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Noel Wilson is a lead designer at Catapult Design “Catapult Design is a non-profit design firm providing engineering and implementation support to the thousands of organizations in need of technologies or products capable of igniting social change.” (Catapult website) . We got a chance to get his opinions about designing for social impact in low income communities.
Check out their website from more info. http://catapultdesign.org/
Thanks Noel for the interview.
Design in Africa : Interesting Blog!
Interesting!
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The charity disparity: can corporate benevolence be free of self-interest?
Invisible intentions of Corporate social responsibility - CSR -
“simple corporate philanthropy, when corporations make donations to charity they are giving away their shareholders’ money, which they can only do if they see potential profit in it. This may be because they want to improve their image by associating themselves with a cause, to exploit a cheap vehicle for advertising, or to counter the claims of pressure groups, but there is always an underlying financial motive, so the company benefits more than the charity”.
Fake Corporate social responsibility? More
“Open Aid is the name of the government’s efforts to adapt the Swedish cooperative development to today’s realities, and the opportunities that globalization and technological developments create. The goal is to combat poverty as effectively as possible. To achieve this goal, aid has to be open to public control and ideas from more sources”
“With more than 1.6 million people dying annually due to smoke inhalation from indoor wood burning stoves, Philips Design came up with an idea to effectively tackle the problem. This was part of ‘Philanthropy by Design’ a program which looks at promoting social empowerment through knowledge sharing, creativity and co-design”.
http://www.design.philips.com/about/design/designnews/newvaluebydesign/helping400million_people_give_up_smoking.page
Mission: “To help create conditions that will enable poor people to improve the quality of their lives”.
