“We needed an amazing place to have this event,” said Trung Le, principal at Cannon Design, a UX for Good sponsor.

Fortunately, there was a space available with which Le was thoroughly familiar: the Chicago campus of the Adler School of Professional Psychology, for which he served as lead designer. Le and others explain how the designers took advantage of this beautiful location in a recent video produced by the school.

“It was exciting to hear all day about how much people love our campus, love our organization, and appreciate the vision of what we’re trying to make in the world,” said Ray Crossman, the school’s president.

Adler not only hosted the event, but participated as well. During UX for Good, teams of user experience designers teamed up with non-profit leaders and other creative types to develop innovative solutions to social problems.

Crossman sat in with the group tackling the mental health challenge, sharing his institution’s experiences as they attempt to break through the therapist-client model of psychology and help whole communities.

As several of the designers explain in the video, they first did a “deep dive” into the world of community mental health, speaking with Crossman about everything from the basis of his school’s philosophy to details of the curriculum. They then developed several useful suggestions for how to get psychology off of the couch and out in the streets.

“It was great to see the user experience process put toward a social problem,” said Sarah Beckley, a senior content strategist with Manifest Digital who helped chronicle the event. Manifest was also a UX for Good sponsor.

In the video, Leitner commented that the Adler School’s mission is really very similar to the organization he he founded with Manifest’s Ulaszek.

“It is a place that seems dedicated to a fusion of professionalism — which UX designers certainly have — and a greater obligation to do good, which is what we’re trying to infuse UX with,” Leitner said.

UX for Good 2012 will take place on April 26 and 27 in New Orleans. Click here to learn more.

Now one of our UX4Good alumni has weighed in with a brilliant take on this dilemma. Dr. Tae is a physicist just as well known for his skateboarding moves as his academic achievements. As a “spark” at UX4Good, he visited all our teams, reinvigorating their thinking. But his presence was particularly inspiring for the education group — and from his recent TEDx video, “Can Skateboarding Save Our Schools?” it’s easy to see why.

In the talk (delivered as a part of the education-themed TEDxEastsidePrep), Dr. Tae considered how he learned to do a 360-degree flip on a skateboard (surely an activity many young people would be motivated to do). Thinking through the steps of the process much like a UX designer might, Dr. Tae noticed that his learning had little in common with school. Among his observations:

• Failure is normal. As any innovator knows, you may have to fail hundreds of times as a project before you really get it right. As Dr. Tae points out, there’s no point in giving the first 100 failed skateboard flips a C+, and it’s actually kind of insulting to give a successful one an A — the move is its own reward. Just as grades don’t make sense, neither does cheating. As he says in the video, “When learning is the goal and learning is the reward, there’s no point in cheating.”

• Time is flexible. Dr. Tae says that though they may not be able to express it in words, there is something all skateboarders know: “Nobody knows ahead of time how long it takes anyone to learn anything.” If students were allowed to work longer on areas where they have difficulty or enabled to skip ahead when they find the work easy, they would learn more efficiently.

• Learning is more flow than fun. As Dr. Tae’s video demonstrates in painful, face-plainting detail, real learning is not fun the whole way through. Those repeated failures can actually be quite frustrating. But when success is possible, learners are inspired to power through the setbacks. Dr. Tae advises learners to seek “Goldilocks challenges” where the level of difficulty is “just right.”

• Teachers are optional. A really difficult skateboarding move requires self-direction; Dr. Tae says it took him years to learn the 360 flip. Close supervision would probably have hurt more than it would have helped. There is a role for instruction in skateboarding, he says, but only if it consists of “real-time meaningful feedback.”

Dr. Tae doesn’t come across as anti-school. But as he points out in the conclusion of the video, the whole universe of learning is much, much larger than the traditional classroom. Our group of UX designers came to a similar conclusion, imagining an educational environment that went far beyond traditional brick walls. Both ideas are a testament to the power of thinking about how people actually learn, whether they’re mastering 360 flips or particle physics.

But of course real entrepreneurship is nothing like that. Starting a business or other enterprise not only requires the ability to endure dozens of confusing failures, but a knack for regularly learning from those failures and turning them into successes. This is true from the very beginning — in fact, many entrepreneurs embrace this way of life not because they came up with some great idea in business school, but because they had lost their jobs or needed an extra $100 a month to feed their kids. The same is true for social entrepreneurship; think how many nonprofit leaders, when asked why they started their organizations, have replied, “Because no one else was doing anything.” Failure, neglect, desperation — for a true entrepreneur, these are all opportunities for growth.

