“How can we raise kids’ awareness of the benefits of fresh food so they can make better choices?”

As the TED Prize team continues to develop our project plans to realize Jamie Oliver’s wish, the above question keeps ringing in our ears. If we are going to inspire families to cook and schools to change their lunch menus, it is critical that kids (and adults) know what is wrong with processed food and why fresh is best.

Today OpenIDEO – a community that brings together human-centered design methods with a web-based platform to incorporate a broader range of inspiration, concepts, and evaluation – launched a challenge to social innovators to find an answer to this question.

You, the TED community, are invited to participate in this challenge. Contributions can range from inspirational observations and photos, sketches of ideas, to business models and snippets of code. Sometimes this can be in the form of a comment, other times it’s building off a previous person’s work.

The challenge is broken into three phases: Inspiration (August 2-17), Concepting (August 23-September 12) and Evaluation (September 16-30).

INSPIRATION: Participants post inspiring content: stories, videos, photos, articles, sketches and anything else that could help the community think differently. People can build off of others’ inspirations or simply applaud others’ work.

CONCEPTING: Building off of themes generated in the inspiration phase, participants offer up ideas to address the challenge. These ideas can be fresh concepts or build on other people’s work. All ideas are open for commented and adulation.

EVALUATION: The community evaluates the most popular concepts against the challenge criteria provided, and a top concept surfaces. On October 8, the top concept will be announced. OpenIDEO will track the progress of the winning concept to show how it is having impact in the world.

Participants can get involved at any time during the challenge.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 7:19 am and is filed under Jamie Oliver's Wish Blog, TEDPrize Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.