Springbok & Radish

Clues for Design’s Frontier

Radish — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:51:54 +0000

Both of us participated in SCAD’s DesignEthos Doference, which injected scores of designers into the efforts to revitalize a Savannah neighborhood. Our reflections on the experience — both comments on the larger shift toward a role for design in social innovation are on the DesignEthos blog. Marc Rettig: Clues for Design’s Frontier Hannah du Plessis: An [...]

Design Ethos: Many voices, many hands, three days

Radish — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:13:23 +0000

Image source: Design Ethos blog We’re excited to be part of the Design Ethos conference and “Doference” this April in Savannah, Georgia. This is the second year that folks from the School of Design at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) have collaborated with the Waters Avenue Revitalization Project in the city of [...]

Resources within ourselves

Springbok — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 16:44:34 +0000

While it may be comfortable to discuss how sad a situations is, it’s much more rewarding to engage and learn how you can be part of its transformation. South African friends of mine, close to retirement, recently moved to a gorgeous costal town where they expected life to slow down from the city pace. But being [...]

A new story

Springbok — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 01:26:37 +0000

There is a story that repeats itself. Each time the plot is roughly the same, but the actors, time and stage all change: Person or institution A wants life to be a certain way. B does not fit that way. B is different. A and B both believe that A is more powerful (or superior, [...]

Video: Designing from Inside

Radish — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:17:00 +0000

As part of a webinar series led by the faculty of the Masters in Design for Social Innovation program at the School of Visual Arts, Marc Rettig presents thoughts on the shift from working with physical and digital materials to working with “social materials” — relationships and “people’s insides,” and the tools necessary to [...]

Video: Measuring Wealth

Radish — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:14:58 +0000

Hannah du Plessis reflects on a project for an Economics and Design course at the Institute of Design, IIT. What is wealth? How do you measure it? Who is wealthy, really? Video (5 min 46 sec)

Positive Deviance

Radish — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:08:46 +0000

Very interesting stuff at the Positive Deviance Initiative site. “Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups (the positive deviants), whose uncommon but successful behaviors or strategies enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers. These individuals or groups have access to exactly [...]

VIdeo: How to Change the World

Radish — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:06:58 +0000

In June of 2009, when he was first beginning to seriously move in the direction described in this blog, Marc Rettig spoke to the New York City chapter of the Interaction Design Association. The talk is aimed at people who speak the language of design-practice insiders, foreshadowing the more general work we are beginning to expose [...]

Video: Making an Impact

Radish — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:56:32 +0000

In the Fall of 2009, Marc Rettig presented some of his first thoughts on the shift from “designing things” to “designing for impact” to the Design Research Conference in Chicago. Video (21 min 14 sec)

An outline of our work

Radish — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:53:47 +0000

A snapshot of our work in progress Over the past two years or so, we’ve been reading, making notes, covering the wall with stickies, synthesizing, and generally giving ourselves a self-created home-study course in how to do the kind of work we’d like to do. (What work is that? It doesn’t really have a name [...]