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e-Estonia - We have built a digital society & we can show you how

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Experience Estonian digitalisation, gain insights on how to build a digital society & meet Estonian companies behind our e-solutions.

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https://academic.oup.com/book/790/chapter-abstract/135425185?redirectedFrom=fulltext

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Abstract. The human capacity to design has remained constant even though its means and methods have altered, in parallel to technological, organizational,

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"That scaffolding of Design Thinking, that collection of behaviors is the heart and sole of creativity. It includes being attuned to the people and culture you are immersed in and having the experience, wisdom, and knowledge to frame the real problem and–most important of all perhaps–the ability to create and enact solutions."

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Design Thinking is the “mindset” of a Designer. It is the underlying philosophy of design. The confusion is this: If you put the term “Design Thinking” into the images search tab on Google you get results that look like processes.  This may be due to a difficulty in describing a philosophy (aka “thinking” or “mindset”) in the form of a picture.

Design Thinking is a mindset. A mind that is set on creating new and useful things.

The Design Process is a set of steps one follows. It is a collection of steps that are specific to an individual or organization and its unique needs and built to increase the production of invention.

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Design Thinking and the Design Process - What’s the Difference?

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I’m compelled to start with a great lesson illustrated in the book, “The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. That lesson: If you take the manufacturing process developed by Toyota (better known as the Toyota Production System or TPS), and implement that process in your manufacturing facility - it won’t wo…

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Design Thinking and Human Centered Design - What’s the Difference?

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What is the difference between design thinking and human centered design? It’s hard to ignore all the talk around human centered design (HCD) and design thinking these days. A quick google search of those terms, in quotes, reveals a combined 23 million results. Digging into those results, and the opinions on the topic might make a head spin.

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Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.

—Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO

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Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which is known as design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.

IDEO did not invent design thinking, but we have become known for practicing it and applying it to solving problems small and large. It's fair to say that we were in the right place at the right time. When we looked back over our shoulder, we discovered that there was a revolutionary movement behind us.

About this site

This design thinking site is just one small part of the IDEO network. There's much more, including full online courses we've developed on many topics related to design thinking and its applications. We fundamentally believe in the power of design thinking as a methodology for creating positive impact in the world-and we bring that belief into our client engagements as well as into creating open resources such as this.

At IDEO, we're often asked to share what we know about design thinking. We've developed this website in response to that request. Here, we introduce design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it. You'll find our particular take on design thinking, as well as the perspectives of others. Everything on this site is free for you to use and share with proper attribution.

(From 2008-2018, designthinking.ideo.com was the home of IDEO's design thinking blog, written by our CEO, Tim Brown. You can find that blog here.)

Design thinking in context

We live and work in a world of interlocking systems, where many of the problems we face are dynamic, multifaceted, and inherently human. Think of some of the big questions being asked by businesses, government, educational and social organizations: How will we navigate the disruptive forces of the day, including technology and globalism? How will we grow and improve in response to rapid change? How can we effectively support individuals while simultaneously changing big systems? For us, design thinking offers an approach for addressing these and other big questions.

There's no single definition for design thinking. It's an idea, a strategy, a method, and a way of seeing the world. It's grown beyond the confines of any individual person, organization or website. And as it matures, its history deepens and its impact evolves. For IDEO, design thinking is a way to solve problems through creativity. Certainly, it isn't a fail-safe approach; nor is it the only approach. But based on the impact we are seeing in our work, the relevance of design thinking has never been greater.

Design thinking today

Design thinking is maturing. It's moving from a nascent practice to an established one, and with that comes interest and critique. People are debating its definition, pedigree, and value. As a leading and committed practitioner of design thinking, IDEO has a stake in this conversation-and a responsibility to contextualize its value in the present moment and, importantly, in the future.

We've learned a lot over the years, and we'd like to share our insights. We've seen design thinking transform lives and organizations, and on occasion we've seen it fall short when approached superficially, or without a solid foundation of study. Design thinking takes practice; and as a community of designers, entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, researchers, and more, we've followed the journey to mastery, and developed maps that can guide others.

Designer's mindset

At IDEO, we are a community of designers who naturally share a mindset due to our profession. Our teams include people who've trained in applied fields such as industrial design, environmental architecture, graphic design, and engineering; as well as people from law, psychology, anthropology, and many other areas. Together, we have rallied around design thinking as a way of explaining design's applications and utility so that others can practice it, too. Design thinking uses creative activities to foster collaboration and solve problems in human-centered ways. We adopt a "beginner's mind," with the intent to remain open and curious, to assume nothing, and to see ambiguity as an opportunity.

