Design isn't just about how something—like a mobile phone or a vacuum cleaner—looks, but how it works and how users receive and interact with it.
Creative design is most often applied in the consumer-marketing world in product development, including packaging and marketing. But a Cincinnati couple is taking design thinking into the nonprofit world through their own nonprofit,
Design Impact.
The organization works with social change organizations to help address local and global social issues through creative design thinking. Design Impact has applied this concept to organizations both in Cincinnati and in rural India where the founders first began testing their ideas.
Design Impact was founded by husband-and-wife team Kate Hanisian and Ramsey Ford. Hanisian's background is in the nonprofit and education sectors, and Ford is a designer with extensive consumer product experience.
Design thinking can help nonprofits meet challenges by giving them a different way to solve, test and measure ideas, says Ford.
Key aspects of design thinking include:
- Identifying opportunities to innovate
- Applying empathy and creativity to change problems into breakthroughs
- Uncovering hidden insights and unarticulated needs from your customers
- Quickly and inexpensively prototyping new ideas
- Initiating design thinking in your business, organization or community
Design Impact is holding a two-day seminar for nonprofits that are interested in learning more about incorporating design thinking in their own problem solving challenges. Design Impact for Change Makers is Aug. 1 and 2, at the
Kaleidoscope building in downtown Cincinnati.
Design Impact for Change Makers will be workshop-based and participants are being asked to bring a real challenge they'd like to solve or idea they'd like to explore. It could be anything from offering a new service to better engaging donors, Ford says.
"It's about idea generation, and staying in a creative state of mind so you don't always rely on the same old solutions," he says. "We'll be working through the entire creative process from discovery to creation and verification."
Event and registration details are available
here, and the cost is $275 for both days.
By Feoshia H. Davis