Tino speaking at TED as a fellow in 2009.
Steven Heller, Aaron and Spike Lee at the Design for Obama book signing at the Pratt Institute.
Max meeting President Clinton.
Working on the Humanity Calls System Mapping.
Promotional poster for the What We Do event at RISD.
A Better World by Design Conference at RISD and Brown in 2009.
A Better World by Design Conference at RISD and Brown in 2009.
Aaron and Spike Lee at Design For Obama photo shoot.
Steven Heller, Aaron and Spike Lee at the Design For Obama signing.
Poster selection from the Design For Obama website.
Tino conquers the Tentons as he rode cross country for affordable housing.
Tino speaking at TEDxSingapore in 2010.
Aaron and the rest of the panel from a discussion of race and politics at the Pratt.
Promotional sticker for the What We Do event at RISD.
Students setting up a Geodesic dome at What We Do event at RISD.
We work with organizations like tech ventures, social startups, green businesses, corporations, non-profit groups and political campaigns because they all have ideas, waiting to be designed.
We see the design process as an approach to problem solving. We seek complex and important problems because we believe that design can and should be applied to bigger problems than how to simply lay out a page, design a logo or sell a product. We bring a holistic design approach to the processes of starting a business, developing a strategy, designing tools, executing a plan, and engaging a community. Like a well designed brochure, an intentionally crafted song, or a well-told story, every component of a business, campaign, community or idea should work together, by design, for a greater impact.
We connect people by telling compelling stories; framing problems and explaining solutions through the creation of narratives. These narratives explain the problems we approach and the solutions we design to create opportunities for communal engagement and understanding.
Everyone at Big New Ideas found their purpose in community, their motivation in collaboration, and their passion in change. Through excellent design, engaging narrative, and creative expression, we seek to activate and empower communities. We seek to inspire conversations around imagination and innovation. We enjoy our work, and hope you do too.
Client List
A Better World by Design
Providence, RICoro New York
New York, NYEnergy Inside
Cambridge, MAESM Zone
Westport, CTEvolving Heroes
San Francisco, CA
Humanity Calls
New York, NYJosh Becker
Santa Clara, CAMobile Naukri
Bagar, Rajasthan, IndiaPeople School
Providence, RIProcter & Gamble
Cincinnati, OH
Individuals
Zoe Brookes (Illustration/Design), Neil Brown, Shawn Carney (Graphic Design), Liz Carter (Graphic Design), Andy Cutler, Mike Eng (Industrial Design), Chad Gowey (Illustration), Teddy Hahn (Graphic Design), Arthur Harsuvanakit, Natalie Herrera (Graphic Design), Jennifer Hom (Illustration), Andrew Fogel (Film), Fabiola Garza (Illustration), Nicholas Kole (Illustration), Benjamin Laramie (Industrial Design), James Lavine (Graphic Design), Lia Marcoux (Illustration), Pak-Kei Mak (Architecture/Graphic Design), Adam Meyer (Industrial Design), Joseph Ng (Architecture), Robyn Ng (Illustration), Alicia Papanek, Noelle Raffaele, Susanna Vagt (Illustration), Jen Whitney (Graphic Design)
Organizations
Air Bed and Breakfast (San Francisco, CA), Changeants (Portland, OR), CreativeKids (Hong Kong), Ecolect (Providence, RI), Mercury (Providence, RI), Nomadic by Design, (New York, NY), TEDxBrisbane (Brisbane, Australia), TEDxCambridge (Cambridge, MA), TEDxNewYork (New York, NY), TEDxSingapore (Singapore), Tech by SouthWest, RISD, USC
Alexander Sayer Gard-Murray
A talented freelance developer, political theoretician, and friend of the studio.
Aaron is a designer, entrepreneur and community maker with a B.F.A. in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. Aaron launched Design for Obama, an online collaborative poster project, and formed a global community of artists and designers who created hundreds of campaign images. He subsequently joined forces with Spike Lee to publish a book about it, Design for Obama - Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology with Taschen books, Spike Lee, and Steven Heller. Aaron co-founded Big New Ideas and now lives in San Francisco perpetually experimenting with a crazy idea or two.
Tino is a military officer turned designer and community builder with a B.F.A. in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. He grew up in Hong Kong, served in the military in Singapore, and was educated in the United States. Tino cofounded A Better World by Design, a conference which brings together 500 people from all corners of the world, across disciplines, to better the world we live in. Tino was selected for the TED Fellowship's inaugural class in 2009. He cofounded Big New Ideas, now lives in Rhode Island, and is continually cycling from city to city meeting new people.
