Where’s Your Aspen?

We’ve been dying to file another report from the Aspen Design Summit, but as our dear friends at Core77 will agree (thanks for the photo), until last night, the short answer is nothing’s happened–yet. We’ve been busy wagging our tongue, but here are some highlights from the featured presentations.

Frank Wilson, author of The Hand, and Elliot Washor of The Big Picture gave the Education Innovation challenge for schools to teach making instead of knowing.

Majora Carter, our new hero and founder of Sustainable South Bronx, and Sergio Palleroni, who’s heading to New Orleans next week for the Katrina Furniture Project, issued the Sustainable Community Development challenge to get our cities to work for our citizens.

Folks from Stanford’s D School and IDE’s Paul Polak and Debbie Taylor (they make that treadle pump third world residents use to find water in the dry season) challenged the Social Entrepreneurship group to find a way for the world’s designers to design for more than 5% of the world’s (richest) population.

Attendees then divided into studio groups to begin the arduous task of solving these problems with the design process. Some surfaced with research surveys, some butted egos in hours-long debate. Personally, we enjoyed watching people’s heads explode.

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