Meet Emily Pilloton, age 27, who took her product design education and decided to make things that mattered. She founded Project H Design in January 2008 and has been involved with dozens of projects tackling social and environmental problems. They range from developing water transportation devices for use in Africa, to helping homeless people in San Francisco design things to sell, and repairing school furniture in rural Mexico.
Ms. Pilloton is featured in a recent New York Times article. Here’s an excerpt:
One project, the Learning Landscape, began when Ms. Pilloton visited a Ugandan school for orphans who had lost their parents to AIDS. “The kids had very specific emotional needs and needed more engaged ways to learn, but there weren’t any good teaching materials,” she recalled. Project H’s New York chapter formed a design team to research the problem and devise a solution: a grid of 16 or 20 recycled car tires half-buried in the ground. “It’s an incredibly dumb construction method,” Ms. Pilloton said. “But it’s cheap — we just built one in the Dominican Republic for $75 — and very effective. We developed games for kids to play in the grid that use movement, competition and connectivity to help them learn anything from kindergarten math to eighth-grade algebra.”
This fascinating and powerful video tell her story and the story of Project H Design.
If you’d like to know more, visit her very cool website here. You can also read her books: here and forthcoming here!