To think like a designer requires dreaming up wild ideas, taking time to tinker and test, and being willing to fail early and often. The designer's mindset embraces empathy, optimism, iteration, creativity, and ambiguity. And most critically, design thinking keeps people at the center of every process. A human-centered designer knows that as long as you stay focused on the people you're designing for-and listen to them directly-you can arrive at optimal solutions that meet their needs.

Anyone can approach the world like a designer. But to unlock greater potential and to learn how to work as a dynamic problem solver, creative confidence is key. For IDEO founder David Kelley, creative confidence is the belief that everyone is creative, and that creativity isn't the ability to draw or compose or sculpt, but a way of understanding the world.

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Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which is known as design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable.

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Enpower Trading Digital Strategy | Dash Digital Studio

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Enpower Trading sought to educate users on renewable energy and showcase its innovative solutions through an interactive digital platform.

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At IDEO, we're often asked to share what we know about design thinking. We've developed designthinking.ideo.com in response to that request. The site includes an introduction to design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it.

We believe the world needs more creative leaders. IDEO U is an online school where anyone can learn to unlock their creative potential through design thinking and collaboration. Learn more and enroll in any of their courses at IDEOU.com.

David Kelley joins KQED's Forum to discuss the importance of cross-collaboration and how everyone can unlock their own creativity. Listen here.

Mindsets, methods, case studies and more - Design Kit is IDEO.org's platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world's most difficult problems. You can also download or purchase The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design via Design Kit here.

A directory of schools and programs that use design thinking in the curriculum for K12 students - a resource created by IDEO and the K12 Lab Network at Stanford's d.school.

60 Minutes visits IDEO and interviews founder David Kelley.

Kelley also discusses the future of design thinking, delves into human-centered design, and learns about creative confidence. More footage from 60 Minutes' time at IDEO here.

A visual, collaborative space for small teams and large organizations to build, test, and refine ideas - and get feedback directly from customers. Learn more at shape.space.

Want a sneak peek at the book? Download the preface and introduction to Creative Confidence here, then order the book today!

A creative process that helps you design meaningful solutions in the classroom, at your school, and in your community. The Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit provides you with instructions to explore design thinking. Download the full toolkit here.

"Most people are born creative. As children, we revel in imaginary play, ask outlandish questions, draw blobs and call them dinosaurs. But over time, because of socialization and formal education, a lot of us start to stifle those impulses. We learn to be warier of judgment, more cautious, more analytical. The world seems to divide into "creatives" and "noncreatives," and too many people consciously or unconsciously resign themselves to the latter category." -Tom & David Kelley

Tom and David Kelley expand on the concept of creative confidence in this issue of the Harvard Business Review magazine. Read " Reclaim Your Creative Confidence." Available in German here.

Is your school or workplace divided into "creatives" versus practical people? Yet surely, David Kelley suggests, creativity is not the domain of only a chosen few. Telling stories from his legendary design career and his own life, he offers ways to build the confidence to create.

Watch "How to Build Your Creative Confidence" here.

Practicing design thinking as an individual is one thing, but for teams and organizations to effectively tackle their most pressing challenges, organizations need to encourage the right behaviors, and foster the right environment. To accomplish this, IDEO developed Creative Difference -a digital assessment tool to help leaders build or maintain creative, innovative, and adaptive organizations. Creative Difference surfaces what type of change is needed and what actions you can take to improve.

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At IDEO, we're often asked to share what we know about design thinking. We've developed designthinking.ideo.com in response to that request. The site includes an introduction to design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it. We believe the world needs more creative leaders.

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The world's first rent-free, premises free, free pop-up clothing store for the homeless

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The role of disruption in world building | Alex McDowell

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Disruption was asked to be banished in 2012, 2014, and 2015, yet it still is a hot, overused 'buzzword.' Just like many aspirational terms before it, ( think s ustainability and innovation), popularity leads to overuse, dilution, confusion, and fatigue. Frankly, overuse sucks the meaning right out of a concept till it's just a shell of an idea held together by ink on a page.

Disruption, like so many overused words, is intensely misunderstood. Conceptually, the term means to create an interruption into something that is maintaining a status quo. Colloquially, though, it is much more about making loads of money from the newest, most 'disruptive' (read: newer) technology out there. It's toppling old industries through new smart, young, and agile upstarts. In this context, it's not about making change; it's about winning customers, clicks, and clients.

To disrupt is to disturb or intervene. The term came to prominence in the late 90s when Clay Christiansen, an MIT professor, spoke of it in relation to business activity in his book The Innovator's Dilemma. For Christiansen, his term "Disruptive Innovation" is the very specific act of challenging a mainstream company by creating a new parallel product that activates previously un-activated elements of the economy; thus, it creates a shift toward the new offering, poaching consumers from the main player over to the newer innovation. It has nothing to do with coolness or edginess, or even social change or sustainability. Disruptive Innovation, in this context, simply has to do with new economic activity that challenges the mainstream business establishment.

