frog design and Austin Center For Design To Host "Design For Impact" Bootcamp

AUSTIN, TX- April 8, 2010 - Global innovation firm frog design and Austin Center for Design are pleased to announce and host a one-day “Design For Impact” Boot Camp. Held on Saturday, April 24th, this free event is intended for designers, technologists, marketers, and other professionals who are interested in extending their skill set into the realm of social innovation and design for impact.

Founded by frog Associate Creative Director Jon Kolko, Austin Center for Design (AC4D) is a new kind of educational institution launched in March 2010 with a mission to transform society through design and design education. Recognizing the growing desire amongst designers to create meaningful change, “Design for Impact” aims to redirect creative design efforts to tackle humanitarian problems. The design process is purposefully applied to issues of poverty, access to clean drinking water, equality of education, and other global challenges, and the outcome is a combination of products, services, and systems that are intended to better the human experience.

“My vision is that the hard work and dedication that designers put into making physical products, digital artifacts, and strategy work for Fortune 500 clients can be refocused on large-scale social concerns, and that new business models can be created to make this redirection of talent sustainable for all involved,” said Jon Kolko, associate creative director for frog design and director of the AC4D.

Facilitated by designers from frog design, faculty from the AC4D, and other creative organizations including Thinktiv, the workshop is open to all levels of design ability. To learn more and sign up, please visit: http://www.austincenterfordesign.com/bootcamp/

In addition to its support for AC4D, frog design is invested in several other social innovation initiatives. It recently announced a collaboration with Movirtu, a for-profit social enterprise that offers simple low cost access to mobile phones for people living on less than $2/day in Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia. frog also serves as the lead design and innovation partner for PopTech, with which it successfully launched Project Masiluleke, a groundbreaking effort that uses mobile technology to address the HIV and TB epidemics in South Africa.

About Austin Center for Design

Austin Center for Design (AC4D) exists to transform society through design and design education. This transformation occurs through the development of design knowledge directed towards all forms of social and humanitarian problems.

The Center offers an innovative curriculum that repositions creative design education in the context of designing for the public sector. Students learn the interdisciplinary skills of creative design thinking, as applied to solving complicated problems of society and culture.

These skills broadly include divergent thinking, ideation, visualization, synthesis, prototyping, and the managing of complexity and data organization. Students use these skills to develop systems, services, products, and new business models that address pressing social issues.

About frog design, inc.

frog design is a global innovation firm and works with the world's leading companies, helping them to create and bring to market meaningful products, services, and experiences. frog's multidisciplinary process reveals valuable consumer and market insights and inspires lasting, humanizing solutions. With a team of more than 450 designers, technologists, strategists, and analysts, frog delivers fully convergent experiences that span multiple technologies, platforms, and media. frog works across a broad spectrum of industries, including consumer electronics, telecommunications, healthcare, media, education, finance, retail, and fashion. Clients include Disney, GE, HP, Logitech, Microsoft, MTV, Seagate, Siemens, Yahoo! and others. Founded in 1969, frog is headquartered in San Francisco, with studios in Amsterdam, Austin, Milan, Munich, New York, Seattle, and Shanghai. frog design is an independent division of Aricent, a global innovation, technology, and outsourcing company, focused exclusively on communications. Aricent is owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Sequoia Capital, The Family Office, and CPP Investment Board.

For additional information, please contact:

Sara Munday
Director of Marketing and Communications
frog design inc.
T: +1-415-489-3073
M: +1-650-387-2061
sara.munday@frogdesign.com