What is the Shape of Innovation?
Altimeter Design Group, founded by associate professor and alumni Tom Weis MID 08, joined a team of collaborators for the project What is the Shape of Innovation?
In 2021, Altimeter Design Group met with the Innovation Cell within the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) to develop the project. Weis and Altimeter will continue to work with the Innovation Cell and are set to collaborate on industrial design-based projects in Spring 2023.
From the Futuring Peace website:
What is the Shape of Innovation? is a facilitated group activity that pairs uniquely designed objects with language commonly encountered at the United Nations and asks participants to consider complex concepts - like diplomacy, trust, and security - from a fresh perspective. As we continue to learn from each workshop session, we build a repeatable exercise that elicits new ideas and insights each time it is run.
To establish a foundation for the workshop, we invited artists and designers to work across various media and create one-of-a-kind objects inspired by word pairings - qualitative attributes paired with the vernacular of the United Nations. What is the texture of resilience, the weight of dialogue, or the movement of diplomacy?
A video about the project titled "How to Spark Innovation for Change" is available to view via UN Web TV.