Christiansen has written about how Uber, often referred to as a major disrupter, is indeed not a disruptive innovator. According to his theory, Uber misses the mark because it did not enter a low-end or new foothold market; instead, it launched in San Francisco, a place where taxi rides were already in high demand and its target audience was already accustomed to using taxis. Furthermore, Christensen points out that the term disruptive is being wrongly used to describe innovation that is simply improving upon a good product that already exists - something Uber did masterfully by offering convenience for hailing a cab and paying for it via a smart app. But, for Christiansen, they missed the mark on being disruptive because the initial consumer base did not reject it and wait for its quality to improve in order to drive down market prices; instead, those already using taxis happily thrust Uber to the top of the market. So yes, Uber is transforming the taxi industry, but, according to Christiansen's framing of disruption, their business model does not follow the basic principles to qualify it as "disruptive."

The Case for More Disruptive Design

So, where does Disruptive Design come into play? And can it really be differentiated from Disruptive Innovation? While the concepts have similarities on face value (such as shared a word that describes change), Disruptive Design is very different from the concept of Disruptive Innovation.

Here is how I frame it:

Design is the act of creating something new - sometimes iterative, sometimes innovative, and in rare cases, revolutionary. Designing is an intentional act of creating a product, service, or system that embodies some degree of change. First and foremost, design has to achieve function ( purely aesthetic creative productions are not, in my opinion, design; they are more so in the world of art, which is incredible and valuable and all of the adjectives to describe the power of art and yes there is always a need for more of it in the world). But art can exist without function whereas design can't, so when we talk about Disruptive Design, we are talking about creating intentionally disruptive creative interventions that are functionally imbued with the objective of challenging the status quo and making positive change.

Design is about creating something that adds to or iterates on the existing, and disruption is about creating a disturbance with the intent of changing a system. When combined, the practice of Disruptive Design is to create intentional interventions into a pre-existing system with the specific objective to leverage a different outcome, and more importantly, an outcome that is likely to create positive social change.

When combined, the practice of Disruptive Design is to create intentional interventions into a pre-existing system with the specific objective to leverage a different outcome, and more importantly, an outcome that is likely to create positive social change.

The Disruptive Design approach is about activating sustainability principles through creative practice. It employs a series of thinking and doing tools that anyone can implement in a formulated processes of mining, landscaping, and building; these terms are symbolistic for the processes that we can use to develop a three-dimensional perspective to exploring, understanding, and intervening in complex hyper-local to global problems.

I developed the Disruptive Design Method as a way to fill a gap between knowledge and action; to forge a community of practice that facilitates purpose-driven change makers; to activate systems thinking; to consider sustainability sciences in what we produce; and to enhance creative ideation techniques as platforms for actively participating in the world around us. Really, it's a remedy for the perpetual frustration that many of us experience, as it provides a set of mental and practical tools to help redesign the world so that it works better for all of us.

We live in a hyper-negativity-fueled media landscape where it is increasingly difficult to escape the perception that everything is fucked. But if we all opt into this restrictive mental model, then we are opting into a self-perpetuating future. In fact, the future is not defined; we co-create it as we participate in the construction of what is relevant now. Our immediate actions actually define the future scenario that we will be in, both individually and as a collective whole ( there is so much amazing nerdy stuff out there ATM on this from physicists see here, here and here).

"The best way to predict the future is to design it" - R. Buckminster Fuller

What may be most surprising about Disruptive Design is that it is not limited to designers, engineers, techies, entrepreneurs, or any other profession that's been unconsciously linked to the word "disrupt." Anyone can practice Disruptive Design. Here are the general prerequisites:

Give a shit about the future of this planet

Have a burning desire to participate in designing solutions that address hyper-local to global issues that affect humanity and the sustainability of the life-support systems that sustain the planet

Be open to sharing, exchange, and collaboration

Be a pioneer who is willing to fail, discover, curiously explore, and change a core part of what they do in the world

See problems as opportunities

Are you a producer or a consumer?

Our entire economic structure is based on the idea of producers and consumers. Whilst we know it's a little more complex than this dichotomic bi-structure, there are very specific differences in these two approaches to living in this world. Modern lifestyles are geared toward a massive shift in production to consumption. Consumption is the act of passively absorbing the products of society, whereas a producer is an agent that forms the artifacts and elements that make up the human world. All elements of an ecosystem designed by nature are both producers and consumers.

Humans are the only species that create closed ecosystems, where one is reliant on the dictatorship of the creator. I can imagine you are reading this on a product that is created as a closed ecosystem, designed to create an addictive need for the specific products of the creator.

