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




