Vision

Village One: a worker-owned studio for ethical design and tech

Village One is a worker-owned cooperative, creating purposeful digital products + infrastructure with joy and integrity.

How organisations are changing.

The next “next” generation

How organisations are changing.

The next “next” generation

The Global Village Coffeehouse Aesthetic | Are.na Editorial

Woodcuts, tribal imagery, suns, curvy figures, aroma swirls, and earth tones: Evan Collins defines the look of the 90s

Smart Coop

Smart: a way to bring meaning and solidarity to work.

Reflector: Infrastructure for Meetings, by Greyhaven

Most organizations run on meetings. Strategy gets debated there. Decisions get made there. Context lives there. And yet...

Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological su

Opinion | The Age of Interdisciplinary Slop

The corporate jargon of change masks the decimation of intellectual life.

The Shift to Managing Managers

From managing work to managing context

Design Thinking

In the past, design has most often occurred fairly far downstream in the development process and has focused on making new products aesthetically attractive or enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising. Today, as innovation’s terrain expands to encompass human-centered processes and services as well as products, companies are asking designers to create ideas rather than to simply dress them up. Brown, the CEO and president of the innovation and design firm IDEO, is a leading proponent of design thinking—a method of meeting people’s needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable way. In this article he offers several intriguing examples of the discipline at work. One involves a collaboration between frontline employees from health care provider Kaiser Permanente and Brown’s firm to reengineer nursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser hospitals. Close observation of actual shift changes, combined with brainstorming and rapid prototyping, produced new procedures and software that radically streamlined information exchange between shifts. The result was more time for nursing, better-informed patient care, and a happier nursing staff. Another involves the Japanese bicycle components manufacturer Shimano, which worked with IDEO to learn why 90% of American adults don’t ride bikes. The interdisciplinary project team discovered that intimidating retail experiences, the complexity and cost of sophisticated bikes, and the danger of cycling on heavily trafficked roads had overshadowed people’s happy memories of childhood biking. So the team created a brand concept—“Coasting”—to describe a whole new category of biking and developed new in-store retailing strategies, a public relations campaign to identify safe places to cycle, and a reference design to inspire designers at the companies that went on to manufacture Coasting bikes. [hbr_brightcove id=”4443548301001″]

Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight

Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)

Network of shared purpose · Issue #369 · muni-town/roomy

Excerpted from Weird Web Pages. The Network is effectively a global jobs board, but for mutual collaborations rather than work-for-hire. Easiest way to prototype this might be with GitHub issues/di...

Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched and the MIT Press Frank Urbanowski Memorial Fund.