With Intent

An organizer in Chicago for more than a decade, Richard Wallace, founder and executive director of EAT (Equity and Transformation), is focused on supporting Black informal workers—people like George Floyd, who are boxed out of the formal economy. Richard explains the historic rivalry between Hispanic and Black informal workers, his confidence in democracy, the reasons we have an informal economy i...

Last week we talked about technology as medicine. This week: food as medicine. Rita Nguyen, Assistant Health Officer at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and founder of the Food as Medicine Collaborative, explains why doctors should be able to prescribe food—and why the healthcare system should pay for it. Institute of Design at Illinois Tech Discover programs and resources on design a...

As Global Head of Employee Digital Experience at the Kraft Heinz Company, Tope Sadiku describes herself as a corporate doctor. To extend the metaphor: her patients are Kraft employees, and her medicine is technology.  Tope considers the evolving employee experience—really, how an employee spends their everyday—and how technology can enhance it. Tope is a 2021 Latham fellow at the Institute of Desi...

In the first episode of With Intent, Kristin Gecan talks to Morgan Ames , author of The Charisma Machine, about One Laptop Per Child—a hugely ambitious, or as Morgan defines it, charismatic —project with good intentions: to bring a laptop to every child in the developing world. We talk about why that project failed, how it connects to utopianism, and what design might learn from it all.  Morgan is...

Institute of Design at Illinois Tech Discover programs and resources on design and systems thinking. Subscribe to With Intent for more explorations into how design shapes our world, whether we call it design or not.