A Human-Centered Design Learning Mashup

Want to learn how to use design for social good? IDEO.org is proud to announce Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation, a five-week course that we've created in conjunction with Acumen. This course is designed to help people start using the human-centered design process to create innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions for social change all around the world. Watch this video to learn more.

What I really love about the course is the group-guided learning structure, which is a bit like a mashup of a weekly book club and a five week human-centered design workshop. The course is also intentionally analog by design, so that it works equally well in high-bandwidth locations like San Francisco and lower bandwidth areas like rural Kenya. Similar to human-centered design, perhaps the single most important characteristic of the course is that all of the learning happens as part of a team. In order to sign up for the course, participants need to form a team of between two and six people.

Once formed, the design team meets once a week in person (no virtual Skype or Google Hangout substitutions) to learn by doing, via the human-centered design workshop materials that our IDEO.org team has created (with lots of great help from Acumen). Along the way, each design team will also tackle one of three social sector design challenges in their community. Best of all, the course is FREE and doesn't require any previous design experience.

So far we have about 3,500 people signed up for the course, with a deadline of July 3. Past Acumen courses have attracted participants from over 100 countries, and we're expecting an equally geographically diverse group of teams for this course. Design teams will have the opportunity to share learnings, ask questions, and get to know other course participants via an online Google community that Acumen has created.

This course is a pilot. There will be wrinkles to iron out and much to learn as we iterate and improve on the course (as true human-centered designers). However, we're enormously excited about this course's potential for getting powerful human-centered design tools into the hands of social innovators around the world.

Interested in signing up? The course begins on July 10, 2013. Register here.

Image courtesy of IDEO.org