Social Impact
So You Want to Control Your Own Destiny, Do You?
Founder motivations and control for impact entrepreneurs Lean Startup is great for finding scale opportunities, quickly, You make assumptions, discover your customer needs, run some tests, and you can quickly get feedback that you’re either on the right track, or need to start again. Yet one thing that tends to stop founders from even asking the right questions in the first place is the reason why they are starting a Read More
Biofabricate
Looking forward to the multiple disciplines being convened at the Biofabricate conference – and the chance to thread environment impact assessment, health impact, startup ethics, and the precautionary principle. ‘BIOFABRICATE’ is the world’s first summit dedicated to biofabrication for future industrial and consumer products. Biofabrication comprises highly disruptive technologies enabling design and manufacturing to intersect with the building blocks of life. Computers can now read and write with DNA. This Read More
AIGA GAIN: Redesigning Commerce / Funding to the Pitch
Is your idea best suited for seed and angel funding, or should you launch on Indiegogo first? What about the values of bootstrapping? What’s a social venture, and if you think you have one, are you better structured as a for-profit, or not-for-profit, or B-Corp? Or, perhaps your freelance design practice is ready to scale—what kind of structure works best, and when is fundraising appropriate? How you choose to launch Read More
Bodies and Buildings Class 1: Intro to Systems Thinking
Have we reached the limits of growth: Bodies are in trouble right now – despite reaching the peak of productivity the US now leads the world in the rampant growth of chronic diseases that lower life expectancy, and reduce life quality. “People are living longer than projected in 1990 — on average, 10.7 more years for men, and 12.6 more years for women. But for many of them, the Read More
Bodies and Buildings NYU ITP Syllabus for 2014
Bodies and Buildings Fall 2014 Syllabus NYU ITP Instructor: Jen van der Meer jd1159 at nyu dot edu Mondays 6:30 – 9:25 PM 721 Broadway at Waverly Why is it so hard to care for our planet and ourselves? We seem hungover from a century of prosperity and ingenuity, unable to invent economic models that create jobs, improve health, and restore the earth. Eager ITP students are better equipped than Read More
NYC BigApps: For Profit or Non Profit?
A strange question started popping up in my classes at SVA PoD, NYU ITP, and in various apps and tech and data competitions: Is my concept best suited to become a company? Or a non profit? Strange, because when I graduated in the 90’s – this question might apply to one’s career path, but it was pretty clear that non profits were for those that wanted to do good, and for Read More
Lean Customer Discovery Needs Design Research
When you are in a startup, under the gun, trying to execute – how do you find time for empathy? Lean launchpad simulates entrepreneurship by requiring founders to get out of the building…and into their customer’s world. Teams succeed when they start talking to people, and find the magic in actually validating their hypotheses with customers, potential partners, and even fellow founders who may have tried to pursue the same Read More
8 Principals for Designing for Dignity in Health Tech
Thanks all for the great discussion, in real time at StrataRx and on the Twittersphere. Is it enough to design for a great patient experience, improved health outcomes, and overall cost reductions in health care? While incentives may soon change, the idea of data-driven solutions to improve health care is not a new one. Yet why have technological solutions so frequently fail on all three of the triple aims? We Read More
NYU ITP: Bodies and Buildings Intro Class
Class Start and Intro to Systems Thinking, Bodies, and Buildings. Class assignment for 2/4/2013 Read ALL OF Donella Meadows: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System Take leverage points 9, 8, 7. Write a 1 page or 500-6000 word essay on the following topic: How do mobile apps try to affect leverage points 9, 8, and 7. 9- The length of delays, relative to the rate of system change 8- Read More
NYU ITP: If Products Could Speak Class 6: Human Health Impacts
Week of March 30 – evaluating human health impacts from environmental warming, resources depletion, and toxicity. Also – starting our reading of Cradle to Cradle. If Products Could Speak Mar 30 2009 from Jen van der Meer
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