Expressing our Gratitude

It’s hard to put into words just how blown away we’ve been by the support of our Kickstarter campaign over the past few weeks. We designed the Travel Pack based on feedback from the thousands of you who’ve used our Design Kit learning tools over the past few years and hoped that it would resonate, but we could never have imagined such an overwhelming response.

To put it plainly, thank you.

Thanks to more than 2,900 backers around the world, we met our original goal of raising $40,000 in less than 24 hours and our most ambitious stretch goal of $150,000 in just 2 weeks! Beyond bringing the Travel Pack to life and helping put it in the hands of problem-solvers around the world, your generosity will provide critical operating support to IDEO.org, allowing us to continue improving the lives of people in low-income communities through design in 2018 and beyond.

After years working in international development, I was seeking a new way of working when I joined IDEO more than 10 years ago. I had been inspired by the moral leaders around me making progress on tough issues like access to clean water, women’s empowerment, and health care for the poor. But I was also impatient, and seeking tools that would lead to more transformative and effective solutions. At IDEO, I was immediately inspired by the way designers used empathy, creativity, and experimentation to get to bold solutions. So, when we founded IDEO.org six years ago, I knew that helping other organizations around the world learn to apply these same tools would be part of our mission.

Since then, our Design Kit tools have been used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world tackling a wide range of challenges. Seeing those tools in action has been such a privilege — whether it’s been sitting with local women in Eastern Congo to co-create a new business with the American Refugee Committee, seeing staff from the YP Foundation in India use HCD tools to collect insights on the reproductive health concerns of teenage girls, or getting feedback from teams at PSI Impact and Digital Green who used our course for human-centered design to spawn new ideas.

We hope that the Design Kit Travel Pack will inspire thousands more moments like these, and we can’t wait to hear how you use them.

P.S. Tomorrow is the last day the Design Kit Travel Pack will be available, so make sure to remind any friends or colleagues who might be interested in getting their hands on one before it’s too late: http://kck.st/2DfnMAV