Hasta La Ideas

This week on Inspire, Adobe’s experience design publication, Emily Pilloton, who founded the fast growing Project H just 16 months ago, writes about the 5 tenets that drive her organization:

There is no chapter without action.
Design with, not for.
Start locally, scale globally.
Document, measure and share.
Design systems not stuff.

Each article discusses one of the above tenets in depth, revealing much of the process and thought behind the growing number of projects that Project H supports. For example, here’s a short excerpt from “Design Systems Not Stuff”:

The New York chapter’s initiative, Empowerment Through Food, is another great systems-approach to the design process. The project uses food (production, distribution, and consumption) as a platform to teach public high school students about ecology, health, and even business skills. The Empowerment Through Food initiative could easily have entailed the design of super cool planter boxes for a roof garden atop every public school in Manhattan. And while the planter boxes themselves are part of the design, they are only the material aspect, part of a bigger curriculum that encompasses the school’s own production of cafeteria vegetables, plant sales that create an enterprise around education, and an adaptable in-classroom curriculum. It is this system that carries the power, not the aesthetics of the planter box. It is a holistic approach such as this, one that asks the big questions and leaves behind something sustainable that can be owned by users, rather than just more design.

The complete list of articles can be found here.

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