Hasta La Ideas

Oxford University’s Said Business School is running a sort of Peace Corps for designers. Writes Lucy Kimbell, Clark Fellow in Design Leadership:

We need up to 10 designers who want to use their design practices and skills to help social enterprise Soul of Africa tackle some of the challenge facing it, during a one-day workshop in Oxford in collaboration with MBA students.

The workshop is a participative, creative “think-and-make-tank” that brings together people from management and from design to use visual methods to analyze and tackle specific problems identified by an organization. MBA students from Said Business School will be joined by designers from different disciplines to help social enterprise Soul of Africa engage with key challenges.

Soul Of Africa is a charitable initiative and a self-sustainable project created to facilitate employment and funding aimed at helping orphans affected by AIDS through the sale of hand-stitched shoes. Unemployed and unskilled women in South Africa are trained to hand-stitch shoes, giving them the self-empowering ability to feed their families and provide them with essential health care.

Download more details here.

What we are looking for

Designers (recent graduates, current MA or BA design students, and design professionals) are invited to take part. Ideally, we’d like a mixture of people from these backgrounds:

– visual communication
– product/industrial design
– service design
– interface design
– fashion
– design management

How to get involved

To apply, send an email to Lucy Kimbell at lucy.kimbell@sbs.ox.ac.uk to arrive on or by Friday 20 March 2009.

The email must include

– your name and contact details and any institutional affiliation
– your design discipline (eg product, visual communication)
– up to 150 words on why you want to participate.

Successful participants will be contacted by Friday 3 April at the latest. Reasonable travel expenses to Oxford (standard class return, UK travel only) will be reimbursed to those who attend the workshop, on the production of a receipt.

The Design Leadership blog is here.

(more…)