News and blog posts from our students and faculty

There was recently a big blowup over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, over a post made by Naomi Riley. There were some interesting thoughts posted in response to the whole incident, and one of the most interesting was from Mark Bauerlein: “If a discipline has a ‘social mission,’ of course, then it includes in its disciplinary norms certain social aims—in other words, extra-academic criteria… any academic discipline that assumes a social mission for itself is always going to have…
Continue reading this post »

I met yesterday with a researcher who studies homeless teenagers; she happened to be in town for the CHI conference. She was staying at a hotel about a quarter mile from Austin Center for Design, the Hilton Garden Inn. When she asked the concierge for directions, he told her not to walk, because “it’s not safe on the east side.” He drove her a quarter mile in a Suburban. Never mind that it was in broad daylight, that the walk…
Continue reading this post »

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

I hear a lot that higher education is ready for disruption. But it’s overly simplistic to say “higher education is broken,” and the entire focus of most education startups seems to be on delivery platforms: ways to bring content to students. Online learning is, indeed, flawed. But there are a lot of other aspects to higher education that could benefit from disruption, including aspects of academic research, the costs of education, and the basic assumptions that everyone needs to attend…
Continue reading this post »

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…
Continue reading this post »

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…
Continue reading this post »

A design researcher studies people in a particular context. The context can be physical, geographic, or conceptual. For example, a researcher may strive to learn about how work is done in a particular business, in order to optimize the process. Or, a researcher may seek to learn about the way a different culture engages with a particular technological advancement, like mobile phone use in developing countries. The research goal may be to understand, or it may be to empathize, and…
Continue reading this post »

When I describe what I’m doing at Austin Center for Design, the common reaction is, “You started a school? How do you do that?” I’m not exactly sure, honestly, because the process only seems logical in retrospect: I sort of made it up as I went along. However, I thought it might be informative to describe the steps I went through in a purely mechanical manner, as an example of the process one might encounter in trying to bring change…
Continue reading this post »

About six months ago, we started doing something called Fire Starter. It’s a collaborative way for startups to get make substantial traction in a small amount of time. The idea is simple, and it’s been working really well, so I thought I would share how it works. We hold a Fire Starter session about once a month. Each session has between 6-8 people in it, all of whom have a startup that is in various stages of development. Our group…
Continue reading this post »

Yesterday, I had a long and productive conversation with some of my friends about their startup. The conversation started when we were discussing roles, and they were noting how – in a startup – everyone is basically doing everything. They weren’t feeling a lot of forward momentum, and when we poked at it and actually listed who was doing what, it turns out that when everyone is doing everything, no one is doing anything. The reason became clear: there was…
Continue reading this post »