Every spring, a select group of students embark on a mission to strengthen and solve challenges for brands dedicated to driving social progress within communities.

Guided by Dr. Tom Guarriello, Mark Kingsley, and Melinda Welch, this initiative offers nonprofit organizations and companies the opportunity to receive strategic consulting from some of our most remarkable students. For the students, it serves as a valuable opportunity to gain hands-on experience and grow through real-world client collaboration.

As part of their honors project, five students from the Class of 2024 took on the challenge of amplifying the legacy of Lewis Latimer—an often-overlooked inventor whose contributions were pivotal to the development of the light bulb and numerous other everyday innovations.

Student Team:

• Chanel Gilcrease
• Jackson Dunn
• Marisa Goldberg
• Vidan Ristovic
• Vidisha Agarwal
• Yicheng Qiang

Teaching Assistant:
Michael Shirey

BRIEF
The Lewis Latimer House Museum asked us to evolve the brand to better serve the next generation of underrepresented thinkers.

CHALLENGE
The Lewis Latimer House Museum needed to reposition its origin story.

The Museum is a modest suburban home in Flushing, Queens where Lewis Howard Latimer, a self-taught polymath and patent draftsman, lived from 1903 until he died in 1928.

For years, the brand honored Latimer’s life as the inspiration for a noble mission: helping close the gap in equitable patenting for minority innovators.

While important, this lens restricted the organization – a nonprofit with "pay-as-you-wish" ticket prices – to a narrow output.

DISCOVERY
Latimer's most powerful gift to the world wasn’t his inventions, it was his approach.

Latimer fearlessly pursued his interests despite living during a period of great political, social, and technological change. The child of escaped slaves living in a systemically racist society, Latimer became one of the most important inventors of the 19th century.

He was also much more: Latimer was a poet, a father, a self-taught patent lawyer, an instructor, a church founder, and a community figure who believed in creating environments that invited diverse collaboration.

The Museum needed to bring this approach to life.

OPPORTUNITY
Latimer’s approach offered the perfect anchor to re-center the organization.

Rather than offering a static museum environment to tell Latimer’s life story, the organization could position itself as a space where Latimer’s mindset comes to life.

Focusing on the broader applications of Latimer’s mindset would also allow the organization to expand its lens beyond just equitable patenting, giving it more flexibility in its operations as a non-profit.

SOLUTION
We repositioned the organization from a static Museum to an active and vibrant open House.

Still part-museum, the Lewis Latimer House echoes Latimer’s life as a multi-faceted individual who shaped the minds and communities around him. The organization centers itself around the “Lewis Latimer Mindset,” a newly-coined term that captures Latimer’s unique problem-solving approach: one that fearlessly engages and challenges the world, regardless of the circumstances or obstacles.

The Lewis Latimer House believes we each carry our own Lewis Latimer Mindset that is informed – but not limited by – our unique story. The House invites emerging thinkers to use the space as a thinking playground to explore their own Lewis Latimer Mindset.

The positioning includes new messaging and programming guidelines, as well as a visual identity that explores the kaleidoscopic, uniquely personal, and timeless nature of The Latimer Mindset.

To better serve the next generation of underrepresented thinkers, the Lewis Latimer House needed to think a bit more like Lewis Latimer himself – and empower others to do the same.

See the updated brand and learn more at lewislatimerhouse.org