Gretchen Chern | Design Research & Strategy

Recycling in Savannah

How to Moti­vate Peo­ple to Cre­ate Bet­ter Recy­cling Habits through Aware­ness, Edu­ca­tion and Con­ve­nience Overview For my final project in the Design Man­age­ment pro­gram at SCAD, I want­ed to take a clos­er look at recy­cling in Savan­nah, GA. The pur­pose of my study was to reveal a bet­ter way to encour­age and enable recy­cling for […]

It’s Not Easy Being Green

It’s Not Easy Being Green is a project by two design­ers trav­el­ing around the world in 184 days. The project was ini­ti­at­ed by Aart van Bezooyen and Paula Raché, a Dutch-Ger­­man design cou­ple liv­ing and work­ing in Ham­burg, Ger­many. Over the course of six months they are offer­ing inspir­ing lec­tures and mate­ri­als work­shops to explore […]

Creative Capacity of Social Business Models — Core77

This arti­cle shows exam­ples of inno­v­a­tive busi­ness mod­els that com­bine cre­ativ­i­ty and social respon­si­bil­i­ty: Cre­ative Capac­i­ty of Social Busi­ness Mod­els.

Tippy Tap: Save Water, Save Lives

I found this video via World Water Day: Tip­py Tap keeps it sim­ple + saves water — Core77. I love how sim­ple the solu­tion is. To learn more vis­it www.tippytap.org/.

The Launch of OpenIDEO

Intro­duc­tion to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo. This week, IDEO launched an open idea gen­er­a­tion plat­form called OpenIDEO. It is a place where any­one, not just design­ers, can con­tribute ideas, become inspired and eval­u­ate the ideas of oth­ers. The thing I like most about OpenIDEO is the fact that it uses col­lab­o­ra­tion to […]

The Design Imperialism Debate

As soon as I wrote my post about Emi­ly Pilloton’s Design Rev­o­lu­tion Road­show, my hus­band was quick to show me this arti­cle writ­ten by Bruce Nuss­baum over at Fast Com­pa­ny: Is Human­i­tar­i­an Design the New Impe­ri­al­ism? This arti­cle has caused quite a stir in the design com­mu­ni­ty. At first glance, I found the arti­cle to […]

Design Revolution Roadshow: Changing the World by Design

What began as a tour for Emi­ly Pilloton’s 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.