The $300 House Challenge is showing us that individuals and companies are willing to make a difference.
Check out WorldHaus from Bill Gross and his team at IdeaLab. Read his Harvard Business Review post on the “design challenge” here >>
Minding the Gap: A Failure in Intuitive Intelligence?
The Gap screws up with their logo redesign. A giant failure of imagination in the boardroom.
But Umair Haque asks the right questions:
- Do designers have a seat in the boardroom — or just in the basement? How often does your CEO ever talk to a designer?
- Are designers empowered to overrule beancounters — or vice versa?
- Is the input of designers considered to be peripheral to “real” business decisions — or does it play a vital role in shaping them? Is design treated as a function or a competence?
- Are designers seen just as mechanics of mere stuff — or as vital contributors to the art of igniting new industries, markets, and catgeories, sparking more enduring demand, building trust, providing empathy, and seeding tomorrow’s big ideas?
- How much weight does senior management give to right-brained ideas, like delight, amazement, intuition, and joy? Just a little, a lot — or, as for most companies, almost none?
Seriously.
We all need to wake up. The Chamber of Commerce approach to design isn’t going to work anymore.
The $300 House: David Smith on the Financial Challenge
David Smith‘s HBR post on the financial challenge of the $300 House raises some very important issues:
Cracking the challenge of slums is the world’s biggest problem of the next quarter-century, because the ecology of slums and the ecology of cities are linked. We cannot have a healthy global economy without healthy cities, and we cannot have healthy cities without tackling slums.
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