Create! Don’t Hate, an initiative of Design Ignites Change, is taking place in cities all across the United States.

In addition to ongoing partnerships with AIGA and the Designers Accord, Design Ignites Change is pleased to announce a new partnership with ASID (American Society of Interior Designers). The collaboration will not only expand the program’s influence into the interior design discipline, but will also encourage ASID members to participate in the School: by Design mentoring program – an initiative of Design Ignites Change that puts social and sustainable design thinking into action by asking high school students to “redesign your school” with the help of their college and professional mentors.

The first ever Design Ignites Change Implementation Award winners have been hard at work. An update on how they are using funding from Design Ignites Change to do remarkable work in their communities can be found here.

And, if all of that wasn’t enough, Mohawk Fine Papers and Johnson and Johnson together with Cynthia Rowley joined forces with Design Ignites Change to create unique products to benefit the program.

Twenty-five leading letterpress printers were asked to create fifty limited edition notebooks to be sold on Mohawk's Felt & Wire shop. 100% of the proceeds are going to Design Ignites Change to support the youth mentorship program School: by Design.

Each sale of the “Dress-Up Band-Aids” gives a dollar to Design Ignites Change. Worldstudio's Andréa Pellegrino joined Cynthia Rowley to celebrate the product launch at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum.

For information about becoming a Design Ignites Change sponsor, contact apellegrino (at) worldstudioinc.com. If you’re interested in participating in the program, contact awhipple (at) worldstudioinc.com.

Worldstudio’s Nina Mettler and Andréa Pellegrino, Johnson & Johnson Chief Design Officer Chris Hacker and Cooper-Hewitt Director Bill Moggridge were on hand to celebrate Ms. Rowley at a luncheon on September 11th at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum.

The stylish Band-Aids can be bought at www.cynthiarowley.com for $10 with a dollar of each sale going to Design Ignites Change.

Jason McDaniel is used to printing killer letterpress invitations and cards. And it’s not that he doesn’t love his work at Dallas’ trendy Miss Q Press, but when McDaniel was invited to participate in The Feedback Loop project, he thought it would be fun to challenge himself to do something outside of his normal routine.

So he letterpress-printed a journal, something he’d never before tried, the sales of which will benefit kids all over the country.

Mohawk Fine Papers and Design Ignites Change teamed up recently to create The Feedback Loop, a project using the new Mohawk Loop grade as a catalyst for change. In exchange for free Loop paper from Mohawk, twenty-five leading letterpress printers, including Missing Q, were asked to create fifty unique notebooks. These limited editions books are now being sold in a special storefront on the Felt & Wire Shop. 100% of the proceeds will go to Design Ignites Change to support the youth mentorship program School: By Design.

McDaniel says the printing part of the project was easy (he printed the covers by hand on his Vandercook #4). It was the bindery that was new for him. His journal was inspired by a vintage french botanical fieldbook he stumbled upon at an antique shop this summer. “I was really inspired by the fact that someone carried this little journal around studying plants, and so the fieldbook became the inspiration for my notebooks.” Plus, the word “letterpress” looks really awesome in French (Impression Typographique!).  ”I have never done any bookbinding professionally, so I wasn’t sure how to go about this in terms of a finished notebook,” he says. But you’d never know it from the finished result.

Project leader Laura Shore is impressed by the work of all of the participants, now on sale at Felt & Wire Shop. “Some of the best letterpress printers in the country are involved in the project, so I knew they’d be good. But I didn’t know they’d be this good. It all started with the simple idea that Mohawk wanted to be a positive catalyst for social change, and, we wanted to get printers to try our new paper, Loop.”

She says she thinks they’ll sell out quickly. “We set a low fixed price on all the notebooks: $15.00, which includes shipping and handling. Our goal was to raise money quickly and test this as a model for future social ventures.”

That would make Design Ignites Change founders and Worldstudio partners, Mark Randall and Andréa Pellegrino, happy. All proceeds for The Feedback Loop go directly to School: by Design – a Design Ignites Change and Designers Accord youth mentoring initiative.  ”We’re challenging high school students – in collaboration with their college or professional design mentors – to ‘redesign their school.’ A $10,000 award will be granted to the high school with the most innovative project to implement their idea,” says Pellegrino.

McDaniel adds, “I hope every single notebook sells so there is a generous donation made.”

Six students from New York City’s High School of Art and Design are being given an opportunity that many designers only dream of – their designs will be featured on Clear Channel’s “Spectacolor HD” digital billboard in Times Square. The billboards were created as part of Create! Don’t Hate., a Design Ignites Change mentoring initiative. Professional designers from the mentoring program of the New York chapter of AIGA worked with students from the High School of Art and Design to create billboard designs addressing the theme of tolerance.

The final student designs address a wide variety of issues such as gay rights, racism and body image. Over the course of two months, the mentors led students through the design process – from brainstorming and sketching to producing the final designs on the computer. Twenty-two students participated, with six of the designs ultimately chosen for display in Times Square on prime advertising space made available through a partnership with Clear Channel Spectacolor.

The winning billboard designs will be unveiled on Spectacolor HD during a launch event at the corner of Broadway and 47th Street on July 6th starting at 10:15 am. The mentors, project coordinators and representatives from Worldstudio and Clear Channel Spectacolor, along with the general public, are invited to celebrate with the students and their families. Additionally, all twenty-two designs will be displayed in an exhibition at the AIGA National Design Center Gallery (164 Fifth Avenue, between 21st and 22nd Streets) through July 22nd.

Made possible through the Design Ignites Change Implementation Award, the first delicious products from PieLab’s Pecans! business are now for sale online. The goal of Pecans! is to teach local youth in rural Greensboro, Alabama to create a profitable business using a plentiful local resource.

