Founded in 2004, the Vancouver Design Nerds Society (VDNS) exists to facilitate, promote and create opportunities for generative dialogue, co-creation and community building. We do this through designing and facilitating workshops (aka Design Jams), and Activations, including urban interventions/placemaking and creative community gatherings.
As an international network of artists, designers and social entrepreneurs, we share a desire to engage design opportunities with a spirit of creative play and openness. Because we are process driven, we are comfortable diving into a wide range of topics – from complex urgent issues like climate change, democracy and data privacy to more playful yet critical domains of design fiction and the ‘new normal’. Diversity enriches our process and propels us forward, revealing unexpected opportunities and surprising results.
Our vision
Design brings people together to think, act and do differently as a collective. Design can be a catalyzer to enact social change and dismantle systems of oppression.
Our mission:
Culivate our collective capacity as designers to support the public, our clients and collaborators to move between generative dialogue and tangible solutions.
How we live our vision and mission as Vancouver Design Nerds:
- Create opportunities for connecting with others through interdisciplinary design collaboration and dialogue.
- Spark the design mindset of people through Design Jams and creative participation in events.
- Connect people in the city with each other through public activations and creative community gatherings.
- Share design skills with the greater public to make them accessible to all who want to learn.
- Engage in design projects that support socially conscious, equitable and inclusive design.
Meet our current Directors and Steering Committee members.