Max is an activist, change-maker, and community organizer with a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Southern California. Max has worked with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, the American Federation of State, County, & Municipal Employees: District Council 37, El Centro Del Inmigrante, Community Health Academy of the Heights, Global Strategy Group, California's Yes on Proposition 87 Campaign, and worked for US Senator Dianne Feinstein. At USC he served as Student Body Vice President, founded USC's student alumni association, and co-founded Delta Omicron Zeta, a community of student leaders built around mutual development and growth. Max is a proud alum of the Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs, and now lives in San Francisco doing his best to be the change.
Building a framework to grow a grassroots community is an exercise in understanding and designing engagement. Our task was to create a platform that leverages a new community of philanthropists' collective mom- entum for thousands of non-profits.
Humanity Calls is a new platform for non-profit organizations to build community and raise money. Humanity Calls gives non-profits the exposure they need to sustain their work on important issues like the environment, health, education, poverty, and human rights. Through an incentive-based system of game mechanics, user's activity and dollars earn them votes which non-profits campaign for to win the community pot in a fundraising tournament.
Mapping
We began by studying the initial system sketches and wireframes provided by the client until we knew the existing system inside-out. We then took apart the entire system, identifying the fewest necessary pieces required to perform the site's core functionality, and reconstructed it, creating a more coherent user experience. To assure both a usable and handsome final product, we first needed to establish that the website was built on a solid foundation.
From our mapping exercise, we created a graphic to illustrate the functional relationship between nonprofits and donors. When invited by a non-profit, a user gets 1 free vote, that they may cast for any nonprofit they like. Users have a multiple methods of acquiring more votes, like donating to the campaign pot or inviting friends to join. Participation is mutually beneficial to both non-profits and users, creating an ever-expanding loop that benefits the community as a whole.
Drafting
Once we understood the system and user experience, we began to wireframe the game mechanics and primary components of the website. We had to provide easy access to organizations and user information while maintaining a clear, actionable item on every page. The goal was to strike a visual balance that created a comfortable, yet forwardmoving environment. We approached this problem simply first and then built on interface and complexity in layers.
The final design facilitates a clean and dynamic visual experience with all information easy accesible and understandable. We built out the entire system which includs dozens of pages and components that seamlessly fit together as part of a holistic system.
The project was launched in March 2010 in partnership with eBay, and has already attracted hundreds of non-profits and over 5,000 votes a week. We are working with Humanity Calls to improve the website and continually engage users and non-profits.
"Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed" -Thomas Moore
We were hired by Josh Becker, a successful venture capitalist from Silicon Valley, who was running for the California State Assembly. The task was to create a presentation outlining some of the causes of California's current budget crises and to emphasize the innovation economy as part of the solution. We worked through the state's data, think-tank reports, and news archives, to connect and visualize the facts into a cohesive narrative. Our presentation provided the candidate with a striking visual talking piece and presentation, as well as a viral platform for conversation with voters.
Study Data
Compiled Slide
In crafting this story, we designed a presentation to show people what the data meant for them, and how our candidate had ideas to move us forward. We created a slide deck that consicely and elegantly presented the case for Mr. Becker's candidacy, and provided a platform for community organizing among his constituents. By making complex public policy issues accessible and relevant, we helped open up the process to more people, their ideas, and solutions.
Today's economic climate has forced many non-profits to cut back on marketing and technology to stay afloat. We believe that innovative technology solutions can help non-profits build community, cut costs, and raise money at the same time when done intentionally and creatively.
Using New York City as its classroom, Coro New York Leadership Center runs four leadership training programs, each for different constituencies at different points in their educational and career paths. Our task was to redesign Coro's website to better engage members of the Coro community, from applicant, to participant, to alum. Our solution restructured the telling of Coro's own story by creating a narrative hierarchy with a bold new dynamic look and feel, and stronger systems, as a tool for Coro to build its community.
Original Website
Required Header and Colors
Coro New York is one center in the National Coro organization. Working within the national framework, we restructured Coro's information architecture to better serve New York's unique needs, while maintaining the overall integrity of a national framework.
After taking the original site apart, we created a new navigation system, wireframes, and information hierarchy to organize the content.
We built upon existing grids and color schemes, while giving photography and typography more consideration and higher placement in the hierarchy of information. This created directional pathways that allow the interested user to find what they are looking for without being distracted and allows a new user a more casual browsing experience without being overwhelmed.
In the run up to Barack Obama's historic election, Design for Obama emerged as an organizing tool for a community of artists and designers around the world, amateurs and professionals, to lend their voices. Adopting the campaign's focus on grassroots inclusivity, Design for Obama was a collaboration that made hundreds of posters, given for free, seen in windows and offices, and used at events and rallies accross the country to help elect Barack Obama.
Aaron started Design for Obama during the summer of 2008 after over a year working with Students for Obama, the student outreach wing of Obama for America. As their graphic designer, he designined a lot of collateral (think how many schools are in every state). With the help of friend Adam Meyer, and a prompt from Design Observer, he launched Design for Obama.
