Find your significant others.

It's one thing to dissolve the barriers that exist between the academic world and real life. It's another thing altogether to tackle the barriers that exist among designers on both sides of the divide. "Architects have always treated designers badly," says Tigerman, who is an architect himself and who had been close friends with Maddox for 20 years when they launched Archeworks. "The fact that there are two of us here is symbolic and deliberate. Archeworks would not have worked if it were the patrimony of a single person from a particular discipline."

Cross-pollination among students at Archeworks is also crucial. About one-third of them are architects, like Tigerman. Another third are interior designers, like Maddox, or industrial designers who work in product development. The rest are what Tigerman calls the program's "significant others" -- lawyers, art historians, retail-display designers, anthropologists, and experts in other fields.

Why do most design schools keep people from different disciplines isolated from one another? "There are too many tensions between departments," Maddox claims. "Those few institutions that even have engineers and architects and materials scientists all on the same campus tend to pit those groups against one another. The goal seems to be to get people to compete for funding. So why would those groups want to collaborate?"

They would if they could see how many sparks fly when you form the sort of interdisciplinary groups that Archeworks establishes. At Archeworks, the team that was formed to create a more attractive head pointer included a nurse, a former shoe designer for Nike, and a recent architecture-school graduate. The designer knew of a lightweight metal composite material that the team could use to make the frame and the pointer.

The architecture student figured out the optimal construction pattern for the elastic bands that would hold the pointer to the user's head. The nurse helped the team test the product on a patient. Within a year, the pointer was in production, and it rapidly became an industry standard. Today, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago receives royalties on the sale of the device.

Bring your best stuff to the masses.

Big design firms had not lined up outside the Rehabilitation Institute, clamoring for a chance to redesign head pointers. Which is precisely why Maddox grabbed the project for her students. "When we started, we wanted to become the people you call on to help in places with no funding," she says, "places where what seems like a small impact could make a major difference."

This year, Archeworks has taken on three such projects. One is helping the Illinois Department of Welfare reroute its delivery system -- and its image. "We're thinking about the many ways in which design could help change a system like this one," Maddox says. "Can we change the way welfare money is received -- change it in such a way that people might be more inspired to go out and get a job?" Products for Alzheimer's patients and interior design for federal housing for disabled people are also on the drawing board.

"Design has always served a pretty elite group of customers," Maddox says, noting that the best design is often available only to people who can afford to pay for it -- the people who may need it the least. "Design shapes the way we live. So it ought to serve everyone."

Ron Lieber (rlieber@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer. Contact Eva Maddox by email (emaddox@evamaddoxassociates.com), or visit Archeworks on the Web (www.archeworks.org).

Sidebar: What's Fast

"As a general rule, the people who have the most money always get the best design," Eva Maddox explains. "At Archeworks, we think that it's the people who don't have much money who are in need of the best design." Here are Maddox's principles for design that makes a difference.

Everything starts with education.

Everyone involved in an Archeworks mission has to know what its goals are -- and why. To effect social change through good design, Maddox has to educate several different constituencies: students, social-service agencies, and other clients.

Look for projects that are getting the least attention.

Diseases and disorders -- and the tools that help people cope with them -- go in and out of style in the design world. Little has been done to design products that assist people with Alzheimer's disease. Archeworks students experimented with various memory-aiding devices, but once they learned that Alzheimer's patients have a lot of trouble getting in and out of cars, they settled on an entirely different product: a walker that doubles as a horizontal board to help people slide in and out of cars -- a product that can help not only Alzheimer's patients but also anyone who has a limited ability to move around.

Remember who your real customers are.

All service firms -- particularly design firms -- need to keep in mind the people for whom they're really working. For instance, by talking to caregivers, the students working with Alzheimer's patients realized that their new product was most useful to those who help people with Alzheimer's get in and out of cars. "I've always felt that our real customers are our customers' customers," Maddox says. "If you don't keep those people in mind -- ask for their input -- then you probably won't be able to improve their lives through your work."