Thoughts on this Post: I appreciate the points that Robert makes on how to approach social design.  He offers very practical ways to move the process forward.

Live From PopTech: Designing for Impact

Original Post and Comments HERE at FastCompany.com

The design process really kicked into high gear on day three–Kevin Starr of the Rainer Arnhold Fellows program and I teamed up for our presentation.

Members of the PopTech fellows program

No one is better than Kevin at getting social entrepreneurs to think clearly about their interventions. He set up some basic components of each fellow’s impact model, including the concise definition of their mission and, more importantly, impact measurement.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but I prefer to work backwards from impact, rather than forwards from mission in the social innovation design process. It really clears a lot of things up fast. If you know the specific impact that you are trying to achieve, the steps to get you there become very clear. And the organization that you need to drive those steps emerges quickly. With a group that has this kind of creativity and capacity it is all about focus.

I spent most of the five-hour work session focusing on understanding behavior (no surprise), particularly the creation of what Kevin refers to as a Behavior Chain. As you have probably guessed, I define social impact as the ability to drive lasting behavior within a community. And I’m always amazed when we’re able to get past all the aspirational language and break down a social initiative into a discreet set of behavioral building blocks (like getting rural health care workers to collect information with their mobile phones).

The fellows are an exceptionally accomplished bunch. Among them are some real veterans, such as Nigel Waller and Deb Levine. Yet this kind of simple analysis always reveals major gaps in understanding around the participants and behaviors that are central to their work. Here are some of the steps:

• Define a clear and simple impact statement (something measurable) like improving health indicators in resource limited settings (in the case of Diagnostics for All).

• Start working backwards. Entrepreneurs usually know the one thing that’s key to delivering an impact. In the case of Diagnostics for All, it is increased rates of testing in these settings.

• From there, you can back out the rest of the behaviors that need to happen to increase the number of people who are testing all the way up through the typical rural health system.

• Look at the incentives and conditions that are necessary to drive behavior at each link in the chain. Are they present?

It goes a lot deeper beyond that, but you get the idea. Common sense, right? But it requires a number of things:

• You have to know whom you are trying to influence.
• You must think not just about the target participants in your intervention (the families in these remote communities) but all the other participants, such as doctors or public health officials that are essential to delivering impact for the end user.

This last bit is crucial because the most essential, sustainable, and innovative part of your program may be in how you can deliver a change in behavior further upstream in the ecosystem. That can be very hard to do. But once you have figured out how to solve for incentives related to distribution (for example) or procurement you can use that platform to support many different interventions. This is how people like Paul Polak have driven value on such a large scale. Reaching the customer is usually 80% of the battle.

With a first pass at the Behavior Chain my goal was to show them how integrate design methods into their process to test and refine their chain. I provided some structured thinking tools to guide them through the process of testing their assumptions and adapting to changes in conditions. It was a great session, although I wish that I had much more time with each of the fellows.

PopTech fellow Beth Kanter

I was followed by the incredible Bath Kanter who took them through a deep analysis of social media strategies. She drew some nice parallels between my core message about the iterative nature of the design process and how you think through these strategies. You can check out more on her blog. It was an honor to collaborate with Kevin, Beth, and the other faculty members. And throughout the process we were assisted by the incomparable Peter Durand and his nimble graphic facilitation skills. What a treat!

[Photos by Erik Hersman]

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Read Robert Fabricant’s Design4Impact blog
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Robert Fabricant is a leader of frog’s health-care expert group, a cross-disciplinary global team that works collectively to share best practices and build frog’s health-care capabilities. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert recently led Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the power of mobile technology to combat the world’s worst HIV and AIDS epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Robert is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he teaches a foundation course in Interaction Design. In 2009, he joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York and is a faculty member of the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellowship Program. A regular speaker at conferences and events, Robert recently gave a keynote speech at the 2009 IxDA Interaction Conference. He is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including I.D. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Thoughts on this Article: While there are many good points here, it almost sounds like Design Thinking is being presented as the solution to ALL problems.  We need to be careful not to oversell Design Thinking.  Promising more than it can deliver will quickly degrade the momentum that the process is gaining.

Magazine and Original Post Here

In the present crisis scenario, deep needs are emerging for a reformulation of values, activated on a collective level through the talent and passion of creative people (not just professional designers) who become the conveyors of a worldview, a new capacity to be concrete. In pursuit of new forms of pragmatism, we find not only the energy and character of the master, but also the new abilities of those who, through personal projects, prove they can enrich their own existence without simply following the directions already indicated by others.

