Hub Stories: Who Gives a Crap? Q&A with Designer Danny Alexander

[Name]: Danny Alexander

[Areas of Expertise]: Design for Social Impact, Mass-Market Sustainability, Industrial Design, Marketing, Supply Chain Analysis

[Memory Lane]:

“I was back and forth between the IDEO offices in San Francisco and Ghana for about three months on a project, a large part of which was spent prototyping. We brought five or six toilets with us to Ghana and essentially spent a couple weeks there leaving them with a number of families for 3 or 4 days each. We tested them by using them. It was an interesting process for sure. You learn a lot by prototyping, especially in a situation where you have to clean someone else’s crap out of a toilet.”

Hub Berkeley Weekly Roll Up: Pitch, Stretch, Eat, and Battle Space Aliens

Good Mix this Week.

Is your pitch made to stick? If you’re unsure, join us this Wednesday for a casual Hub Lab Sexy Salad Practice Pitch – we’re going to open the table for people to practice their pitch/storytelling and more. After people give you feedback with their mouths full, hopefully you’ll take away some gems that can make your story stronger. And after a hard week of work, why not get a stretch in?

Hub Stories: A Tale of Whiskey and Good Decisions

[Name]: Lindsey Franklin

[Areas of Expertise]: Climate Change, Political Organizing, Sustainability Initiatives for Small Businesses, Community Building

[Memory Lane]:

“There are a couple things I have been really proud of in my life. One was working on the Obama campaign, since it was the first real entrepreneurial thing I’d done. I was placed in a rural Republican county in Michigan, and for the first three weeks my office was a local McDonald’s. I was told to create a network of people who would vote for this presidential candidate: basically, I was tasked to build an organization all by myself, with no budget. By the end, we had a network of 200 active volunteers who were excited about what we were doing. The experience of building a functioning network in very little time, with no budget except my small stipend, was very valuable. I was actually on the phone with my head volunteer yesterday, and he was telling me how their last Democratic meeting was packed with over one hundred people in this small room. It made me feel that I really did something positive.”

Hub Berkeley Weekly Roll Up: Doodling

Blank Canvass = Adrenaline Rush

There’s something so uniquely intriguing about that white desert. An empty void on any surface. Even the space in the letter ‘O’; I bet you’ve filled that gap in with a pen or a pencil at some point in your life. It’s funny how these spaces of Nothing, draw so much from Everything. Which makes me supremely happy to say IdeaPaint and AusPen have partnered with us to equip our spaces with these blank canvasses, and the tools to fill them in.

Hub Stories: Q&A with the Curator of Spices

[Name]: Chris Pemberton
[Areas of Expertise]: Cooking, International Development, Travel, Technology, Sustainability Consulting

[Hub Memory Lane]:

When Chris was on his honeymoon in Turkey, he encountered a unique spice blend he couldn’t forget. Baharat, which means “spices” in Arabic, is often used to season lamb, fish, chicken, beef, and soups in the Middle East. The spice left a certain sentimental memory on Chris’ palate that followed him home to the U.S., where “barbecue is serious business,” but something is still missing from the cooking experience.