Author Archives: Rick Marzec

OpEd Fellowship video released

The OpEd Fellowship video has been released. For those who have heard me talk about this incredible program, here’s an opportunity to watch a video that shows a bit behind the scenes.   I am remain immensely grateful for my participation and to our amazing editors, Michelle Weldon and EJ Graff who led us through the storm.

CSCW 2014 Workshop Accepted : Structures for Knowledge Co-creation Between Organisations and the Public

I’m thrilled to be helping to lead a workshop at CSCW 2014 examining how social computing technologies have emerged to support innovative new relationships between organisations and the public. We discuss how this work has been inspired by concepts such as collective intelligence, citizen science, citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, diverse types of organisations are aiming to increase engagement with the public, collect localised knowledge, or leverage human cognition and creativity. In supporting these approaches, organisations are often provoked to make their data and processes more open, and to be inclusive of differing motivations and perspectives from inside and outside the organisation. In doing so, they raise new questions for both designers and organisations. For example how are “official‟ and „unofficial‟ information sources combined or hosted, mediated, or considered reliable? Does the role of the professional change through greater involvement of amateurs? How are the motivations of members of the public harnessed for mutual benefit? This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to address those questions from different perspectives. 

Paper on crowdfunding work to appear at CSCW 2014

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.

Design for America to work with FEMA

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.

Join me for the National Endowment for the Arts Webinar on Social Impact Design

Please join me and my colleagues, William Drenttel, president of Winterhouse Institute and co-founder of Design ObserverCharlie 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.

 

Received National Science Foundation Grant to work on The Loft

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.

Design For America’s Swipe Sense is selected as a “Wall Street Journal Startup of the Year”

Congratulations to Design for America’s Swipe Sense team for being chosen by the The Wall Street Journal editors to participate in ‘WSJ Startup of the Year,‘ an episodic video documentary for WSJ Live, the Journal’s online video platform. The series will track their progress from startup to success over the course of five months.