This may explain why more than five years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is being lauded in this month’s Inc. magazine as “the coolest startup city in America.” That designation isn’t based on vain hope but hard facts. According to article author Donna Fenn, between 2007 and 2009, 450 out of every 100,000 adults started a new business in or around the Big Easy, which is higher than the national average (and double the local rate before the storm). We imagine that when social entrepreneurship is factored in the rate would be even higher. Fenn goes on to detail several events designed to encourage innovation Cajun-style. The rub: remember how many thousands of students canceled their Spring Break plans to pitch in with the reconstruction of New Orleans? Among them were future MBAs, and many of them have been coming back on a regular basis to help the region not just rebuild, but reboot with new ideas and expertise.

At UX4Good, we’re betting that we can do the same thing with user experience designers. That’s why for our 2012 event we’ll be converging on the Gulf. We’re already talking to social service organizations in the area who feel they could benefit from UX expertise and help designers hone their skills by solving new challenges. But as the Inc. article demonstrates, New Orleans’s problems aren’t the main reason we were drawn there. Rather, we are eager to see how our designers tap into the city’s resilient spirit and emerging entrepreneurial ethos. In Chicago (site of our 2011 event) a spirit of innovation once grew out of a great disaster and never went away — we’re sure that with the right combination of talent and tenacity, New Orleans can repeat the feat. Laissez les bon temps rouler!

UX4Good 2012 will take place May 2-4. If you have ideas about who we should work with there or what kinds of problems we could solve, contact us here.

“I would offer that this change of perspective is exactly what the ‘idealists’ at UX for Good were attempting to bring to the participating nonprofits. And I would also offer that they succeeded in doing so. As in any competition, the work products varied in quality; that’s what competition is about. But I am confident that every single participating nonprofit executive left the event with valuable perspectives they could not afford to have acquired by conventional means, i.e., engagement with professional user experience firms.

It is with this perspective that I followed UX for Good-related tweets today, and ran across the entertainingly titled ’UX for Good is Bullshit or, the Pernicious Effects of Doing Good without Understanding the Problem’ by Gabby Hon, and its scathing assessment of the value of such an event. To ignore this commentary is a disservice to over 70 people who donated their time, effort, and in many cases, unreimbursed travel expenses to join the UX for Good conference, as well as to the Adler School of Psychology, who donated the excellent facilities.”

Read more of Cia’s rebuttal.

Carlo was one of 8 sparks at UX for Good – innovators who rotated through the design teams to sharpen or unsettle their thinking. Here’s what he wrote about the experience:

“My job was to learn and ask questions to help these top designers and thinkers work out a way to help social good organizations expand their reach. It was a very thought provoking way to spend the day, I was very intrigued and moved by a few of the projects and organizations. One of the groups was focused on creating action plans for CeaseFire, an organization that works to combat violence in Chicago and globally. I was really drawn to their Violence Interrupter program, these are community members who are actively working to stop violence from happening by trying to peacefully resolve conflicts. I sat and listen to Dr. Slutkin briefly tell a story how one Interrupter was able to subdue two possible unrelated conflicts by having the first group help him resolve the second unrelated conflict. It’s truly amazing the power we can have as a community if we step up and take action and work together to stop the unnecessary violence.”

Read more.

“Among the five challenges UX teams are addressing is community mental heath, in partnership The Adler School and our President Ray Crossman.”

Read more.

“I felt that quite often, 7 or 8 of the 9 agreed on a direction and wanted to move on, but that we were held back by one or two holdouts. To get the best ideas out, there must be room for dissent. To work against a deadline, sometimes, we have to move on. How we move in the direction of the majority without making anyone feel alienated? I tried to summarize what seemed to be group consensus items and asked for collective confirmation. As time dwindled, consensus became easier to achieve.”

In such a large group of talented people, pockets of deep expertise can limit individual perspectives. Framing the problem took longer than making actionable suggestions because of the diversity of perspectives. On the other hand, we could not have comprehensively understood the real problem without that diversity. Harnessing and directing talent is difficult but rewarding.”

Read more.

Read more from reception attendee Kristen Miller.

In addition to being an awesome design event, it happens to be the same weekend as ORD Camp — a barcamp inspired event that’s put on by a few folks from Google, and happens to be invite-only, but brings together the top tech thinkers and do-ers in Chicago. Chris and I attended last year (as the token out-of-towners) and we were both planning to attend this year as well! When UX for Good came across my radar, I realized that it’d be a better event in terms of professional growth — but we were still able to travel and stay with each other in Chicago over the same weekend! Bonus!”

Read more from UX for Good rock star designer Brynn Marie Evans.

Read Brynn’s bio.

Read more from Carolyn, who attended the reception.