OpenIDEO: The Social Causes Arm of IDEO - Meena Kadri, Community Manager, IDEO

“That OpenIDEO thing is great isn’t it?” My mother, approaching 80, discovered Google Buzz a few months back and has been following me on Twitter from there. Via one of my tweets, she had a look around OpenIDEO and was fascinated by the scope of inspiration and global collaboration. As a doctor she has always been somewhat in the dark about what I do for a living but from following my Twitter links she’s started to get the idea. “It’s about design and people and making the world a better place, right?” she offered as a perspective on my professional pursuits.

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IDEO's Tim Brown on Using Design to Change Behavior - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Many large-scale phenomena are the sum of individual actions — sometimes millions or even billions of them. Apple's recent celebration of 10 billion songs downloaded represents 10 billion choices made by consumers to download a song rather than buy it in other formats. In the healthcare space, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported a 50 percent drop in respiratory infections in children, a drop attributable (in part) to the group's campaign to educate millions of children to change their behavior: To wash their hands. But what does it take to bring about such mass behavior shifts? Are there approaches that businesses could use, too, to influence behaviors on a micro level, and gain benefits on a macro one?

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A Set of Design Principles for Councils - Tim Brown, IDEO

I had the great pleasure of spending a few days last week with some eminent designers and design thinkers as part of a World Economic Forum event in Dubai. We were participating as one of over 70 WEF Global Agenda Councils consisting of experts from around the world studying how to improve global institutions. As the Global Agenda Council on Design we felt that one of our greatest contributions might be to help other councils embed design thinking in their deliberations. We created a set of design principles that we felt might be a useful guide and I am listing them here: Design is an agent of change that enables us to understand complex changes and problems, and to turn them into something useful. Tackling today’s global challenges will require radical thinking, creative solutions and collaborative action. Here is a set of principles identified by the Global Agenda Council on Design that could help your Council to develop ideas and strategies to address the complex problems facing us all.

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