like to improve on. Share these two lists with your team and email them to me.

2. Schedule and hold at least one substantial group brainstorming session place during which you discuss a wide range of problems and their possible solutions to address in your given topic area. Produce and save sketches, mind-maps, lists of ideas, photos and any other evidence of your brainstorming session. The more the better.

3. Produce a list of questions you have regarding the user communities to pass along to One Earth Designs team members.

4. Develop at least 3 of these project concepts a bit further and create three 11x17 presentation boards for each. Each board can investigate a slightly different aspect of the concept, for example: the problem being addressed, material, manufacturing, human factors, sustainability, etc. These should all have a consistent graphic layout. You may work on tasks individually or, preferably, work together in group work sessions.

Black Tent Films

Photo Copyright Black Tent Films

I am pleased to announce that this week we will watch Tibetan Woman's Life (Quicktime trailer), directed by a very talented filmmaker from Western China, Puhua Dongzhi. He is the founder of a film company, Black Tent Films, which has produced a number of award-winning documentaries on everyday life in his home region which have been screened across the globe. This film will help inform you about the lifestyle, culture, and challenges that are common for women the communities we are designing for during Project 1. Below is a summary taken from the film company's website:

Tibetan Woman's Life, dir. by Puhua Dongzhi

34-year old Sgrolmamtsho married Don'grub at the age of 21 (in 1993) without experience of housework, fieldwork, and fetching wood. Filmed by her husband's younger brother, 'phagspadon'grub, in Amdo, the film concentrates on the daily life of Tibetan village women--fetching water, feeding livestock (swine, a cow, a mule), milking, cleaning the stables, cooking, household religious activity, weeding fields, transporting manure to fields, fetching wood for fuel--along with commentary by Sgrolmamtsho about her life and family. (Rare insight into Tibetan village women's lives. Tibetan soundtrack; English subtitles. 52 minutes. Color.)

Screenings: 30 June. 2008--10th RAI International Film Festival of Ethnographic Film.

Design Project 1 Details

Design for International Social Entrepreneurship

(3 weeks)

• Overview Students will work in groups over the course of three weeks to identify, research and respond to issues faced by people living on the Himalayan plateau. Mentorship will be provided by members of One Earth Designs, a US-based NGO that promotes environmental health and income opportunities in partnership with communities in the region.
• Objectives Students will present designs for new products, services and systems that help Himalayan communities leverage their resources according to the best practices of social entrepreneurship. In support of their designs, students will benchmark against existing projects in the field. Final output includes an oral/visual presentation as well as models, design drawings and system diagrams as applicable.
• Final Review on Tuesday March 23rd

Assignment 3: Due 3/4

It was great to see the work that everyone brought in today! Keep putting in effort to express your skills and insights to the rest of the class so that we can help you grow in the areas you are interested in developing. I will email you each individually with my comments and observations later this week.

Assignment 3 Details

1. Scan or photograph your work from the weekend design exercise and post the JPGs to your blog site, along with a link to a PDF version of the boards. Please include a paragraph of text introducing and linking to Assignment 2. If your blog is empty for some reason, by all means go ahead and add your responses to the readings from Assignment 1.

2. Skim through the following papers referenced during Jesse's talk earlier today and post a few sentences of remarks on each on your blog.

• Designing Sustainability, Agogino
• Metrics for Measuring Ideation Effectiveness, Shah, et al.
• Creativity as a Design Criterion, Christiaans

3. Reflect on three areas of social need that are of personal interest to you and compose a paragraph for each on your blog page describing the issue and why it matters to you. You do not necessarily need to choose one of these areas to work on during Design Project 2, but this will help us begin the discussion that will lead you to your final topic.

4. Based on these reflections, create a list of the local nonprofit organizations or businesses with social missions that you are considering contacting. Visit their websites and prepare a brief statement about the communities they serve. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about what a qualifying organization would be - remember this does not need to be a non-profit. Any org or company that provides social benefits to generally underserved communities is worth bringing up in discussion. Below are some resources for locating organizations to add to your list.

• http://nonprofitdir.rifoundation.org/
• http://www.risdpublicengagement.net/id3.html
• http://208.82.213.185/resources_search.asp (this one has a large group of orgs in MA listed)
• http://www.clearlyso.com/businesses-directory.jsf (this one is purely for taking a look at Social Businesses across the globe)

5. Lastly, please take a look at this OED powerpoint and PDF document. There are some areas of crossover with what we covered previously, but you will find new information about communities in Western China that has not yet been covered in class.

Thanks everyone!