How does this relate to being a disruptive change maker? It's easy; avoid being a passive consumer, activate your agency, and become an active producer. The hard part is that it requires a rewriting of the mental codes we have all become comfortable with and are attached to for convenience and efficiency alike.

Creativity has always been about challenging the status quo. The advent of the industrial revolution came along and really helped shift the role of creativity, industrializing its role in society. When the profession of industrial design was created, it was all about customizing the user experience to overcome the mundanity that mass production had facilitated. Also, companies now needed to find new ways of getting a competitive edge, and creatives started to be the hot commodity in facilitating this need (a trend we are also seeing again on the rise now with the Internet age). Inherently, though, design, in this context, was focused on adding to the aesthetic experiences of the material world and its rapid advancement; it wholeheartedly embraced issues of planned obsolescence and the advent of the throwaway culture (there are troves of old-school reading on this; here are a few great starting points- Vance Packard's The Waste Makers, Gils Slade's Made to Break and The Economists Take on Planned Obsolescence).

Now we have experience design (in which many jobs are filled by traditionally trained industrial designers), and it's really about cognitive experience design (Tristan Harris, who used to be a Design Ethicist at Google, eloquently writes about this in this article). The issue here is that the designed world is often created to serve the interests of corporations as producers, to activate the latent consumer desires. Creative minds are put to work on creating the financial and increasingly neurological dependence of the average human to be addicted to the momentary emotional benefits that consumption has on us. Just take the pure emotional joy that many of us experience the moment we get a new gadget - the bliss that a well-designed UX offers us, versus the pain and frustration we experience when something does not work according to our expectations. But, here's where the money factor comes in - so much of what is produced is designed to break, to be undesirable as quickly as it was desired! This, my friends, is where the Disruptive Design approach differs from the rest. It means actively seeking out the production of goods, services, and expenses that challenge and change the status quo so that we have more significant contributions to the narratives of where we want to end up as a species, happening from all sides of the debate. And this means corporations must be willing to experiment and create things that go against the "business-as-usual" model of take, make, use, and dispose. This is where movements like the Circular Economy, regenerative business, and product-service system models are so incredibly powerful at reimagining the economic activities that sustain many of our livelihoods, but also have significant costs to the wider social and environmental ecosystems.

After observing the misguided trajectory that creativity is now being forced to take, I knew I wanted to use my own creativity and agency for something greater than short-term economic gain. I also realized that no such framework for complex problem solving, systems thinking, social innovation, sustainability, and activated change making as a result of design existed. And thus, post-PhD into this arena, the Disruptive Design Methodology was born.

Activate your Agency: Learn the Disruptive Design Methodology

The Disruptive Design Methodology is a three-part process of mining, landscaping, and building, embracing an approach to problem solving that helps people develop a three-dimensional perspective of the way the world works and provides a unique way of exploring, identifying, and creating tactical interventions that leverage systems change for positive social and environmental outcomes. Because intervening in the status quo requires a critical and flexible thinking framework (along with a bit of rebellious flare), the Disruptive Design approach initiates change by teaching practitioners to love a problem arena, which essentially is any arena in which you wish to create positive change. Instead of avoiding or ignoring problems, the Disruptive Design method dives right into the sticky center of the issue and then look at the ways in which complex, dynamically evolving systems interact in order to find the opportunities for leveraging change through creative interventions.

Once you learn to be a problem lover, you use systems boundaries to define the spaces you wish to explore, and then find connection points perfect for a tactical intervention (which is often not where you would intuitively think, based on your starting knowledge in the problem arena). Then, because you have all this new knowledge from mining and landscaping, you can rapidly develop divergent solutions and creative approaches for change that build on your unique individual sphere of influence, which is the space we can all curate to affect change on the people or things around us. Any problem from community concerns to massive global crises can be explored and evolved through this method; because it's a thinking and doing practice, it can be adapted and evolved based on the problem. The core pillars of the approach are always systems, sustainability, and design.

Disruptive Design is a way for creatives and non-creatives alike to develop the mental tools to activate positive change by mining through problems, employing a divergent array of research approaches, moving through systems analysis, and then ideating opportunities for systems interventions that amplify positive impact through a given micro or macro problem arena. It enables you to gain an empowered perspective of your role in the world and get the tools to take on a proactive approach to designing change in day-to-day, local environments and socially-motivated practices.The entire knowledge set equips you to be a more aware and intentional agent for change; due to the high demand for our popular worldwide pop-up programs, we have just started releasing classes online through the UnSchool Online. You can dive into a comprehensive overview of the Disruptive Design Methodology in this introductory class.

