OpenIDEO: Collaborative Design Thinking

Design and innovation consultancy IDEO, credited with pioneering the concept of design thinking, has been at the forefront of pro-social design over the past decade. Now, they are entering the ever-growing field of crowdsourcing and collaborative creation, but doing it a way that subverts the traditional crowdsourcing model and actually put’s IDEO’s own strengths to use in a curatorial, consulting capacity as part of the creative process.

This week, OpenIDEO opened its virtual gates as a collaborative platform for concepting and bringing to life social good products and projects. Highly visual in nature, the tool invites the community to solve big problems by building a sort of collective intelligence based on exchanging skills and expertise, from business acumen to hand-drawn sketches to inspirational images to lines of code. While the community drives the process, IDEO provides guidance, helps frame the challenge in actionable terms, and prototypes products where needed.

Current challenges being tackled on OpenIDEO include projects for WWF and TEDPrize winner Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution movement.

Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine and Huffington Post, and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter.