Project 1: Brainstorming

Project 1: Sketch Models

"The Power of Unreasonable People" by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan

Elkington and Hartigan discuss three different models of social entrepreneurship. The non-profit business models, the hybrid models, and social models. They differ in terms of financial support, revenues, and service/product users. However, all of them intend to deliver a social transformation by focusing on unprivileged groups. The authors analyze the pros and cons of each models, but highlights the positive impacts of each of them by giving case studies of successful organizations and companies. A social venture such as Sekem group is very interesting because not only supports local farmers but also improves the life quality of many Egyptians by offering organic products. In a large scale it is a comprehensive model because the company’s mission to produce a sustainable system improves the crop yields along with the income of local farmers. It also addresses the environmental problems in the country such as the decrease of natural resources and the devastation of the land. Like many of the examples given by the authors, social models that succeed have a strong impact not only on local groups, but also on the nation's economy, environment, and culture.

Project 1: Concept Sketches

Areas of Social Need

1.Improving Parents and children communication
http://www.ccfcenter.org

2.Building Strong Communities
http://www.ihdri.info
http://www.comcap.org/matriarch/default.asp

3.Eating Behavior
http://www.farmfreshri.org/

4.Elderly Care System
http://www.historichamilton.com

Reading Responses

Designing Sustainability, Agogino
As discussed in class, different cultures have different demands and applying these experiences can result in innovative solutions that are true to the users’ needs. A cross disciplinary and cultural course, as mentioned in the reading, allow students to “acquire a global vision on sustainability”. Furthermore, it teaches them the value of using each other resources and experience into a common goal. In fact, as seen in the course analysis, language was not a barrier to communication. However, the inability to understand the design mission from the beginning led the team members into disagreements.

Metrics for Measuring Ideation Effectiveness, Shah, et al.
Even though the author had an interesting approach on sub categorizing the ideation process, I thought to be very limiting and contradictory. As a design student, I believe that coming with the initial ideas should be as open as possible. Many of the design that comes from ideation are not meant to be the final design but the beginning to an innovative solution. Therefore, trying to measure “the technical feasibility” or counting if the same idea appeared multiple times seems too restricting.

Creativity as a Design Criterion, Christiaans.
Being the idea of defining “creativity” highly subjective, the author tries to create a measuring system by comparing opinions from professionals within the field of design and from people with no expertise in the area. I thought interesting the study of “creativity” by associating its value to “attractiveness” and “prototypical”. The results from the experiments show that the attractiveness has a high value to creativity among groups with design experience. On the other hand, groups with little or no design experience perceive the prototypical with more significant value. However, the author concludes that the measurement of creativity remains subjective. People have their own understanding of “creativity” influenced by their own experience, background, and emotion.

Design Concepts

These are some of my initial concepts for the problems encountered by the communities in Western China. The lack of energy sources affects local families in their daily lives. In particular, I was interested on exploring heating alternatives given the region’s cold temperature. I looked at the existing heating distribution as well as related technology in these communities. I was also interested on their customs and ways of applying their culture into innovative solutions that would be less intrusive and easier to assimilate.