Design 21: Social Design Network

We are committed to creating green manufacturing jobs by using a product design-driven system of creating green manufacturing enterprises, a different enterprise every two years, for Alabama's depressed, rural Black Belt region where it is almost impossible for start-up manufacturing businesses to begin on their own. By starting with the product, and taking into account all the challenges, opportunities of the location, and needs of the local community, we can customize a product - and customize an enterprise around that product that can succeed in that specific location to potentially employ hundreds of people. If successful, we hope that DESIGNSEED can serve as a model of a systematic way to transfuse failed agricultural-based economic regions, like Alabama's Black Belt, with a new, vital manufacturing-based economy that enriches the local community with revenue, the workers with purpose, pride and a future, and the consumers with sustainable products that serve them, and our planet, well.