Our large scale qualitative study on crowdfunding work, including the specific technological pain points and future opportunities, will appear at CSCW 2014 in Baltimore.  The work counters the popular press that tends to downplay the amount of work required to crowdfund and explores the way in which the community share expertise with one another.

I am thrilled to announce that Design for America studios (Cornell, Rice, Baltimore, Yale, RISD – Brown, Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Northwestern, Case Western,  Barnard – Columbia, University of Illinois UC, Virginia Tech) will be working with FEMA this coming school year to improve the response to natural disaster.

Please join me and my colleagues, William Drenttel, president of Winterhouse Institute and co-founder of Design Observer, Charlie Cannon, chief design officer at epic decade and associate professor of industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design, and Mike Weikert, founding director of Center for Social Design & master of arts in Social Design at Maryland Institute College of Art for the National Endowment for the Arts webinar on Social Impact Design on Tuesday, August 20th from 2-3pm EST.

More details can be found at here and here

The webinar will coincide with the third annual Symposium on Design Education and Social Change.

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers and our lab for supporting our publication titled “Crowdfunding: Motivations and Deterrents for Participation” in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.

My colleague, Matt Easterday, and I just got word that we received an NSF grant to work on our Digital Loft Project, an online platform to connect, collaborate, and create solutions to challenging social problems.  We have an awesome team working on this project and will plan on rolling on the online platform this fall.  This project builds on initial work done through funding from the Mozilla and MacArthur Foundations.

I am looking forward to joining the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems as a Associate Chair. The organizing committee includes smart, energetic faculty. I can’t wait!