Social media must-read Mashable recently interviewed the Labs’ dean and founder, Jeff Leitner, about our upcoming conference UX4Good. Here are some of the highlights of the article: How Many UX Designers Does it Take to Fix 5 Social Problems?

“The idea is not to create a website or code a seamless graphic, but to use the skill sets of a UX designer to analyze social issues. “They’re really good systems designers, I don’t know if they knew that,” says Jeff Leitner, the founder and dean of Insight Labs and, along with Manifest Digital’s Jason Ulaszek, one half of the brains behind the event.

UX for Good was born from a late night conversation between Leitner and Ulaszek. Without much of a model for how to do it, they put out a call to UX designers that wanted to take their skills at streamlining digital systems to the non-profit world. UX for Good attracted a glut of designers from places like Groupon, Sears and Cannon, and started wracking up sponsors.

But why UX designers? Wouldn’t something like this be best served by non-profit thought leaders? Not so, Leitner says. UX designers are uniquely positioned as gatekeepers of the technological world and its human end user: They make technology make sense for people. “I think we stand at an interesting time when technology is so pervasive and solutions that take into account both humanity and technology are where the answers lie,” Leitner says. “And UX was designed to solve for that… it is the center of the venn diagram between technology and people.”

Read the article in its entirety here.