41–49 of 49 posts
I'm guessing you have very high earning potential. It is almost certainly the case that the most impact you can have is achieved by focusing on earning as much money as possible and donating as much of it as possible to organizations optimized for making impact. But most people seem to want to optimize the feel-good hands-on impact instead of the total objective impact.
Healthcare user experience sucks. Last century kind of sucks. Find a job at Cerner or Epic who account for more than half of all hospital information systems and help clinicians avoid tragic errors, make faster and better decisions, understand health records more clearly, capture ideas/observations/memories.
The last release 5.0.0 implemented Bootstrap 3, but we are trying even more design enhancements for the next minor release.
A good quote from the book "Hacking Healthcare" by Fred Trotter is: "[I] state categorically that healthcare benefits from open source more than any other industry."
If you want to improve Healthcare in the US please join the OpenEMR project. There are a lot of good OS healthcare projects out there but few that are fighting for the highest level of regulation compliance along with being really good to use software.
First, not every world problem is solvable with design. Being aware that you are one facet of the solution is both comforting and overwhelming. To have broad impact you often need a team of experts to cover the pipeline from end-to-end, so that means things like solving for the terrible Heath Care experience in the US or UK require massive reformations in how that industry has been run for almost 100 years. On the bright side, there are lots of private clinics aiming to solve this - One Medical is a great example (I promise I dont work for them, just a fan of their approach). If you have the motivation to aim for this level of impact that is awesome, but most likely wont be available to you until you have several years of experience under your belt and area ready to move beyond graphic design and into a role as creative director (like Jony Ive for example).
The good news? You can start planning for that career path today. Start small by targeting industries that you already have experience with, even if that experience is indirect. Got a passion for food culture? Maybe run with that. Seek out reputable companies that are trying to perfect food distribution to restaurants and grocery stores. From there you will start to see the pain points that cause issues like food deserts in inner city areas. Start to slowly invest time on the side volunteering with non-profits and groups that are actively trying to solve for these oversights in the food distribution system. See whats holding them back from making big changes. Regardless of what industry you focus on, assume you will always be spending time on the side volunteering with activist/non-profit groups that are already targeting the crisis at hand.
Your journey now is to marry your charitable 'side-job' with your full-time job, and your choices will hinge on reducing the gulf between the two. One day, they can be one and the same job - and youll see the path towards that goal unfold for you as you roadmap your steps to achieve that goal. Sometimes this means creating your own company - but it certainly doesnt have to be that way. Lots and lots of private companies are stepping up to offer people another option than the current, broken norm, such as One Medical that I mentioned above.
Lastly, Ill echo what others have said about donating your earnings. Ill take that a step further and suggest the idea of working a charity initiative into your regular earnings model. If you are working for yourself - this is a great opportunity to build your passion for giving into your pricing. I love seeing places that actively advertise how much they donate and incorporate a breakdown of that cost into their payment model. The invoices they provide will outline exactly how much of your payment is donated and to what organization. By doing this, these companies are not only making a positive impact, but they are fostering a culture within their industry that values giving-back. Often clients will seek them out specifically because they want to support a company that values altruism and sees it as a sustainable business model.
Sorry for the novel-length post! Ill close with this: just remember - always ask yourself what you can do TODAY, however small it may seem. You may not be Elon Musk, but the path to that kind of impact is created step-by-step with every small interaction. Every relevant experience is a learning experience. Volunteer, find an open-source project, talk to others who are trying to solve problems too, and network with like-minded people. We all start out as little cogs in a big machine, but together we can change the system, one step at a time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you call the position "product designer" when it is definitely asking for UX designers? I mean, when I think "product designer" I think industrial design, but this is clearly on the software side. Ah, I guess this is common confusion; from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_design : > Product design is sometimes confused with (and certainly overlaps with) industrial design, and has recently become a broad t…
A digital product designer is basically a UX designer with knowledge of product management. While UX rely only on the user experience and the constraints of the user environment, the P.D. have to incorporate (and understand) business requests, production workflow, ect.
Ask HN: I am but a humble bus driver. I too wonder what world problems I should work on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what the chinese do WRT city plannin given the amount of building they have been doing, and if walkability plays a role in their designs, and what they use for said designs.
There's been a lot of visible experimentation, but I've not seen anything indicative of a definitive strategy. I would be curious to know if there were any lessons learned from replicating old world European towns.
Of course this isn't a natural or old layout however.
Content for school kids aged 5 to 9. There isn't much out there for them. Anything interactive and imaginative. Take a look at the curriculum for ideas of what teachers want to teach, most schools have laptops, chromebooks or iPads.
Are you by chance in that industry somehow? I'm (as a designer) with an organization that's looking to break into this very kind of niche - it's almost the other end of the problem ironically; we have plenty of resources, but very little insight in how it should be applied. Are there .pdf examples online that you would point to as a good base? Would you say the content needs to be different for parents vs teachers, a…
For example we use the exam board AQA for computer science. They give you: http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/computer-science-and-it/gcse/...
which is tons of stuff to plan and teach computer science for 3 years.
But some of it is pretty crap.
If I were you I'd do something similar for primary schools, for example my son has had topics on volcanoes, american indians, the oceans etc. Find out what topic teachers what to teach, the create good resources that code english, maths, science etc all inside that topic. Give them clear lesson plans that cover say 8 weeks of work. Make them so cool and so easy and so super interesting that teachers fucking love you.
Remove all the pain points: - marking REMOVE THIS - testing AUTOMATE THIS - creating and cutting up resources e.g. a puzzle for each student.
so create a giant crate of stuff, ship it to the teacher quickly - if I order it in a panic on friday have it there for me on sunday so I can rip it open, read "lesson 1" and go.
make it cheap so if it saves me time and effort I'll just buy it with my own money.
Make it shareable - let other teachers in my school use it for free.
etc. talk to a teacher, sit down with them, buy them dinner and a pint and LISTEN to them. If they moan about marking until 3am every day, SOLVE that issue. If they moan about stupid testing that punishes kids of low income families FIX THAT PROBLEM. Invent a smart way of revising/testing that solves it. I imagine you already have 20 ideas on how to do that.
If the class needs an iPad or two to connect to your app/website - SHIP IT IN THE CRATE, ask for it back once the topic has finished.
You want the teacher to open the crate of goodies and say HOLY SHIT this is amazeballs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's been a lot of visible experimentation, but I've not seen anything indicative of a definitive strategy. I would be curious to know if there were any lessons learned from replicating old world European towns.
It is my understanding that Barcelona and its superblocks often serves as a showcase for great city planning: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-r... Of course this isn't a natural or old layout however.
https://www.failedarchitecture.com/behind-four-walls-barcelo...