Design for America’s leadership studio attracted students from 29 universities to work on improving the lives of familes affected by down syndrom. ABC 7 Chicago featured the program.

Check out Smithsonian’s latest on how universitities are grooming the next great innovators!

Thank you to everyone who supported me along the way. I am most grateful for your encouragement, wisdom, and humor!

I am honored to have been asked by Associate Vice President for Research, Dr. Jian Cao, to join Northwestern Initiative for Manufacturing Science and Innovation (NIMSI) aims to facilitate the translation of ideas to impact both mass production of products and emerging hyper-customized and personalized manufacturing. It will do so across the broad spectrum of design integration, material innovation, novel processes, computational methods, human-machine interface, logistics, economic and employment analysis, and more.

http://www.forbes.com/pictures/emeg45edife/mert-iseri-26-and-yuri-malina-24/

We are thrilled that Yale’s Design for America will be presenting their design for humanitarian crisis at South by Southwest 2015 in Austin Texas. This project originated as a DFA partnership with FEMA in 2014 to design solutions to improve the experience of flood victims.

We are thrilled to be invited to present our research on the social technical work and resource exchange in crowdfunding at this year’s conference on Collective Intelligence 2015.

Congratulations to our Delta Lab students, Emily Harburg and Youngsong Kim for their Work In Progress acceptance at CHI titled “CrowdFound: A Mobile Crowdsourcing System to Find Lost Items On-the-Go” 

CrowdFound allows users to input lost item descriptions on a map and then sends notifications to users passing near tagged areas. To assess the system’s efficacy, they conducted interviews and user testing on CrowdFound. Their results show that users were able to find lost items when using a combination of the notification, map, and item description features. In addition, users were willing to deviate off path to look for lost items, particularly when exercising. Their findings also suggest socio-technical features to promote more effective on-the-go crowdsourced help on microtasks. This research builds CHI’s understanding of physical crowdsourcing as a tool for solving societal problems and suggests broader implications for utilizing mobile crowds.

Huge shout out to Jenna Leonardo and Katie Kirsch who founded Girls Driving for a Difference. Girls Driving for a Difference is a team of Stanford students using design thinking to empower middle-school girls across the United States to become leaders of social change, both within their local communities and beyond.

This Summer of 2015, Jenna, Katie, and team will be driving in an RV across America, visiting all-women’s communities (specifically leadership and summer camps for middle school girls), and coaching design thinking and leadership workshops. These workshops will give girls the tools, inspiration, and creative confidence to discover their purpose, enact social change in their communities, and envision their own dreams for someday changing the world.

More information here.