We finally launched the new Enabled by Design site this week! It is part blog, part design survey and partly an example of a type of innovation pipeline that we have been playing with internally for a while. More on that later. Denise provided an overview of the new site on the blog.

We are big fans of Social Innovation Camp, and when we first heard of Enabled by Design, who won the first SICamp in April last year, we were blown away by their idea. The basic concept is that the current industrialised provision of assistive devices is impersonal and often downright depressing, and EBD intend to show how 'users' (aka people!) can hack and adapt existing products to suit their needs, and apply a touch of crowdsourcing to design better products.

Any successful social enterprise needs a good idea that gets better the more people get involved, but it also needs passionate people who can grow a network around the concept, and in Denise and Dominic, EBD have that in spades. That was a deal clincher for us, so we asked if we could help them build an initial platform they could use to get started and begin to harvest ideas.

The Guardian wrote a lovely profile of Denise and her work this week (Paul Miller captured the actual paper version). We kinda launched on the same day, but we had some server config issues that caused login problems, which necessitated a full-on war room the following morning to fix. Apologies to any users who were affected.

So far the site seems well received, and there is a fair amount of Twitter buzz about the project. We are very much open to ideas on how to improve the site, which is just a v0.1 to get the ball rolling, so please offer your feedback via the site.