In the last few weeks I've spoken at three great conferences in the US on the future of design:
Emergence06 at Carnegie Mellon on Service Design,
IIT's About, With & For on user-centred design,
And the Sarasota Design Summit.
I talked about three things: the need to design a new generation of public services, what RED is learning about how to design for behaviour change around issues like climate change and chronic disease, and transformation design as a way to bring policymakers, economists, designers and innovators together to create new solutions.

The excitement around design thinking and where it may lead businesses has been growing in the US for some time now, and these conferences highlighted the power design has to inspire and transform organisations and their offerings.
Most interestingly for me, I found a huge appetite out there for applying design to social issues - and judging by the number of relevant presentations and discussions it's a fast-growing area.

The response to the work of RED and the Design Council in general (especially Factfinder) has been fantastic; lots of people wanted to know how to replicate RED’s approach in a US policy context. I saw work from a couple of great non-profits, and also picked up a new magazine called 'Good', about the 'merger of capitalism and idealism' and featuring lots of innovative social enterprises, including microfinance portal Kiva, who have employed designers Cale Ryder and Jon Rodriguez to look into designing new systems for third world borrowers to upload their stories to the site. See their experiences at intocontext.org. The tide seems to be turning on sustainability too, away from the 'chair made of plastic bottles' towards much more systemic and far-reaching solutions being proposed by design groups. Commitment from corporate US giants like Walmart to changing the market for items like energy saving bulbs, and Participant Productions' film An Inconvenient Truth are creating a new feeling of optimism about what the US can achieve; service design group live|work are tapping into this by setting up a New York branch focussed on sustainable service solutions. Two of the conferences were organised by masters students, from IIT and CMU, and it was clear from their excellent discussions that the next generation of design leaders

CATEGORY: EVENTS+ RED TEAM+ TRANSFORMATION DESIGN