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Take the full methodology set online here > Check out the overview course on the Disruptive Design Method >

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Disruption was asked to be banished in 2012, 2014, and 2015, yet it still is a hot, overused 'buzzword.' Just like many aspirational terms before it, ( think s ustainability and innovation), popularity leads to overuse, dilution, confusion, and fatigue.

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JKR x Ipsos x BCC: Be Distinctive Britain 2024

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What do you do when you have parenting questions? You ask other parents, right? The Australian Centre for Social Innovation applied that principle to the complexity of the child protection system. Families who 'made it' through tough times support families who are really struggling. For every dollar spent on " Family by Family ", $7 is saved. It won gold in the 2019 Good Design Awards.

Loneliness kills more people than obesity. Focused on social isolation amongst the elderly in the UK, Participle designed "Circle" to re-empower older people in their own communities, rebuilding their feelings of purpose and facilitating more than 20,000 occasions of on demand support.

Could a first person shooter video game cure cancer? Probably not...except that Hopelab's "Re-mission" was proven in double blind trials to improve medication adherence amongst young people with cancer.

A group of Designers in East London developed "Everyone Everyday", rebuilding connections for people in a low socio-economic community with simple acts of sharing food and skills, and making things together, amplified to build micro-business.

ThinkPlace's beautiful visual journey mapping and storytelling for the " Family 100 project " is partly credited with convincing policy makers to increase social security payments in New Zealand.

These are all examples of what happens when Design is employed to make a difference. All over the world, Designers are seeking to positively impact the lives of people doing it toughest. I've heard it called "Social Design", "Social Impact Design", "Design for Social Impact (or Social Innovation)" and a bunch of other things. I am one of those "Social Impact Designers".

What is common amongst these projects, is that by deeply learning about the experience of people facing these intense human challenges, and using that understanding as a launchpad for creativity, Designers have been able to rethink traditional modes of creating social change and as a result have begun to make greater impact.

Now I'm not really sure "Social Impact Design" is a thing, just like "Social Impact Human Resources" or "Carpentry for Social Innovation" isn't really a thing. And, we definitely don't need ANOTHER category of design to argue about who is and who isn't in the tent. I think what we mean by these Design categories is applying Human Centred Design mindsets and tools to the complex social problems that surround us - Poverty, Homelessness, Child Abuse, Financial Exclusion, Hunger, Racism... Humans have stuffed up a lot of things.

Nevertheless, what is building out of the field are some seminal texts in Social Impact Design - Ezio Manzini's "Design, When Everybody Designs" and Lucy Kimbell's widely circulated PHD come to mind. And there's toolkits galore - I like this one from Frog, Kimbell has one too and an obscure company called "IDEO" seem to have a popular one. There's opportunities to deep dive, from Masters courses to MOOCs.

Design is finding a seat at the table in policy development, traditional non-profits, international development, social impact consulting, corporate social responsibility, social enterprise, social good think tanks, community regeneration and in advocacy and activism. Though it's fair to say, that only a few places in the world have made Design mainstream in those spaces. It remains experimental, or at least emergent, amongst the players who see Social Change as their traditional business.

A Landscape of Design from the very talented Matthew Khinda at the Service Design Studio at NYC Opportunity. Yellow Highlight of "social impact design" added by me. (sorry Matt).

And we are probably not talking about the use of traditional design disciplines for social impact either. Great graphic design, and brilliant furniture should be part of the offer of support for people doing it tough, but by themselves they are unlikely to be transformational. Operating in these environments, with the complexity of social issues, needs the use of the more intangible forms of Human Centred Design - Service Design, Strategic Design (with a dollop of Systems Thinking, and a pinch of Experience Design and UX) to address the social problems around us. These forms look beyond simple touchpoints to the systems and behaviours needed to drive real change.

If there's anything common amongst the diverse practices happening in Social Impact Design, then it's that black box methods are shunned. The kind of Design that has heroic Designers in a light filled warehouse studio using their giant brains and creativity to produce solutions and then presenting them back to grateful clients won't cut it. Social Design is inseparable from the collective, participatory, shared power models of design. As Hopelab's Vice President, Chris McCarthy told me: "If it's not participatory, you're doing it wrong - it's the level of participation that is the question".

But at the same time, writers like Manzini make an important distinction between diffuse design (where everyone is a designer) and expert design and worries that "Post it design risks transforming design experts into administrative actors" [1]. Participatory approaches in Social Impact Design range from deep, immersive, years long connection with struggling communities (like the Southern Initiative in Auckland) and light touch creative consultations, where most of the decisions are made by the Designers themselves.