In consumption, too, a perspective of ‘design thinking’ emerges, capable of grasping the quality of products, based on knowledge or perception, intuition or culture. The new rules of the game emerge form the new conception of personal happiness.

From the strictly economic dimension that has prevailed in recent decades, we are shifting – in terms of collective perception – to a dimension in which the human quality of relationships and experiences takes on a force that is equal or greater to that of the material quality of consumption.

The challenge for businesses oriented toward this widespread design attitude, then, is to guarantee clients an offering of products and services capable of playing a role of mediation between the happiness of persons, understanding new qualities of life, rethinking the starting conditions for happiness, and the concrete practices through which to make these things possible.

This is where everyday intelligence is transformed into design thinking, when consum-authors think concretely about their quality of life and experience, assessing the value of an object, a product, a form, a material. In this rethinking, there is a new central focus on the quality of time, space and the body, reformulating economic and technological dreams of consumption.

The perspective becomes one of a contemporary condition that is anything but banal and standardized, that proposes the revolutionary capacity for each person to set the borders of his own normality. The intelligence required for this design exercise is versatile, not focusing only on the emotional side or the rational side: the decisive challenge for the future becomes to imagine design, productive and commercial paths that manage to balance these different aspects.

Many entrepreneurs and designers we have interviewed for this issue of Interni on Design Thinking have incorporated this rule of the game in their activities: a virtuous encounter between reason and passion, indicating a precise, profound ‘Italian way’ of doing things that is a direct heritage of the Renaissance workshop. In this game, giving is equal to receiving: a more or less articulate expression of a link of affection, symbolic or perceived. The need for this link is now becoming more and more evident, while the legitimacy of trade, in which value coincides with price, is definitively disrupted. If we shift our viewpoint to the sphere of marketing, we realize that the logic of the target excludes this exchange, makes mutual relationships impossible, because when you reach a target you kill it, you don’t want to listen to it or to serve it, you try to isolate it, depriving it of its social capital, outside its context of life, and above all beyond its character, that cannot be reduced to a standard profile.

Marketing divides where design joins, through its capacity for shared passion: just consider the products of Apple, immune to crisis or segmentation. What is normally of interest is to work in an economy of scale, through the erasure of personal character, replaced by single, isolated individuals, equivalent to one another, targets ready for a one-to-one strategy, like a surgical war with every single consumer, which would actually be impossible to implement, due to the clear imbalances and expenditures of energy required. In this outlook, the consumer has become the enemy, and this is the real reason behind the crisis: there may be a king, the focus of corporate concerns, but he is a king who commands an enemy nation.

Design Thinking helps us to get out of this rut. How many companies look their customers in the eye? How many managers look into the eyes of their own companies? To decide on the right thing to do, starting with their own experience and abilities? To courageously take the responsibility for decisions outside the usual schemes? In recent years there has been a sort of uprooting of the gaze and of thought, we have avoided trying different viewpoints, especially those of real, concrete, vital people. And many consumers have noticed that companies and their products are no longer capable of proposing a worldview: they have become enemies, desperately trying to impose, to deceive, to persuade, to brand reality and the territory: and this is no longer acceptable.

Distinctions between company and company, product and product are increasingly frequent, evaluated on the basis of value codes, ethical behaviors, processes of production and communication. This is the rise of the consum-author and the development of his design attitude. Certain eras have an encoded system of aesthetic rules that are happily shared, after a certain period of mental incubation.

The Italian Renaissance is perhaps the most emblematic example. A happy period thrives on cultural codes, in the collective sense of the term, on artistic habits, shared terminology. In the postmodern phase from which we are emerging there was no grammar, no syntax, no dictionary, no spelling: the language existed for isolated individuals, bent on not communicating. Today, on the other hand, individuals (like artists and designers) are rediscovering the taste for exchange, for communication. Also through design thinking.

It is as if in the moment in which everything seems to have been rendered inevitably inauthentic by the media, suddenly everything becomes true, as if reality were revealing itself; like the emergence of a need to touch, to get back to reality as a starting point. This coincides, in any case, with a slow, difficult reconstruction of an ethical dimension, in which the capacity to establish relations, to make responsible, to share, is more important than simple technologies of power ‘exercised’ on territories, communities, individuals.

This means working on a new ethics, less oriented toward an aesthetic or ideological ideal, closer to concrete life and hedonistic ideals, not egotistical or autistic, but intelligent and relational. Aesthetics, then, has the task of formulating an alternative ethics to construct a morals that is no longer one of resistance (as happens all too often) but of existence, that does not accept submission of aesthetic production to the laws of the market, and even less so to the logics of media.