Innovation Blog

An article by: Mark Dziersk, Senior Vice President of Design and Marketing, Herbst LaZar Bell

Today it seems everyone wants a piece of design even those that know nothing about it because design can differentiate. It is the big new thing, the thing that helps to add black to the bottom line, to generate profits. For a designer, design is not about making money professionally, or personally. (In fact, aside from an elite few, those who practice for the most part really don't make a lot of money.) There is a big difference between what the profession is being asked to do and what motivates it in the first place. A really interesting question to ask any designer is how did it happen to you? What was it that first made you decide that design was it? It's different for every designer and, then again, it's the same. It's an acknowledgement that usually happens in or just before college, that time when young men and woman come of age. Endless nights of blind dedication, stale pizza and bleary-eyed intense levels of execution usually follow. What moment caused the epiphany that made being a designer what you had to be?

Nick Negroponte, founder of MIT's Media Lab, is spearheading a mission to empower the education of the world's poorest children, a group which numbers in the hundreds of millions. OLPC, Negroponte's nonprofit, has the ambitious goal of providing poor children around the world with electricity-independent, wireless laptops with basic word processing, Internet, and email capabilities. Their premise is that if given access to the tools and some creative teaching aids, these illiterate children can ultimately teach themselves to read. From there, they believe children's curiosity will kick in, and the barriers to learning will begin to crumble.