Doing Design for Social Impact gives Designers a lot of power, proposing to work on behalf of people who have traditionally been excluded from power. Encountering that vulnerability means that Designers have to ask big questions about how they should wield their influence and control. It's leading to the development of some newer thinking around "Equity Centred Design" frameworks from the Stanford d.School and Creative Reaction Labs who challenge the status quo:

"We have noticed some people that use design thinking are often separate from the communities they are trying to understand: they go into the community to observe and then leave to create a solution. On the other hand, Equity-Centered Community Design focuses on dismantling systemic oppression and creating solutions to achieve equity for all".

A line that the UK Government based 'Policy Lab' team borrow: "Democracy is profoundly bigger than user need".

One of the big critiques of Design in social impact spaces is that Designers who don't embed deeply enough in the systems and communities they are working in, and don't listen well enough, tend to reinvent the wheel, creating prettier versions of existing models and practices. Or worse, see good ideas sit on shelves in wonderfully crafted artefacts, never to impact the lives of anyone (except maybe the Designer, who gets to do fun work, feel virtuous and collect a great salary).

There are participatory social change practices that have come before Human Centred Design; community development, community organising, public participation. Those community organisers have some legitimate criticism of Design in Social Impact...maybe the reason Design is making waves is that it seems to be able to secure the budgets that community development always needed, but could never get.

I think they have a point, but I don't think they are right. I spent 17 years in traditional non-profit land, as a youth worker trained in those old practices, and I can see the difference design makes. I've drunk the Kool-Aid. Yeah, ok, maybe Social Impact Design is a thing after all.

There's no easy answers, but the Designers who seem to be doing better in social impact are those that are turning their attention to questions of power - the complex interactions of their privilege, their expert status, their role in amplifying the power of historically marginalised people and whether they have the right to make decisions on their behalf. I hope we don't reinvent the wheel. Those older, participatory practices already have deep practice knowledge about the ethical problems of power and vulnerability. If we mash together those older social change practices, with the disciplined creative capacity of design, then that looks like something that could have profound impact.

NESTA's Geoff Mulgan said in a 2014 reflection on Design's place in Social impact: "We're at a fascinating moment when design needs to learn as well as teach if its full potential is to be realised. If it does, it could become one of the defining fields of the next few decades. If it doesn't it risks being seen as a fad that failed".

I wonder if we are in a different space in 2019?
[1] Manzini, E 2015, Design, when everybody designs : An introduction to design for social innovation, The MIT Press: Cambridge: Jethro Sercombe is a youth worker turned Service and Strategic Designer working in Social Impact with non-profit Anglicare WA, and in freelance consulting. This year he was awarded a Westpac Social Change Fellowship through his work in the community and has just completed a study tour to key social impact design initiatives across the world.

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The Power of Designing for Social Impact

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What do you do when you have parenting questions? You ask other parents, right? The Australian Centre for Social Innovation applied that principle to the complexity of the child protection system. Families who 'made it' through tough times support families who are really struggling.

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I just came across this story and even though it is not news, I love it so much I thought I should share it here.

Back in March, Intermarché (France's third-largest supermarket chain) launched a fantastic campaign against food waste. "Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables" (or "Les Fruits & Légumes Moches" in French) highlights the plight of non calibrated, imperfect fruits and vegetables.

Reducing food waste is an essential part of fighting the current World Food Crisis. Fresh produce waste not only increases the prices of other fresh produce but also takes a toll on the environment as energy is used to produce, process, transport and dispose of it. In the UK it is estimated that 40% fruit and veg never reaches the shelves because it doesn't LOOK good enough.

Intermarché decided to raise consumer awareness about food waste by selling "ugly" fruits and vegetables. The fresh produces were retailed 30% cheaper than their calibrated counterpart, as Intermarché was able to buy them cheaper from producers who would have otherwise thrown them away.

Intermarché created a superb advertising campaign (with beautiful pictures by Patrice de Villiers) backed up by dedicated aisles, labelling and spots on sales receipt for the "Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables".

Customers were also able to purchase " Inglorious Carrot Soup" and "Inglorious Orange Juice" in a bid to prove that the non-lookers were as tasty as their beautiful relatives.

The trial run of "Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables" took place in Provins and was extremely well received by shoppers. It was deemed a success with 1.2 Tons of "ugly fruits and vegetables" sold in the first 2 days.

In spite of the success of the campaign, Intermarché will apparently not be rolling the campaign over nationally as the logistics would prove to difficult on a bigger scale. Instead, they will leave it to individual stores, able to source and retail their own "Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables", to decide if they want to take part in the campaign.

While some of our supermarkets such as Waitrose, Tesco and Sainsbury are making some efforts to sell misshapen fruits and vegetables, would not it be great to see a campaign like the one ran by Intermarché in the UK?

