Pocket Hotline is described in an article in Les Affaires, an online French publication: Pocket Hotline permet de partager des connaissances à votre communauté en créant une ligne téléphonique sur un sujet qui vous passionne.

Read the whole article – in French – here.

Check out alumni Alex Pappas in The Communicator, discussing HourSchool:

“In Alex Pappas’s view, everyone in the community has something to offer, from the poorest to the richest. Anyone can be a teacher. You don’t have to be an expert or have a teaching degree to share your knowledge. This is the idea that Hour School is promoting.”

Read the whole article here.

Here’s Design Snack #4, on Design Process:

8 articles, 3 topics, and many disparate ideas in between. Should be easy to coherently piece together the relationship between creativity, knowledge, and strategy, right? I find it difficult to wade through academic articles like these, and I set out to simply reduce the information into a story told through a concept map. It took a few yards of butcher paper and sprawling scribbles, but I came up with a two-part story.

There are two distinct paths that were discussed in the readings, one of creativity and one of strategy. Their qualities remind me of your typical engineer and artist, each having something meaningful to say and show, but stuck in a routine and never able to bring them together successfully. These two paths will run on without intersecting, until a third factor appears – us.

The knowledge that we have gained from our experiences gives us perspective, which leads to a unique perception of the world around us and a framework in which to approach it. Combined with strategy and creativity, we are able to make lateral leaps to connect the dots on the two different paths and generate new ideas.

The new idea should be tested, re-drafting a hypothesis each time it goes through a cycle of finding a solution and recognizing another problem. The outcome of this iterated, actionable creativity based on our experience and knowledge is innovative design. It’s the type of design that gives us that magical moment, where we question why we didn’t think of it before. It’s the type of design that will allow us to make large strides in ill-structured problems, and take a bite out of the really wicked ones.

The message behind this exercise was a good reminder of how important it is to allow yourself to value your past experiences, that they are important and useful-regardless of whether they were sitting behind a desk or outside in the middle of the woods. I’ve had a hard time cutting across the track to the other path, so to speak, and perhaps if I trusted my past knowledge and sensemaking skills then those abductive leaps to innovative ideas would come a little bit easier.

This week our mission was to create an artifact to show the relationship between creativity, strategy, and knowledge. For fun I chose to craft my thing to have the feel of a children’s book. However, I think the subject matter remains a little too abstract for any children I know. Does the naive approach render the story enjoyable or downright irritating? I’ll let you be the judge.

“I Wish I Had Thought of That!” A Design Story by Ben

And here’s the same idea applied to our service design, Girls Guild:

Here’s Design Snack #3, on Design Research:

Image by cliff1066

It is less than a month until our meal assembly service, Feast For Days, enters the piloting phase. As we move closer to this milestone it is important for Jonathan and I to begin thinking about what future business targets we want to aim for. Below is the first iteration of our statement of strategic intent. What do you think?

Our plan is that Feast For Days becomes the most widely used meal assembly service in the Austin area. We plan on achieving this though a low per-serving price point, strategic partnerships with nutrition relief agencies, and whimsical branding that targets a broader audience than the competition. We aspire to see our service attract low-income families and time-strapped, health conscious young adults which are both largely untapped demographics in the meal assembly industry.