Welcome to The Design Loft: your regular, weekly dose of skill-building connecting design with evaluation and delivered by email worldwide.
Design is how we shape the world. Evaluation is how we learn from our efforts.
Design is the discipline of innovation, while evaluation informs the development of those innovations in practice. They help us create products, services, and systems that make a positive difference at a time when we need new ideas and wise action.
What to Expect
The Design Loft is a training program and learning experience wrapped in an email newsletter 🚨. It’s meant to give language, skills, tools, and perspectives that allow change-makers to do their work better — whether you’re designing the change or evaluating it.
It’s for designers and evaluators to build that shared language and elevate the impact of both practice fields. If you’re looking to make a difference
Using materials you can easily access from your email, you will gain weekly insights, information, short lessons, and tools to learn:
How to create things that achieve meaningful results.
How to learn better from our work while doing it.
How to systematically look at our work (e.g., processes, procedures, collaborations), learn from it, and use that data to inform decisions and improve our quality.
How to create the means to assess our work that adds to it rather than distracts from it.
How to enhance the value of evaluation and demonstrate the value of good design.
How to communicate outcomes and impact and share it with others.
How to inspire your clients, colleagues, communities (and yourself) through your work as a designer, evaluator and change-maker.
How to create a culture of innovation in your practice, your workplace, and your organization
How to change the world (or at least your part of it)
Each week, you’ll get a bulletin that contains links to resources, news, case studies, and research. It will also contain a short lesson on a tool, technique, method, or concept you can learn in under 10 minutes.
As a paid subscriber, you’ll also have access to live events, ‘office hours’ (coaching and advising sessions), and a community of fellow learners that are connected through Notes, Substack’s less hateful, chaotic, and far more friendly engagement platform than some others you might know about 😉. You can ask questions anytime.
That’s weekly resources, a course-in-a-newsletter, a community, coaching, and live events, all for the same as you’d pay for a couple of lattes and a croissant 🥐 each month.
Like your morning coffee break ☕️ or tea time 🫖, The Design Loft provides a boost to your day.
In short, The Design Loft will elevate your impact.
Thank you for subscribing!
About The Design Loft: History
The Design Loft began as a pop-up conference at the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) annual conference. That year, the conference's theme was design. In the spirit of creative ‘design thinking,’ AEA President John Gargani asked Cameron Norman to develop a way to inspire evaluators to think about and use design in their work.
The Design Loft was born.
The Design Loft name came from the location at the hotel (The Pulse Loft at The Marriott Marquis, Peachtree Centre), first used to hold a ‘pop-up conference-within-a-conference’ where evaluators could learn a single design method in 45-minute interactive workshops. With the help of some of the AEA’s Graduate Education Diversity Interns (GEDI), we delivered eight sessions, one every hour on the hour during the Friday of the conference.
The Design Loft was a hit, and Cameron was invited to deliver it as a regular feature of the AEA conferences until the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted in-person events in 2020.
This learning experience is a way to continue that spirit. It takes that creative approach from learning design at conferences to learning online wherever you get your email.