Design for America

Design for America at Northwestern is a consortium of talented, renaissance-thinking, passionate students from the NU community who radically collaborate with community organizations and nonprofits to solve real world problems. The organization creates social impact by understanding the challenges of our communities, creating powerful solutions based on human-centered insights, and partnering with organizations to execute our transformative ideas.  Design for America believes in the power of students and the local community to affect real change in our world using their boundless energy, social intelligence, and fresh perspectives.

Read about Design for America:

In the Office for Research Newsletter, September 2009

In the Daily Northwestern, May 27, 2009 issue

In the Segal article featuring the DfA Summer Fellows Program

DfA Summer Fellows Program Design Coaches

The Summer Fellows program was successful in large part to the design community commitment to the effort.  Three professionals in the design world volunteered to be design coaches for the Summer Fellows project teams: Jeanne Olson, Human Factors Consultant; Cheryl Small, Director of Alchemy at Leo Burnett and Brandon Ward, Director of Akimbo Group.  The three coaches devoted 200+ hours combined to the students' learning and design processes.

Jeanne Olson, Human Factors Consultant

Jeannie is a user experience researcher, business strategist, and learning science strategist who uses a multi-disciplinary approach to examine users, products and environments.  She believes that inviting stakeholders, users and designers into the learning process of participatory design ultimately leads to the most innovative solutions for complex problems.

Jeannie spent the first fourteen years of her career applying collaborative research methods to solve problems for companies like Hyatt Corporation, Schneider Logistics, Ingersoll-Rand, and Chrysler Systems.  Prior to building her own consulting practice, she was a charter member of Hewitt’s Center of Expertise for Learning and Change, and led the Chicago User Research Lab for Scient Corp.  Jeannie currently teaches in the Northwestern Graduate Program for Learning and Organizational Change.

She volunteered as a Design for America Coach because she believes that working with students to design solutions to produce social impact is one of the most rewarding projects that she can imagine.

Above: Mert Iseri (left) and Jeanne Olson, addressing hand hygiene compliance challenges for Evanston's NorthShore Hospital.

Cheryl Small, Director of Achemy, Leo Burnett

Cheryl Small spent the first 15 years of her career in advertising agencies. She loved developing big brand stories that like great movies touched people deeply. And she saw the new products and services that she created for brands like LEGO toys, J&J, Kellogg’s, AT&T, Marlboro, Allstate, and Maytag as extensions of the plot, ways to increase engagement between the customer and the brand.

But five years ago, Cheryl became frustrated. Great ideas were continually being lost in organizations. So she created her own consulting practice to help companies discover and champion new ideas. Whether it was creating a new retail store in Switzerland, designing a new on-line revenue source for a confectionary icon, or understanding how masculinity changes in Asia could be used to create new products, her work became rooted in harnessing group collaboration.

She was then lured back by her old employer Leo Burnett to develop this business for the agency. In addition to creating the new agency division, Alchemy^LB, Cheryl joined Northwestern’s Master’s in Learning and Organizational Change (MSLOC) program to increase her impact on driving innovation through companies.

Cheryl was honored to coach a team of Design for America students. Design for America demonstrated how humility, collective creativity, understanding human dynamics, and problem reframing created positive change. It revealed the untapped potential in all of us, and our ability to make the world a better place.

Brandon Ward, Director of Akimbo Group

Brandon Ward is full of hot air.

With 10+ years in Account Management at Leo Burnett, he feels at home facilitating the creative process and leading productive meetings in large conference rooms full of world-class integrated communications professionals and marketers of iconic global brands.

With a master’s degree in human-centered innovation from the Institute of Design at IIT and a passion for managing brand design teams at {akimbo} (a boutique design firm within Publicis), he loves to draw on white boards as he pontificates about the virtues of design thinking.

In his free time (wishful thinking), Brandon tries to get re-acquainted with his wife and two children, he pretends to rehab his historic bungalow, he unsuccessfully role-plays as a 19 year old soccer player, and he seeks out new music at the same pace he consumes Mexican food or anything else that’s edible.