Other things you might like to read

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Intermarché - "Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables"

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I just came across this story and even though it is not news, I love it so much I thought I should share it here. Back in March, Intermarché (France's

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Supermarkets Often Reject Ugly Carrots and Grotesque Apples. This Campaign Celebrates Them.

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How I taught myself to code. Litha Soyizwapi. TEDxSoweto - Trialogue Knowledge Hub | Resources for CSI & sustainability in Africa

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Litha Soyizwapi is a graphic designer and a self-taught app developer. His popular GauRider app is the quickest and most elegant way to manage commutes on Gautrain—the rapid transit railway system linking Johannesburg, Pretoria and OR Tambo International Airport in Gauteng Province, South Africa. Here, he talks about how graphic design taught him to think in

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Christian Guellerin - L'École de design Nantes Atlantique

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How Design offers companies a tremendous opportunity to work on their corporate social responsibility

Design is in vogue, in vogue for companies who believe that creation and innovation are drivers of their future development. Managers talk about innovation strategies, foresight, concepts, possible futures, design thinking. They organize their teams transversely in project groups which are united around an idea of what tomorrow will be like, determined that it will be more "enlightened", more beautiful, better designed than today, and of course, more profitable. Design has become a management strategy and discipline. But what is left of Design, the humanist discipline born of the Applied Arts? What is left of the "unique human dimension and the esthetic values of traditional small-scale production"? (1)

If you ask a passerby what design is, they will not fail to talk to you of beautiful tables, stylish chairs and magnificent lamps. Paint your living room white, put a posh white leather chair in the middle and everyone will tell you how designer your house is. Tell them you're a designer and you will immediately be treated with respect.

I recall a conference by Philippe Stark, the great French designer, talking about transparency as the sublime embodiment of design, as if to say that anything that wasn't transparent could not be considered "designer". It was the time of Kartell chairs. Obviously, that is ridiculous except for the talent of the entertainer who seeks to tell the gullible what is beautiful or ugly, esthetic or meaningless, what can be considered as art and creation and therefore divine, or what is common. A white leather or transparent chair is no more designer than a pouffe bought in the Istanbul bazaar: only the meaning that we give things is designer.

Casimir Malevitch clearly understood that "White on White" is only a thing of beauty for those who take the trouble to make sense of it. Design is whatever we decide it is; when it comes to beauty, there are no absolutes, only humans determine the rules to give it meaning. The row of low-rise council flats is hideous, but it becomes a treasure when we discover that it was built by Le Corbusier and that nothing is due to chance. Design is a representation of the world and of things, the vision for which mankind is responsible, the one we want to live with, better and happier. Design is a humanism in the sense that it makes individuals responsible for the world in which they want to live. The designer's work is based on the humanist visions of the Renaissance artists and philosophers. Similarly, artistic creation, from which design differentiates itself completely, implies a result which provokes, at least for its author, emotion, pleasure and values. The designer goes further and introduces the notion of progress for mankind.

Design is a humanism

Humanism is a world view in which everything gravitates around man like everything used to gravitate around God in the earlier vision of the west. The full importance of this philosophy became clear during the Renaissance era, particularly thanks to Thomas MORE, an English Catholic philosopher, theologian and politician who died a martyr in 1535. By going against classical theologians who believed the world gravitated around God, he cited and reflected on the words of Protagoras (Plato - Protagoras - Dialogue with Socrates): "Man is the measure of all things and the source of all light".

His most famous work, Utopia (2), is the revelation of an imaginary world created and ruled by man, a sort of projection of a perfect world, an allegory which is both idealistic and impossible but also sufficiently accurate for us to be able to imagine it. This notion that man can conceive of, or even create, the absolute, good and evil, perfection and Love, stands out from Christian theories of the time which claimed that happiness could only come from God.

Humanism eventually left behind its theological and Christian references, and with Kant became a general outlook on life (political, economic, ethical) based on the belief in salvation through human forces alone.

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point is to change it" wrote Karl MARX later in "Theses on Feuerbach" (3). That is the real challenge. Humanism became political doctrine in the 19 th century, when the industrial revolution was defining other horizons for the notion of progress. The idea is for responsible humans who are not alienated by machines to change the world and make it a better place.

Design and ethics

Whether you consider the work of designers on purely philosophical and spiritual grounds or, on the contrary, on technical grounds, it is clear that it is a specifically human activity based on a moral, intuitive or reasoned approach to progress.

