One of the most valuable graduate seminars I took at CCA (though I realized it in retrospect, of course, as I was in the final, burned-out throes of thesis work at the time) was a visual anthropology seminar team taught by an IDEO designer and social anthropologist. The course reader was heavy on Geertz, Mitchell, and the like. Our fieldwork methodology was based on IDEO’s, obviously, which I was intrigued to find (via Todd Walker’s Tumblr, Designing Innovations) has recently been made public as a crowd-sourced design initiative. OpenIDEO is “a global community that will draw on your optimism, inspiration, opinions and ideas to solve problems together for the collective social good.”
OpenIDEO’s beta site has been live for just a couple of weeks; as of 9 August, it received 33k visits, 23k absolute unique visitors, 126k pageviews from 121 countries, according to a recent post (replete with Google Maps datavis, natch). As of today, 3,890 users have registered. I just became user number 3,891 after reading one of the more thorough user agreements I’ve seen on a website in a good, long time; here’s an approximation via the FAQ. (And also: Isn’t this the most adorable Vimeo project pitch evaaar?)
