Austin’s Passion for Design-Thinking

Lesa Walker
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

Authors: Cristina Bordin, Erin Rainosek, and Lesa Walker

Three women in Austin joined forces with one goal in mind: build a community that is passionate about design thinking to make a positive impact on their hometown, Austin, TX. As one of the fast growing cities in the United States, Austin is very familiar with big and complex challenges. To tackle them, Lesa Walker, Cristina Bordin and Erin Rainosek realized that coalescing design thinking and a large community of individuals who are not intimidated to solve complicated issues was the way to go.

The question on our minds: How could we accomplish this goal?

On July 17th (2017) we kicked off the week with an OpenIDEO Austin Outpost meeting — -we brought together people with various interests and backgrounds to contribute their inspirations, ideas, and creativity to an OpenIDEO global challenge: the Circular Design Challenge. People who participated in the outpost learned about design thinking, met fellow community members, and worked together to learn about the power of design thinking.

At the conclusion of the outpost meeting, 90% of attendees expressed interest in starting a chapter. Even more exciting — attendees from the community expressed interest in local challenges such as: addressing homelessness and gentrification, improving public education and transportation, preserving diverse communities, and what every Austinite dreams of — -reducing traffic.

It was clear that there is a strong desire to foster collaboration and leverage the power of design thinking to make our city a better place. In a city where thousands of nonprofits coexist, it is evident that people care about their community. It comes as no surprise that the City Council approved a resolution designating Austin a “compassionate city” in 2016. Empathy drives design thinking and compassionate action. Now add that to the exhilarating entrepreneurism of start-ups. Consequently, Austin has become a hub for social entrepreneurship, making an OpenIDEO chapter the ultimate catalyst to trigger positive change and strengthen our city’s compassion and social innovation.

And in the spirit of collaboration and partnership, the challenges we want to address will be guided by the interests of locals to ensure that we can mobilize real change in our community. The outpost left us very excited about the prospect of a future chapter, and we are eager to make our community a better place through design.

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