Congratulations Jessica Vechakul! She has become one of only eight inaugural IDEO.org fellows, http://t.co/HbMf0esH. These applicants were chosen out of 400 applicants to “work, learn, grow and innovate ways to make the world a better place.”

Jessica Vechakul is proud to be working with IDEO.org on human-centered design for poverty-alleviation. Her doctoral dissertation will be based upon these real-world projects with development organizations. Her research interests include:

• developing a framework for evaluating the impact of design in the social sector
• figuring out how to spread transparent stories of success and failures with generalizable lessons for the design and social sectors
• analyzing whether and how human-centered design methods are adapted based on project sector (agriculture, water, etc.), type of deliverable (product, service, or process), or stakeholder demographics (literacy, gender, culture, etc.)”

IDEO.org‘s goals are to reduce poverty through human-centered design projects. In IDEO.org‘s words: “through the IDEO.org Fellowhship Program, we’ll foster a community of future leaders with expertise in design thinking, then let them loose on the world. ”

Jessica’s BEST research is in the area of Design for Development: http://best.berkeley.edu/drupal/node/44