About Us
For too long, too much of the world’s population has been left out of typical design processes. Through the co-design of products, services and policies, the lives of more than 2 billion people around the globe can be dramatically improved.
We believe in the power and potential of design. We strive to push the field forward with every engagement.
Our Journey
2008 -
Where We Started
Back in 2008, there was a critical gap in the delivery of aid to communities in need. Many NGOs had ambitious visions to improve conditions in underserved communities around the world, but there was no system in place to bring in the designers trained to make the products those NGOs needed to realize their mission.
Catapult Design was founded in 2008 to do just that: to help clients meet the needs of the underserved.
How We’re Evolving
Since then, Catapult has established itself as a leader in the movement it helped create: social impact design. We have learned a great deal from our experience leading projects and from the communities with whom we have worked. We continue to explore new roles for designers that include creating deep, meaningful local design partnerships in our priority regions. In those moments when we aren’t designing products and systems, we stay busy building capacity and doing research to continue to grow and innovate.
We are also highly committed to ensuring that our work is firmly embedded into the local and global systems so they can be sustainable. Our goal is to help our clients, partners, and end-users explore, prototype, and realize solutions capable of driving social change. We excel at turning those ideas into reality.
Our Mission
How we turn ideas into action
Catapult Design is a non-profit design firm that works in two ways:
The net benefit of our activities is nothing less than a substantial improvement in the lives of those who have long been overlooked by traditional design models.
We provide product design, design education, and design strategy services to organizations working to ignite social change. Using this fee-for-service model, we reinvest all profits to grow the organization and pursue our mission.
We identify areas where design is most needed, and rather than waiting for a client to provide the funding, we raise money for our own concepts in the form of grants, donations, and sponsorships, allowing us to be more proactive.
Core Values
Humility
The impact world is littered with well-meaning solutions that serve the ego of the implementer, not the needs of the end-user. We prioritize community needs and put in the work to identify and understand them.
Collaboration
The founders of Catapult Design witnessed organizations recreating wheels and spending critical dollars developing solutions that are completely inconsiderate of communities. Catapult Design collaborates with experts, end-users, and implementers to develop solutions capable of change.
Integrity
The lack of honesty with our partners is a disservice. The organizations we work with choose us because they want to achieve results. We are not afraid to provide constructive feedback and to protect the process in order to arrive at a better solution.
Initiative
Catapult Design seeks out entrepreneurial team members who have demonstrated an ability to pursue their passion. The challenges we are tasked with typically have not been solved in decades—our team members go the extra mile because they’re motivated to solve them.
Discipline
We don’t apply a band-aid to wounds that require stitches. We make the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order to our activity in order to produce our intended result.