Designers project themselves into the future, they create, relatively speaking, their "Island of Utopia". This activity fosters reflection, debate, an awareness of what is and the prediction of what will be. It fosters desire, consciousness of what will be better, and intuition of the resulting pleasure. This is precisely how Spinoza defines mankind in "Ethics", the work he wrote between 1661 and 1675. Extending the Cartesian doctrines of "Cogito ergo sum", he defines it according to two specific approaches: consciousness and desire, the consciousness of yesterday, of today, of tomorrow and desire, the ability to distinguish what is good, from what is better, pleasure but also, from that moment on, the awareness of good and evil. The designer's act of creating corresponds perfectly to this definition: a conscious act of imagining the future to satisfy the desire for something better.

Today's designers continue to use tools and thus revive the age-old tradition of craftsmanship: this characteristic is essential because it is not enough to be a "thinking man or a project man" in order to be. If we take Darwin's theories of evolution, particularly the ones that deal with adapting to one's environment, we distinguish humans from animals by the former's ability to manipulate tools, to perfect them and to use them as an extension of their head and arm. It's partly through using tools that man has managed to adapt, develop, raise himself from his original condition, but also and above all to change the world in which he was living. Without their tools, designers are nothing but project managers. With them, they become committed architects and builders of future progress - and happiness. "The hand is the mind" teach the companions. The aim is to reconcile the head, ideas, the mind, doing and acting. Because ultimately, if we want to change the world, we will have to take the lead.

Finally, designers create. In a subconscious state, the pencil sometimes escapes from the hand which is holding it to draw invented and involuntary shapes. As such, designers, although human, approach the sublime, something which goes beyond them, a transcendental objectivity... They touch God with the end of their pencil. In a sense, they invent him, they create him. In a world where sacred and moral values are in decline, where robots and artificial intelligence make us question what humanity is, designers, with their ability to create beyond themselves, call on us to find a new definition of humanism, one that consists of thinking that there is something above us, the ability to be able to conceive of God. It's highly unlikely that robots, however intelligent, will ever have this faculty.

If God has a purpose, whatever the religion, it is to teach us about morality. Free from theological references, ethics, a philosophy concerned with the moral judgement of our actions in society, offers a rational justification for what is good and evil. It goes even further than morals. Emmanuel Lévinas writes "Morality makes us pity those who are hungry, ethics makes us take responsibility to help feed them. Faced with the hunger of men, responsibility can only be measured objectively." Ethics replaces the religious values of morality and forms part of reasoned action.

Design is humanist because it puts the individual at the center and makes it the measure of all things, and ethical because it aims to represent and to build "with its hands" tomorrow's world, the world in which we hope to have a better quality of life despite the fact that our moral reference points, those of God, but also of Marx and Proudhon, the reference points of every form of idealism, are disappearing in favor of the law.

What of humanism and ethics when it comes to working for companies whose sole purpose is to generate added value?

Design as it was derived from the Applied Arts became industrial as a result of the tremendous technological and economic boom that took place in the mid-19 th century. The idea was to "rediscover the unique human dimension and the esthetic values of traditional small-scale production in industrial-scale production". The notion of progress was changing: owning a car, taking the train, buying your clothes at Parisian department store Le Bon Marché became the symbols of happiness to be attained. It was, however, important to find a sense of meaning to this deep social and economic change in the industrial products being churned off assembly lines which alienated workers to the point of swallowing them (4). A touch of beauty in a rapidly-changing world dominated by machines.

Design accompanied the industrial then commercial boom of western societies, always with the same responsibility: to produce better, more functional goods and to achieve progress. It is starting to overtake technology and business and to take center stage thanks to the major changes taking place in the world. Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen, former rector of the Design School Kolding (Denmark), in her "A Manifesto for Global Design and Leadership" explains: "The 19 th and 20 th centuries forced companies to ask two questions: What is profitable and what is technologically possible? In the 21 st century, the question is: What makes sense?" The importance of design becomes fully apparent for companies which are considering their future and the role they should play from now on.

It depends on their capacity to innovate. They must adapt constantly to radical changes of context which make their future uncertain if they don't have this capacity to change extremely quickly.

These are troubled times: changes in ecological awareness (which require us to save the planet), geopolitical changes with the arrival of major new powers, cultural change accompanied by the decline in morality in favor of law, uncertainty about the relevance of democracy and the role of politics, globalization of trade, digital transition, the ageing population, protein transition, etc. All these things are disrupting the world, forcing us to rethink it, to transform its nature, to redesign it. If experience is vital for all things, experimentation, or the ability to project yourself into the future in order to better anticipate it, is becoming primordial.

Design raises questions about the uses of the future. It draws them, represents them, gives them shape, purpose and value. It makes them objective, comprehensible, acceptable. As well as making them meaningful, it also seeks to make them virtuous. Design as an economic discipline is a powerful strategic tool which enables us to speculate about the future, influence development choices, propel companies into the future since they have no choice but to anticipate and adapt to rapidly changing environments. