This year, in our first-ever Spring Mini-Conference, we are so excited to be collaborating with Design for America (DFA), the energetic student group that tackles social problems with design thinking. Below, Annie Wu (RISD ’13) shares her experiences and what makes her so excited about DFA and ABWxD. Make sure to come check out the DFA-lead workshops at the Mini-Conference on Brown’s campus on April 28!

To most people, the word ‘design’ carries connotations of aesthetics, e.g. furniture,fashion, posters. But design is so much more. All the things designers do – understanding the problem through research, interviewing and uncovering users’ needs, coming up with innovative solutions – can certainly lead to products such as the Swiffer, or an intuitive interface on a smartphone app. What happens when this process is applied to social issues? What if human-centered design thinking were used to address the increasing rate of heart disease, to help children with learning disabilities succeed in school, or to encourage consumers to recycle? The results would be incredible. That’s why I, along with David Emanuel (Brown ’13) and Sophia Yang (RISD ’12), started the RISD/BrownDesign for America Studio.

This year, we’ve had three teams use human-centered design to tackle local and national issues such as healthy food access, childhood lead poisoning, and dyslexia. What’s been especially inspiring to me is how these interdisciplinary teams work together and are able to see the issues through so many different lenses, ranging from public health to graphic design. And of course, this applies to the Better World by Design Conference too, as it’s organized by students of all different majors and features speakers and leaders of alldifferent disciplines – and I think that this is one of the major reasons for its awesome success.

On behalf of Design for America, I am so ecstatic to continue working with A BetterWorld by Design. Like DFA, the Conference represents progress through a different way of thinking: change by design, change by collaboration, change by approaching the world both with curiosity and the conviction to improve it. It is these values and ways of thinking and doing that truly will make a better world.

- Annie Wu, RISD/Brown Design for America Co-founder and Team Lead

www.anniewu.net

We all know the thrill of the startup phase. It’s nothing less than exhilarating. But after Year 1 when the rubber hits the road and the real work begins, one discovers that the day-to-day duties of running an organization are not only challenging, but not very FUN! Learn how to deal with these difficulties with this series of classes from the Social Innovators Collective.

In response to the number of social enterprises and nonprofits that have failed within the last year and after 30 hours of interviews with founders, the Social Innovators Collective put out a 911 call to New York’s best and brightest social entrepreneurs and nonprofit executives. The result? A series of classes designed to teach you what’s needed keep your doors open so that you can do the meaningful work you’ve chosen.

Whether you’re in the early stages of your organization’s enterprise building or are contemplating launching a social enterprise or nonprofit, now is the perfect time to take advantage of the amazing knowledge and experience the instructors possess.

The workshop series was designed as a whole, but you can also sign up for individual classes.

Tickets and information

20% Discount Code: PARTNER

About the Social Innovators Collective:

The Social Innovators Collective is an international network of emerging founders, leaders and individuals who work in the social enterprise and nonprofit sectors. The Collective was born in 2010 when a handful of New York-based social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders realized that we were dealing with strikingly similar challenges, and that by leveraging our collective resources and insights we could overcome those challenges. Currently, we connect through an online forum, workshops, social events and Mastermind Sessions (peer to peer mentoring). The story of how we began was featured in NextBillion last December.

We are so excited for the SEEED Conference to kick off this year! We have invited Josephine, the Outreach and BIG Challenge Coach for SEEED, to share her experiences and why she got involved. Check out her story below and definitely come and check out the conference on March 16th and 17th!

My fascination lies in finding efficient and effective solutions to solving social problems. Upon returning from Udaipur, India working for a small, local NGO I desired to understand how NGOs can be most effective — my thought process being that in order to avoid becoming another intermediary, NGOs should have as their overarching objective to be obsolete long term. At SOCAP last summer, I pondered about how the current philanthropic funding mechanisms are encouraging the behavior and problems of the non-profit world. My eyes have recently landed on Big Society Capital – the first wholesale social investment bank in the UK, which aims to develop the social investment market by catalyzing private investment.

The importance of structuring a stable and efficient infrastructure for social enterprises to thrive is becoming increasingly important. The social sector is lacking the efficiencies that the commercial sector naturally has developed — mostly due to different capital flow and customer relations. These efficiencies are found by innovating around market mechanisms to equalize supply and demand; using banking structures to strategically invest philanthropic capital balancing financial and impact returns; and promoting the creation of policies, incentives, and standardization to increase the effectiveness of the larger ecosystem. Social entrepreneurs are equally as important within this infrastructure for creating innovation, development, and resilience of market forces. Redesigning the structure of the social sector will allow for riskier innovation to happen and entrepreneurs to scale and deepen their impact. Luckily many exciting things are happening all over the globe and an opportunity has come to explore these initiatives together.

On March 16 and 17, Brown SII and SVPRI are organizing the first national social enterprise and ecosystem builders’ conference as drivers for economic development (SEEED). This will be an opportunity for practitioners, leaders, academics, and students to convene and discuss current issues, barriers, and solutions within the social enterprise field. There will be an extensive student track, multitude of panels, workshops, and networking opportunities to discover or grow within the social enterprise space. Students can even sign up for an executive mentoring session to discuss career options, venture issues, or develop a mentor relationship with experts in the field. For more information or to register, check out its video or go to http://seeedus.com/. Join me to be part of the SEEED movement!

- Josephine Korijn, Outreach and BIG Challenge Coaching for SEEED

Only 2% of Americans produce food for the entire country. That means that large distributors that sell in bulk, like Sysco, find it more cost effective to haul one truck filled with product cross-country rather than to have local producers provide part of the product. When Michigan State asked Sysco to start providing local options, Sysco answered. It took them 3 years to overhaul their massive production and distribution system, but they found a way.

Here’s how it works:

STEP 1: Sysco representative talks to local farmers about how much produce the distributor needs for the year and the farmer plants accordingly.

STEP 2: Sysco representative forwards list of farmers to a broker.

STEP 3: (a) Small, remote farms deliver to a “food hub” – a satellite collection point from which the broker will pick up the produce. (b) Farmers who live near the broker can deliver the food there themselves. (c) If Sysco needs a farmer’s product badly enough, it will send a truck to pick up the produce.

STEP 4: The broker consolidates the food with those of other local growers, marks where they’re from, and assigns tracking numbers.

STEP 5: Sysco sales reps sell the food, prioritizing local food in the surrounding area before offering produce from other regions.

STEP 6: Customer eats.

While this system doesn’t seem like rocket science, it is a huge leap forward for large food distributors and offers huge possibility to schools across America that have their food provided by similar companies. Keep it up Sysco!

Personally, I find myself most struck by the concept of interdisciplinary collaboration that A Better World by Design entails. After transferring from a Pre-Med/Bio-Engineering major to an Industrial design major, the most common response I get from people is an eyebrow raise followed by a statement along the lines of “Wow. Well that’s a huge change.” In actuality, I’ve found that there’s a good deal of overlap between the two disciplines, in terms of both process and goals: both look to use design thinking to solve problems. It’s this kind of collaboration and partnership between disciplines that I find so essential toward bringing about a better world.

For instance, Skylar Roebuck and Lauren O’Neill of Operation Simple really epitomize the kind of collaboration I believe will solve global issues through design thinking. Together, a computer engineer along with a graphic designer worked together to develop a portable surgical table for underprivileged countries. The table can be shipped easily to those in need and provide them with better healthcare. By designing their product together, they created something compact and cost-effective, while still retaining the integrity of its function by reaching out to resolve global problems and promote a better world. Read more at http://operationsimple.com/.

For rather obvious reasons, the interdisciplinary nature of this project struck a chord with me, and I can only hope to strive toward something similar. Though many of my own ideas are primarily concerned with healthcare, such as a needle cover that enables a safer and more efficient way to administer vaccines, I believe a Better World by Design can encompass so much more. The solutions to social, economic, and environmental problems of our world can be realized through community collaboration. After all, A Better World by Design is so much more than a conference. It’s a way of thinking and a way of doing.

- Katharine Li, 2012 Competition Coordinator