Here’s our public presentation of GirlsGuild, a community of makers in apprenticeship.
Check it out and let us know what you think by liking our Facebook page and commenting, or signing up for our Newsletter! We’ll keep you posted on our exciting plans for this Summer!
~xoxo Cheyenne & Diana
It’s with great pride that I present AC4D’s graduating class of 2012. Congratulations to Ben Franck, Jonathan Lewis, Cheyenne Weaver, Diana Griffin, and Jaime Krakowiak for their great work throughout the year, and their excellent final presentations at our graduation event.
Feast For Days
Ben and Jonathan are the founders of Feast For Days, a service that helps people cook together in order to encourage healthier eating. You can hear audio of their final presentation here.
Clean Collective
Jaime is the founder of Clean Collective, a service that helps small farms lease their land to natural energy providers. You can hear audio of her final presentation here.
Girls Guild
Cheyenne and Diana are the founders of Girls Guild, a service that helps girls gain agency and self awareness through a collaborative apprenticeship with an artist. You can here audio of their final presentation here.
To our five graduates: I’m extremely proud of you. Congratulations, and good luck!
Austin Center for Design’s final presentations are tonight, and while our second cohort of students is hard at work, we checked in with our alumni from our first graduating class.
Alex Pappas and Ruby Ku continue to drive peer to peer teaching at HourSchool, the company they founded during their time at AC4D. Through their main product offering at http://www.hourschool.com, anyone can offer to teach a class in an informal setting. Additionally, HourSchool offers peer-education focused consulting services to impact organizations looking to enhance their internal knowledge sharing, and provides a unique enterprise platform for the dissemination of proprietary and tacit knowledge.
Christina Tran has been freelancing in LA, and has recently started working with the HourSchool team, helping organize the services side of the business.
Scott Magee and Chap Ambrose continue to build and expand their core product offering, Pocket Hotline. Started at AC4D, Pocket Hotline is a platform for real-time community-driven support. Anyone can start a hotline at http://www.pockethotline.com and invite volunteers to take support calls. Since starting, Pocket Hotline has successfully powered a Ruby on Rails hotline, a nutrition hotline, and hotlines for various companies and organizations. And, Scott and his wife are expecting their first child.
Kristine Mudd is freelancing in New York City, where she’s working on a variety of interaction design, visual design, and social impact projects.
Kat Davis is an interaction designer at frog design, based out of Seattle, and works with the local improv community in her spare time.
Saranyan Vigraham is a developer evangelist with Paypal’s X.commerce. Between traveling to conferences, hackathons and other developer facing events, he also takes time to hack on new technologies and learn new development tools. Saranyan and his wife are expecting their first child.
Ryan Hubbard is a team member at the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, where he works on various service design and design research programs. In his off-hours, he continues to work on Patient Nudge, the startup he and Christina formed at AC4D.
It’s amazing how much our alumni have accomplished, and in such a short time. Keep up the great work: I’m extremely proud of each of you!
Our free book Wicked Problems is featured on Fast Company’s CoDesign blog:
How To Create Products Hand In Hand With Your Customer
In Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, author Jon Kolko argues that involving end users in the entire design process ensures a humane design solution.
The HourSchool team recently generated some great press, with a writeup in both AGBeat and in the Huffington Post. From the HuffPo article:
We are born to learn. The innate ability to learn is within us, regardless of our current situation. No one need ever be overlooked or written off. When we look at people on the street, do we acknowledge them as talented human beings with potential to grow, potential to contribute more, potential to teach?
HourSchool does. The online platform enables anyone in your community to create a class related to something they’d like to learn or something they have to share. These classes happen in cafes, homes, and offices around town.
AC4D alumni at HourSchool competed in the Pitch Some Good competition at SXSW, and took away first place with a cash bounty and some great mentoring and community rewards. Alex Pappas presented for HourSchool to the crowd at Center61. You can read about the win in the Austin Business Journal.
Congratulations!
You can read an excerpt from our new project Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving over on Stanford’s Social Innovation Review. Stanford Social Innovation Review is an award-winning magazine and website that covers cross-sector solutions to global problems. It is written for and by social change leaders in the nonprofit, business, and government sectors who view collaboration as key to solving environmental, social, and economic justice issues.
Hi,
I’m pleased to announce the availability of my next book, provided for free in its entirety online at http://www.wickedproblems.com.
Titled Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, the book is presented as a handbook for teaching, learning, and doing meaningful disruptive design work. The book includes an introduction to wicked problems, describing some of the challenges and opportunities of design-led entrepreneurial activities. The text describes the skills necessary for successful entrepreneurship, and offers both methods and curricula for learning how to engage with large scale humanitarian problems.
The book is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which allows anyone to use the contents for their own non-commercial purposes.
Jon Kolko
= Edit: Here’s some nice press we’ve received on the book launch:
Please join us in welcoming new faculty member Kevin McDonald.
Kevin leads the user experience and design efforts at Spredfast – an Austin-based startup that provides large corporations and brands with enterprise-level solutions in the social media management space. Prior to joining Spredfast, Kevin spent two and a half years at Dell creating applications for the company’s consumer lines of products. And before Dell, Kevin spent five and a half years as a Principal Designer at frog design.
Kevin holds a BA in History and Economics from the College of William and Mary and earned a Master’s degree in Human Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech, where he conducted research in the Everyday Computing Laboratory – a unit of the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center.
Welcome, Kevin!
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Austin Center for Design is a not-for-profit corporation in Austin, Texas - 501(c)(3), under the status of the IRS.