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Posts Tagged ‘Fast Company’
May 10, 2012
IDEO.org talks with Fast Company’s Co.Exist
Piggybacking off of its namesake, the legendary design and strategy firm of IDEO, it’s not hard to understand IDEO.org‘s meteoric rise in only its first full year of operation. But as its beautifully designed website and other communications illustrate, IDEO.org represents “simplicity on the other side of complexity,” expressed so beautifully by Oliver Wendell Holmes when he wrote, “I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
So, true to form, Fast Company‘s Co.Exist has distilled “3 Lessons from IDEO.org for Designing the Best Social Enterprises” into these gems: “1. Understand the community you’re serving; 2. Make a measurable impact; and 3. Work with the right people.” They’re all far easier said than done, but exemplified by IDEO.org’s “‘Clean Team‘ initiative, which has provided a hundred toilets to residents of Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city, and plans to scale that to 10,000 toilets over the next 18 months.” The toilet product itself as well as the crucial corresponding sanitation system is represented in the graphic above, which will enlarge here or when clicked on.
Click here to read “3 Lessons from IDEO.org for Designing the Best Social Enterprises” at FastCoExist.com.
April 27, 2012
Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards
As announced earlier this month, Fast Company magazine and its widely-read design arm, Co.Design, have launched their first-ever Innovation by Design Awards. Categories include products and spaces, but we particularly like the inclusion of services and systems, among others. Despite no explicit call for public interest projects or measure of social impact, we’re confident such projects and metrics can uniquely capture the attention of the jury–even one of this extraordinary stature.
At a glance, it might seem like we’re launching yet another design competition, much like those that have gone before. Most design competitions tend to be run by the design community, and for the design community. So even when designers win them, all they’re really doing is telling other designers–who already know their work–that they won an award. As important as those awards are in elevating talent, they don’t pull design out from the margins. Our aim, by contrast, is to place designers at their rightful place at the forefront of business innovation.
Click here to learn more about Fast Company‘s Innovation by Design Awards. The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2012, with the winners announced this fall and published in the October issue of Fast Company, which reaches nearly 3 million business leaders each month, while Co.Design draws another 1.5 million readers and 6 million page views.
April 13, 2012
2012 Needs to be the Year of the Toilet
Last year, Bill Gates made headlines by issuing a multi-million dollar challenge, illustrated in the video above, calling for an operable toilet that isn’t dependent on electricity, plumbed water, or a sewer system. It’s yet unclear what kind of innovation Gates’ challenge has spurred, but we’re encouraged to see that nonprofit IDEO.org has collaborated with Unilever and Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) to develop new products and services for in-home sanitation in Kumasi, Ghana.
Then, just yesterday, Fast Company‘s Co.Design published a playful and provocative infographic, titled “POOP: The four-letter word no one’s talking about.” According to the corresponding article, “1.4 million children die each year from diseases caused by contact with fecal matter; that’s more than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, and just because there aren’t any toilets.” In other words, we have our work cut out, and there’s a huge role for design and designers to play.
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