Design Revolution Roadshow: Changing the World by Design

Emi­ly Pil­lo­ton is the Founder and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Project H, a non-prof­it com­pa­ny she launched in Jan­u­ary of 2008 at the age of 26. Pil­lo­ton decid­ed to start the com­pa­ny after feel­ing as though her skills as a design­er were mis­di­rect­ed. She want­ed to become a change mak­er instead of a stuff cre­ator.

What began as a tour for her book, “Design Rev­o­lu­tion: 100 Prod­ucts that Empow­er Peo­ple,” end­ed up becom­ing much more. Pil­lo­ton used her 2009 Sap­pi Ideas that Mat­ter Grant to turn the book tour into a mobile exhi­bi­tion with work­shops and lec­tures geared towards inspir­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of young design­ers and pro­mot­ing the idea that design can have a pos­i­tive social impact.

The Design Rev­o­lu­tion Road­show last­ed 75 days and includ­ed stops at 35 high schools and uni­ver­si­ties. They even made a stop at SCAD! Pil­lo­ton, along with fel­low Project H-er Matthew Miller and Juneb­ug the dog, trav­eled around in a vin­tage Airstream trail­er with a pink stripe down the side. The trail­er housed 40 of the prod­ucts fea­tured in Pilloton’s book which vis­i­tors were able to use and expe­ri­ence. The Design Rev­o­lu­tion Toolk­it was dis­trib­uted to stu­dents and edu­ca­tors as well as any­one who was inter­est­ed in apply­ing cre­ative prob­lem solv­ing to social issues. The toolk­it out­lines 13 val­ues and cor­re­spond­ing strate­gies for how to pro­duce great design for the greater good. You can also down­load a copy from their web­site.

The pre­sen­ta­tions that were made at each of the schools includ­ed exam­ples of Project H ini­tia­tives as well as the fol­low­ing imper­a­tives:

• How to engage with under­served com­mu­ni­ties as clients
• The impor­tance of work­ing local­ly first
• Why we need to design with, not for
• The dif­fer­ence between design­ing solu­tions instead of stuff
• How design think­ing is an approach to every­thing
• How to work like a design­er, but think like a jack-of-all-trades
• Why talk is not enough, and how to take action

Emi­ly Pil­lo­ton has also appeared on the Col­bert Report (Jan­u­ary 18, 2010) to show­case a few of the prod­ucts fea­tured on the tour and to dis­cuss the pur­pose of her work.

I look for­ward to read­ing Emily’s book and I hope to apply the Design Rev­o­lu­tion prin­ci­ples to my own work.