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At IDEO.org, we believe that the most potent weapon against global poverty is design. The solutions, systems, and social innovation that arise from truly understanding and designing alongside the poor are the most likely to offer hope and improve lives. And for us, if we can't see real impact, we haven't done our jobs.   Born in 2011 out of the global design and innovation firm IDEO, IDEO.org is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to applying human-centered design to alleviate poverty. We partner with nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, and foundations, to directly address the needs of the poor in sectors like health, water and sanitation, financial inclusion, agriculture, and gender equity. We employ top-notch designers, an elite class of businesspeople, and development experts, making IDEO.org a flexible and creative organization uniquely situated to tackle poverty through design.   A key pillar of our mission is to spread human-centered design. Though we believe that our design process is crucial to arriving at innovative solutions, we don't think that we're the only ones who should be using it. We want everyone on board. By sharing, teaching, and empowering social-sector workers to practice human-centered design, we're elevating design as a poverty-fighting tool.   We work at home and abroad, on our own projects and promoting and supporting the work of others, spreading the practice and promise of human-centered design. IDEO.org is dedicated innovation, great design, and changing lives

At the Design Management Institute we connect design to business, to culture, to customers-to the changing world. We bring together educators, researchers, designers, and leaders from every design discipline, every industry, and every corner of the planet. The results are transformational. Design that delivers competitive advantage. Design that raises the bar of performance, fit, and feel. Design that touches the heart and mind. Design that creates a unique and memorable bond. Design that changes the world.

At IDEO, we're often asked to share what we know about design thinking. We've developed this website in response to that request. Here, we introduce design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it. You'll find our particular take on design thinking, as well as the perspectives of others. Everything on this site is free for you to use and share with proper attribution.

Design thinking is in our genes. For decades IDEO has pioneered the human-centered design approach to solving complex problems. In 2010 asked-how might we open up method enabling people everywhere spark innovation where it's needed most? Our answer: OpenIDEO. iDEO "design thinking"

Design Impact collaborated with the Tarsadia Foundation, Newport Beach, CA in 2013 to launch the publication Design and the Social Sector: A Guide to Partnering. Funded by the Tarsadia Foundation, the purpose of this guide is to provide practical insights, tips and tools developed specifically for designers interested in working with non-profits on social design projects. It includes a wealth of information on building healthy relationships, evaluating your own capacity, setting realistic expectations, and developing strong collaborative goals.

We're very inspired by Ezio Manzini, the Italian design strategist and founder of DESIS network, who says: When we design, we search for problems to solve. If you take the capability approach, you search for capabilities to support. He continues, "You don't ask what you can do to make people behave differently. You ask what you can do to recognize people's capabilities and help people use those to solve the problems they face." In the social sector, problems and unmet needs are almost too easy to find. Rather, we look for assets-the people, resources, behaviors, relationships, and systems-that are already working well. Our designs leverage those assets to create more and better life. A structured process We believe strongly that design is a process, and we've often found the design process to be transformative for both students and clients. Ours can be represented by a "double diamond," a two-part sequence of broadening and narrowing.

"Designers need to understand and demonstrate how their work impacts the success of their business. Leaders outside of design also need to know how to use design more strategically. By open-sourcing rare case studies from both multi-billion dollar companies and early stage startups, we aim to help you use design as a strategic business partner at your company."

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS Designing Change: This course extends the purview of design to the structure of society, government, education, healthcare and business. Students will be provided a thorough grounding in systems thinking and how to identify leverage points to create change. They will produce designs and models for a new product, as well as its launch and distribution in a developing country. Training will also be offered in Positive Deviance, a change model used with great success in childcare, women's issues, healthcare and corporate innovation.

GreaterPlaces is a crowdsourced "How-To" manual for creating great communities - cities, suburbs and rural areas.   Think of a Pinterest or Houzz for community design. WHAT IS COMMUNITY DESIGN? Community design is about people, the places we live, and the spaces we share.  Community design is also about how we come together and make decisions that affect our communities and neighbors: from crossroads in the country to homeowners' associations in the suburbs to new apartments in the city.

WHO WE ARE Design Impact is a non-profit social innovation firm made up of designers, community development practitioners, social entrepreneurs, and educators. We collaborate with passionate people, bring design and innovation practice to the table, and work together to design a better world. Our mission is to: * INCUBATE projects that transform communities, * EQUIP leaders with social innovation tools, and * ADVANCE methods of creative community change.

The Bootcamp Bootleg is an overview of some of our most-used tools. The guide was originally intended for recent graduates of our Bootcamp: Adventures in Design Thinking class. But we've heard from folks who've never been to the d.school that have used it to create their own introductory experience to design thinking.

We are a team of civil engineers, planners, and sustainability specialists with expertise in land use planning and zoning, municipal finance, transportation planning and design, stormwater management and green infrastructure implementation, and urban design and placemaking. But, design of elaborate, expensive infrastructure projects is not what we do. The leaders of our organization spent the majority of our careers with large firms designing complex, expensive projects, only to later realize we were making things more economically fragile and unsustainable. We acknowledged that before we could do more of the types of projects our communities need, we'd have to change how people think about the way we have been planning and building our cities and neighborhoods. Rather than sit back and wait, we started VERDUNITY to help lead this change.

"Social design is the future. Explore a simple start to what social design means and how you can engage in it. We're trying to build a platform for young people to engage in social design and help them design the world they are about to inherit - check out the platform here www.socialdesigncares.com. Learn. Engage. Empower. Collaborate."

When creating new services for clients, we very often don't delve deep enough into the organisation that delivers the service. Service solutions are often limited to pragmatic improvements that lie directly in the customer experience, what many consider 'the art of the possible'. But by combining classic service design and user journey mapping techniques with notation from Systems Thinking, we can go deeper into understanding WTF's really going on inside our organisations.

"In 1973, social scientists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber defined wicked problems as those incomprehensibly complex and messy issues we have trouble defining, let alone attempting to solve. Climate change has proven one of the most wicked, as have healthcare, corruption, and the prison system. Such problems are inherently systemic, with unavoidable social complications that require flexibility and patience."

Design@Darden is an online community that helps educators teach design, especially in settings where design is not traditionally taught, such as business schools. The resources and conversations taking place at Design@Darden aim to create community and advance knowledge. By sharing inspirations, thoughts, tools and challenges, Design@Darden hopes to facilitate a vibrant community of educators who are innovating the future of design.

ABOUT IDEO WHAT WE DO IDEO (pronounced "eye-dee-oh") is an award-winning global design firm that takes a human-centered, design-based approach to helping organizations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow. We identify new ways to serve and support people by uncovering latent needs, behaviors, and desires. We envision new companies and brands, and we design the products, services, spaces, and interactive experiences that bring them to life. We help organizations build creative culture and the internal systems required to sustain innovation and launch new ventures.

but we sensed the outcome could easily become a 'touchpoint solution' that might address a particular facet of trauma, but wouldn't take into account the deeper reasons why these problems existed," Seth explained.

We work at the intersection of evidence-informed practice and user-centred design. We have deep respect for both evidence and the experience and expertise of practitioners, young people and families. We think public systems and services can be more impactful when they are considered together. 

"We need to ratchet up from targeted innovation and apply design-thinking principles to one of the biggest social issues of our time: global poverty itself. "