Final Crit and Goodbyes!

Well, the first ever RISD Design for Social Entrepreneurship advanced studio has officially come to a close. We finished off with great presentations and a party at Krisa's place! During the critique, we got to see the latest developments in everyone's projects with numerous guest critics. You can check out the project on our project page here.  After the presentations, we had a great group discussion on the role of industrial design in today's society. 

Stay tuned for videos! And see below for pictures.

Thank you to our Guest Critics and Visitors! 

Guest Critics: 

Jenny Kinnard- Procter & Gamble, Designer

Alex Tee- Altitude Inc, Engineer and Strategist

Peter Hawking- Office of Public Engagement, RISD, Director

Claudia Ford- International Affairs, RISD Director

Yuriko Saito- HPSS Professor- Ecological Responsibility for Artists and Designers

Damian White- HPSS Prossor- The Sociology of Ecology

Alan Harlem- Brown Swearer Center, Director

Visitors: 

Deborah Kanston- Multicultural Affairs Office

Becky Bermont- Media + Partners

Danielle Mancuso- Media + Partners

Videos Now Available!

For those of you who could not attend Thursday's lectures, they are now available on DeSE's YouTube Channel! Below is the first clip of Tanya Fields' profound lecture on the power of community activism for social change and what we as designers can do to make a difference. 

Stay tuned for more videos to come as we continue to upload from previous lectures!

A new BoP Social Network

BoP Source has recently come out with a social network which aims to directly connect consumers at the base of the pyramid with the companies that want to do business with them. Sign up today and join in on the conversation!

Jocelyn Wyatt- Design in the Developing World

A great recent post from IDEO's Jocelyn Wyatt discusses the approaches to designing for development, including systemic thinking and business approaches. Great to see in what ways our projects here at DeSE are resonating with the greater field!

Jocelyn Wyatt leads the Design for Social Impact initiative at IDEO . Prior to IDEO, Jocelyn worked as an Acumen Fund fellow in Kenya and served as Interim Country Director for VisionSpring in India. Jocelyn has an MBA from Thunderbird and a BA in Anthropology from Grinnell College. She blogs (periodically) on www.jocelynwyatt.com.

"Fully admitting my bias here, I did think the Design in the Developing World panel was an especially interesting conversation between a top-notch set of designers and practitioners. Caroline Balerin launched the panel with the question "What would it look like to design for the other 90%?" I fully expected the panelists, who have traditionally designed products, to respond with something about appropriately designed technologies. I was pleasantly surprised to hear each of them respond with the need to design not only the products, but the systems around them."

Read the full article on nextbillion.net here. 

Claudia Ford on the History of Development

Claudia Ford, Director of RISD's International Affairs, speaks to RISD's Design for Social Entrepreneurship class to share her knowledge on the history of development and some of the criticisms of the UN Millennium Development Goals.

Below is her slideshow and stay tuned for the live video series!

Claudia Ford Presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ford claudia)

Thank you Claudia for sharing your wealth of knowledge, experience, and grace with our class! 

Syllabus Now Available!

The semester is approaching soon! Next Tuesday, RISD ID Juniors and Seniors are encouraged to stop by the ID building to meet with professors to find out more about all the studios. For those of you who are not able to make it, click HERE to view the Design for Social Entrepreneurship course syllabus. And please feel free to contact me for further questions: sami.nerenberg (at) gmail.com

DeSE Course Description

Design for Social Entrepreneurship (DeSE)
RISD Fall '08

A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change.

This course aims to cultivate social entrepreneurial designers by investigating the power of product, system and service design to create positive social and environmental change. Looking at both international and domestic issues, this course asks, how can design and design thinking be used to solve the world’s leading problems to achieve triple bottom line sustainability—environmentally, socially, and economically? Structured around holistic thinking, collaborative and individual design work, with mentorship from experts in the field, this course uncovers how to design products and/or services, wrap a business around it, and create tangible positive impact in our world today.

The first half of the semester, the studio will investigate the UN Millennium Development Goals as a framework of understanding global issues. This investigation will include intensive research, peer-to-peer learning, system’s mapping, and a design project. As a group the studio will translate the UN goals to the “US Sustainability Goals” (USSG) - identifying the eight key factors
the US must focus on to become socially and environmentally sustainable. We will develop a series of educational videos defining the USSG to share with the larger design community including IDEO and others. As a final project each of you as an individual or small group, will choose a USSG and delve into the communities around us, to discover how design can improve the quality of life for our social and environmental landscapes.

Throughout the semester you will acquire and utilize the following skills: problem finding, problem solving, critical thinking, information architecture, new media, human factors, marketing, product design, system/service design, working in a group dynamic, presentations, and business strategy.

The projects and deliverables created during this course will be shared with the larger design community including IDEO, Procter & Gamble, Core77 and other design companies.