From designforobama.org:
Many artists including Shepard Fairey have already proven that poster art is not a dead medium in the United States and have also shown how much of an impact a single poster can have. It is in this spirit Design/ers for Obama was created. With the goal of supporting Barack Obama's campaign for presidency, Design/ers for Obama will introduce new tools and opportunities to web-powered grass roots organizing that has already revolutionized campaigning. Sponsored by www.designobserver.com, Design/ers for Obama is a community art project for Obama supporters, whether visually inclined or not, to aggregate and rate Obama poster art that is available for download in a variety of sizes that can be easily printed by anyone. At such a turbulent (yet exciting) time in our nation's history, collaboration has never been more important.
The site was a barebones collaboration tool deisgned to connect creative supporters with the campaign at large. Through the design and dissemination of posters by a grassroots army of designers and artists from around the world, and the simultaneously growing awareness of the Obama art movement, the project began to spread.
Posters began to come in slowly until dozens were coming in every day. As media exposure increased so did site traffic, and posters from the collective began to appear in windows, on walls, and at conventions accross the country.
After reknowned design critic and historian Steven Heller covered us in a story on the grassroots Obama art movement, the requests for interviews and gallery shows started to come in from around the world. Design for Obama was going viral.
Read 'This Election's Poster Child' by Steven Heller on The New York Times Campaign Stop Blog
As the project continued to grow, Spike Lee saw one of our posters, "Did the Right Thing" by Don Button, a version of the poster for Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing." Spike first met Barack Obama at a fundraising party in 2004 and had never heard of Obama before. Barack came up to him at the party and said "I met my wife because of you." He proceeded to explain that it had taken him weeks to summon the courage to ask out Michelle, but that when he did, they went to see "Do the Right Thing" and then talk, over coffee, about why Mookie (Spike's character) threw the trash can through the window.
Upon seeing the "Did the Right Thing" poster, Spike found the entire collection and called Aaron in class to explain what it felt like to see his own poster come back to him, meaningfully altered, through such a grassroots effort. Spike and Aaron decided to partner in publishing site's collection. A week later we were meeting with publishers, eventually partnering with Taschen Books, a world-renowed art house publisher with an interest in the unusual.
Aaron spent the better part of his senior year at RISD designing Design for Obama: Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology. The book was published by Taschen Books and released on November 4, 2009, to commemorate the one year anniversary of Barack Obama's historic election. The book is currently available at booksellers nationwide, online, and art institutions accross the world, including the Louvre, the Tate, MOMA, and the Met.
The 2008 Better World Conference at Brown University. 
Emeka Okafor, TED Africa, speaking at the 2009 Better World Conference at RISD.
A Better World Gala Party at 2008 Better World at Drukee Brown Architects. 
Panel discussion at 2009 Better World by Design at RISD. 
Core 77's hour design challange at Better World 2009 at Brown University.A Better World by Design is an annual conference bringing together a global community of innovators in Providence, Rhode Island, reaching across disciplines with the goal of bettering the world we live in. At the 3-day event, a global cast of innovators and thought leaders are invited to share engaging stories, teach workshops and discuss relevant issues. The conference is an immersive experience that deepens our understanding of design, technology, and enterprise to reshape our communities and sustain our environment.
The conference was founded in 2008 by Tino Chow, Steve Daniels and Sharon Langevin of Brown University. The conference was started as a single event, and was not intitally intended to live on. We brought together diverse speakers and audience from all walks of life to share and challenge one another. We invited a host of thought leaders like Cameroon Sinclar, Iqbal Quadir and Paul Polak and hosted several social events. Better World grew from a student event to a national conference within months. Now in its third year, it continues to grow as a space for learning and collaboration.
The 2009 Conference
In 2009, we focused on building a community where conversation and collaboration would kick start projects. We invited a larger audience and featured more collaboration with local and national change makers, like the AIGA, (Blank)Lab, CORE77, Design Observer, Ecolect, Keeseh Studio, New England Wind Fund and the City of Providence. The conference was covered in magazines and blogs such as C|net, Dwell, Make Magazine and Treehugger.
Emily Pilloton, Project H, speaks at 2009 Better World at Brown University.
Second day at the 2009 Better World Conference at Brown University.
(Blank) Lab Installation/conversation at 2009 Better World at RISD.
William Drenttel, Winterhouse Studios, speaks at 2009 Better World at RISD.
In between sessions at 2009 Better World by Design by the Providence River.
Core 77's hour design challange at Better World 2009 at Brown University.2010 and Beyond
For this year's conference we are broadening our focus from hosting conversations about pressing issues to fostering catalysts for change. We are strengthening our relationships with new and existing partners to roll out new initiatives, including a competition and an online collaborative platform.