After a month on the road, Dave’s finally made it to the Heartland, doubling back from the East, South and West to the Great Plains en route home to Boston. Keep up-to-date with all of the adventures on Route 77 by following @DaveSeliger on Twitter!
Day 31
Prototype BRT bus interiors by students at the Institute of Design, lead by George Aye and Martin Thaler
Just days before I arrived in Chicago, I stumbled across Greater Good Studio’s Kickstarter project to reshape public transit in the city. (This was before we featured the project here on Core77, so I like to think I got the exclusive scoop, even if it’s a week late!) George and Sara Aye, the founders of Greater Good Studio, are truly putting their money where their mouth is. “I always said I was going to do these things,” George said, referring, of course, to using design to solve society’s problems instead of a career where the project ratio is “one children’s hospital to ten frozen pizza projects.” George spent almost a decade at IDEO before leading the internal design team at the Chicago Transit Authority. Sara also “walked away from corporate innovation to social innovation,” leaving an equally successful career at IA Collaborative.
George and Sara Aye
The goal of this past year has been to build a foundation and presence for the Studio, both in terms of local clients and the larger “conversation about design and social impact.” The Ayes look to luminaries at Reboot, Project H, and IDEO.org, among others, for leadership in the field. However, this conversation about social innovation is happening almost exclusively on the East and West Coasts, with little growth in the states in between. “We would like to prove that this is worth doing,” said George. “There are ways to help people other than pro bono and traditional consulting. It’s hard—if it was easy, everyone would do it.”
Prototype BRT bus interiors by students at the Institute of Design, lead by George Aye and Martin Thaler
Being successful in the field of social innovation, though, means finding a business model that fills this void between contemporary notions of profitability and the starving NGO worker. Panthea Lee of Reboot once mentioned something similar to me about the failings of NGO’s and how to succeed in the business of saving the world by acting like a for-profit company. This is the exact approach the Ayes are taking: operate as a non-profit studio with the mentality and business acumen of a for-profit institution.
“We didn’t know if anybody would say anything or if there would be crickets,” said George Aye of the Studio’s launch. Shortly after, the Ayes received a call from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management to teach innovation to MBAs. “Suddenly we were experts,” said Sara. “If we’re saying we are, then we better be,” said George. The classroom served as a petri dish both for the students to learn new skills and for the Ayes to learn what it means to teach design. One project had the students shipped off to Africa and Asia to explore emerging markets where “the challenge is designing when there is no obvious client.” The lesson learned was one of finding innovative solutions that are sustainable and “financially sound” through some sort of “commercial value.”
Post a Comment