News and blog posts from our students and faculty

Please join me in congratulating Austin Center for Design’s graduating class. These students have completed thirty-two weeks of intense training, reflection, and creative production. The results of their effort are five companies, each founded around principles of social entrepreneurship: these companies generate revenue, and simultaneously drive social impact, pursuing a humanitarian theory of change. The companies, and their founders, are presented below:

Ad@pt, founded by Melissa Chapman and Willy Morgan
Ad@pt provides illustrated adoption timelines, which are designed to give families a bite-size, digestable glance at all of the adoption options. This way, when a family calls an adoption agency, they feel informed and in control. Our product hosts and helps manage digital copies of the adoption paperwork throughout the process so that, in the end, families have an easy-to-access and secure access to this important content on their mobile devices.

Spoak, founded by Callie Thompson, Eli Robinson, and Dave Gottlieb
Spoak is an app that evokes audio stories based on personal photos of artifacts, people, places and events. Transform memories into dynamic stories. Invite family and friends to record their own versions and bring shared history to life.

CareWell, founded by Eric Boggs and Chuck Hildebrand
Other caregiving task management systems are little more than bandaids. They fail to connect caregivers with long-term, motivated helpers. They fail to address the fundamental fear, anxiety, grief and guilt that are a natural part of caregiving. CareWell offers practical and emotional relief for people who are helping an ailing or aging loved one. It equips caregivers with powerful delegation and task management tools to tame overwhelming logistics of caregiving. It also addresses issues of fear, isolation, burn out and guilt through stress-free recruiting of motivated helpers, planning guides and ‘system at a glance’ tools.

Kites and Ladders, founded by Bethany Stolle and Jesse Jack
Kites and Ladders allows families with autistic children to negotiate this communication gap with a shared visual communication system. Our product includes a wearable biometric sensor for tracking emotional state, a camera app for the child to visually express their point of view, and a photo editing app that allows the child to customize photos and share them with a private network of family and caregivers.

Bring Up, founded by Will Mederski and Kevin McCann
By sending parents SMS text messages with classroom highlights each night, bringup gives parents insight into the school day so they may have meaningful conversations with their children anywhere. bringup builds a bridge between the classroom and home.

Congratulations to all eleven of our graduates. We’re extremely proud of you!

On Wednesday, March 6th, Austin Center for Design co-hosted a SXSWedu party with MyEdu and Stubbs. The event – the Design Movement in Education – highlighted three themes, represented in student work:

DESIGN RESEARCH: FINDING INNOVATION
Market research attempts to understand purchasing behavior of a small sample, in order to predict purchasing behavior of a big sample. Design research attempts to empathize with a small group, in order to identify opportunities for design-led innovation. It’s a strategic driver for new product and service functionality.

DESIGN ACROSS TIME
Service design considers how people change over time, and how products can evolve to meet their changing needs. It considers the multiple touchpoints people have with products as multiple opportunities to create engaging interactions, and treats people as co-creators of experience.

NARRATIVE AND STORYTELLING
Technological advancement has allowed even “non-creative” people to tell their story in a way that’s meaningful and engaging. Through rich video, the nostalgia of audio, and simple creative tools, people can claim control over the way they are perceived and represented in online, social media.

You can see some great pictures of the event below. Thanks to Kim Foster for her photography, and to Stubbs for some great food!

AC4D has just announced the date for our 2013 Design For Impact Bootcamp. Please join us on March 9th, 2013, to learn how to use design to address large-scale social problems. Click here to learn more. Note that this event sells out quickly each year; we encourage you to get your tickets soon.

We’re please to announce a new design event in Austin, Texas: A Mingle-Mangle Razzle-Dazzle Ragtag Design Extravaganza! Join us October 5th and 6th, 2012 in Austin, Texas, for 2 days of thought-provoking and inspirational conversations about the role of design, technology, and “user experience” in shaping the fabric of society. This design event is a conference not to be missed. Confirmed speakers include:

• Allan Chochinov, Chair, Products of Design, School of Visual Arts
• Bryony Gomez-Palacio, Co-Founder, UnderConsideration
• Anya Kamenetz, Senior Writer at Fast Company
• Alan Cooper, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Cooper
• Heather Fleming, Chief Executive Officer, Catapult Design
• Ralph Caplan, Author, By Design and Cracking The Whip

Our attendees at this design event include designers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and agency directors; at this conference, you’ll experience some great networking with some of the top talent in Texas.

Six more speakers will be announced in the coming weeks; for now, we encourage you to register early, as this is an event you don’t want to miss! Learn more here – we hope to see you at the Design Extravaganza!

Here is the final AC4D presentation of Feast for Days, a collaborative cooking business co-founded by Jonathan Lewis and I. Enjoy!

Hi,

I’m interested in sharing some of my thoughts about design in a more accessible format than my admittedly dense writing, and so I’m going to be publishing quick videos – Design Snacks – once a week on various designerly topics.

Here’s the first one; I hope you like it.

Please join us at our third annual Design for Impact Bootcamp, to be held on Saturday, Mar 31, 2012. This day-long event will introduce you to the research and design approach we use at Austin Center for Design; after taking part in the event, participants will have:

• Acquired a high level process for approaching large-scale social problems, and understand the challenges associated with these types of problems
• Experienced the research, synthesis and ideation processes as related to design for impact
• Gained empathy with a target, at-risk population
• Acquired the introductory vocabulary to speak about strategic design work, in the context of designing for impact

There are a limited number of seats available for this event; if you are interested, please sign up here.

Students at Austin Center for Design have concluded their design research and preliminary synthesis, and have identified product, service and business opportunities that address the wicked problem of food. The students presented the sixteen weeks of work to a packed room on December 17th, 2011; a video of the presentation is below, and you can download the slides here (as a 23 meg .pdf file).

The work that will be developed over the next sixteen weeks include:

Clean Collective, founded by Samir Rath and Jaime Krakowiak. Clean Collective will connect clean-tech ventures, which typically require a large physical footprint, with independent farmers, who typically have a large amount of unused or under-utilized land.

We Cook, founded by Ben Franck and Jonathan Lewis. We Cook will bring together various families from low-income households in order to foster group cooking and sharing of a week’s worth of food.

Girls Guild, founded by Diana Griffin and Cheyenne Weaver. Girls Guild will help girls who are struggling with eating disorders to find a mentor and utilize creativity as a positive emotional outlet.

Congrats to all of the AC4D students on a great first half; we look forward to seeing these ideas come to life over the next two quarters!

It’s less than 24 hours until we present our design ideas. Here is a glimpse into the final preparation process: