Exciting times for graphic design: Jessica Helfand and Bill Drenttel received an enormous grant from Rockefeller Foundation to spawn the latest iteration of their growing empire.  Building on recent years’ Bellagio conferences, the Winterhouse Institute aspires to “develop collective action and collaboration for social impact across the design industry.”  Their manifesto, of sorts:

“We believe designers can make consistent, sustained and human-scaled contributions to solving large social and environmental problems, particularly to benefit poor and vulnerable people in developing countries.

There are an increasing number of examples of design-thinking — or integrative thinking — addressing these problems, whether initiated by design firms, individual designers or NGOs, yet there are only isolated examples of success. All this signals growing interest in harnessing design creativity in areas where massive public sector efforts were attempted in the past. The power of this movement, though, would be amplified significantly with success-sharing mechanisms, documentation of best practices, matching of resources to needs, and promotion of the promise of design as one avenue to innovative solutions.

Effectively, the challenge becomes how to we get the best designers working with the right NGOs towards solutions against large and critical problems? How can we get enough momentum and participation that collective action by the design community is possible and self-generating? Are there models or structures needed to create systematic engagement with the social sector?”

Rockefeller Foundation has long supported both design innovation and social change – it will be really exciting to see how, and with whom, Winterhouse pulls this together.