Category Archives: Design

Conference Blog: Catapult Labs 2012

Did you miss the Catapult Labs conference on May 19?  Then you missed something extraordinary. But don’t worry, you can get the recap here. The event was sponsored by Catapult Design, a nonprofit firm in San Francisco that uses the … Continue reading

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Filed under Program Design, Program Evaluation, Evaluation, Design, Conference Blog

Measuring Impact: Integrating Evaluation & Design (Workshop May 19 in SF)

Interested in design for social change?  Curious about how to measure the social impact of your designs?  Check out my upcoming San Francisco workshop—Measuring Impact: Integrating Evaluation & Design–taking place on May 19 as part of CatapultLabs: Design Tools to … Continue reading

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Conference Blog: The Wharton “Creating Lasting Change” Conference

How can corporations promote the greater good?  Can they do good and be profitable?  How well can we measure the good they are doing? These were some of the questions explored at a recent Wharton School Conference entitled Creating Lasting … Continue reading

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Conference Blog: The Harvard Social Enterprise Conference (Day 2)

What follows is a second series of short posts written while I attended the Social Enterprise Conference (#SECON12).  The conference (February 25-26) was presented by the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. I spent much of the day … Continue reading

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Toward a Taxonomy of Wicked Problems

Program designers and evaluators have become keenly interested in wicked problems.  More precisely, we are witnessing a second wave of interest—one that holds new promise for the design of social, educational, environmental, and cultural programs. The concept of wicked problems … Continue reading

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Should the Pie Chart Be Retired?

The ability to create and interpret visual representations has been an important part of the human experience since we began drawing on cave walls at Chauvet. Today, that ability—what I call visualcy—has even greater importance.  We use visuals to discover … Continue reading

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Filed under Design, Evaluation, Visualcy

The Future of Evaluation: 10 Predictions

Before January comes to a close, I thought I would make a few predictions.  Ten to be exact.  That’s what blogs do in the new year, after all. Rather than make predictions about what will happen this year—in which case … Continue reading

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Tragic Graphic: The Wall Street Journal Lies with Statistics?

Believe it or not, the Wall Street Journal provides another example of an inaccurate circular graph.  This time the error so closely parallels an example from Darrell Huff’s classic How to Lie with Statistics that I find myself wondering—intentional deception … Continue reading

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Filed under Design, Visualcy

Tragic Graphic: The New York Times Checks Facts, Not Math

Over my morning coffee, I found myself staring at this bulldog graph in the New York Times Magazine (12/11/11).  Something was wrong.  At first I couldn’t put my finger on it.  Then it hit me—the relative size of the two … Continue reading

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EvalBlog Launched!

Welcome to EvalBlog.  This where I—and a growing number of guest bloggers—will share our experiences designing and evaluating social, educational, cultural, and environmental programs.  I will draw on my experiences at Gargani + Company.  Guest bloggers will draw on their … Continue reading

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Filed under Design, Evaluation, Gargani News, Program Design, Program Evaluation