Designers at PieLab have helped the students acquire the skills they need to formulate a business plan, develop their pecan products, as well as brand, market and sell them. In addition to the tag featuring the youth’s logo designs, a local craftsman was employed to emboss the leather strap around the rim of the jars with the word “GOOD,” which can be used as a bracelet after the jar is opened.

It’s hard to say whether we are more excited by the great packaging design or the delectable contents. By purchasing these mouthwatering treats today you will not only be empowering youth in Greensboro, but you will also be supporting an outstanding Design Ignites Change project!

Jars of pecan brittle and pecan butter are both available to purchase at
www.the-pecans.com.

The deadline for the next round of Implementation and Idea Awards is June 30th. Learn more at www.designigniteschange.org.

Since its inception in early 2009, Design Ignites Change has engaged over 1,000 high school and college students and well over 100 educators and professionals through the program. Support from corporate and institutional partners help ensure that Design Ignites Change can embrace the increasing number of schools and students who want to participate in these growing efforts.

To learn more about how your organization can support Design Ignites Change, please contact Andréa Pellegrino at apellegrino(at)worldstudioinc.com.

Design Ignites Change, a collaboration between Adobe Youth Voices and Worldstudio, is excited to announce the inaugural 2009 Implementation Award winners: PieLab’s Pecans! and Kansas City Art Institute’s A Book by its Cover: Reading Stereotypes and Freewall: Making Space for Diversity. The biannual award program recognizes exceptional proposals for design intended to make the world a better place, and grants their creators the financial support to realize those visions.

The grand prize award goes to Pecans!, a budding pecan product enterprise – led by low-income youth – in Hale County, Alabama. Here, recent design school graduates, contributing their energy and talents to PieLab, a community design center in downtown Greensboro, mentor 16-24 year-old high school dropouts participating in the Department of Labor’s YouthBuild Program. The $12,000 award serves as the capital to get the business off the ground, in turn providing the youth a chance to expand their skill sets: everything from perfecting the best pecan brittle recipe, to developing a brand identity and market strategy, all while completing their high school diplomas or GEDs. “We are ecstatic,” says Robin Moody from Pielab, “we have been looking for a way to help fund this idea and are now so grateful to have the ability to carry it out. We worked hard on really fleshing out the application and are so glad to see the work paid off. It’s exciting to partner with Worldstudio on a project that has a positive impact on local youth.”

A second place prize of $2,400 was awarded to A Book by its Cover: Reading Stereotypes, a project that aims to uproot racism by fostering positive, meaningful connections between Arab and non-Arab students. Set between two schools: the Islamic School of Greater Kansas City and Garfield Elementary, also in Kansas City, this pen-pal-like book exchange project, conceived by Ramzy Masri, a student at the Kansas City Art Institute, begins by opening up a conversation about prejudice that evolves into a rich exchange involving students’ experiences, and culminates in a surprise reveal around identity.

Simple yet compelling, Freewall: Making Space for Diversity, wins the third place prize, for offering a proactive answer to bullying. This project created by Logan Smith, a student at Kansas City Art Institute, creatively repurposes empty wall space at Center Alternative School into a personal expression of the student body. Each student is invited to design a warm-colored sticker around the theme of something he or she loves, and to post it to a 5’X5’ cool-colored patchwork display. The eye-catching collaboration will transform and grow to feature 288 unique designs when complete. The award of $250 will be used to cover the cost of supplies.

Tyler Galloway, a faculty member at Kansas City Art Institute who was integral to the school’s Design Ignites Change effort says, “It’s going to be an amazing learning experience to step beyond the classroom with these projects that are context-specific and require face-to-fact contact and audience response. It’s great validation for the work. They are examples of design that goes beyond the artifact itself.”

The jury also identified six promising proposals for honorable mention: Frugal Food: Eating on SNAP; Save Money, Save the Planet: Tag Along; Anchor: Campus Crime Prevention; Design for Eco and Social Sustainability; Sanitation Solution; How Much Do You Know About Plastic?; and Break the Jam! Save Money, Save Time. With the idea that these projects would benefit greatly from a little more time in the incubator, jurors, Michele Ronsen and Mark Westlund have generously offered to help these teams refine their proposals and resubmit for the next round of awards in June.

The Design Ignites Change Implementation Award is granted twice a year to student initiatives that exhibit a powerful and provocative solution to a pressing social problem. Reviewed by an independent committee of creative professionals, business, civic and non-profit leaders, the submissions are evaluated on concept, viability, potential of impact, as well as a detailed plan for timely execution.

Design Ignites Change, a collaboration between Adobe Youth Voices and Worldstudio, engages high school and college students in multidisciplinary design and architecture projects that address pressing social issues.

There are several ways to engage with the program:

» Colleges and universities are invited to join Design Ignites Change to engage their students in social issues and gain visibility for their programs.

» Creative professionals and college students are invited to mentor underserved high school students through an exciting partnership with The Designers Accord.

» Corporations and nonprofits can also participate in Design Ignites Change through sponsorship.

By participating in Design Ignites Change you can gain visibility for your organization and its programs, students can showcase project case studies online and apply for awards to execute their ideas. Opportunities to engage with your community by mentoring underserved high school students are also available including an initiative developed in partnership with The Designers Accord. Stay tuned for more updates on the 2010 Design Ignites Change program!

Thanks to the generous support of Adobe Youth Voices there are no fees involved for participation.

If you are a school or creative professional and would like more information, contact Mark Randall. If you are a corporation or non-profit, please contact Andréa Pellegrino.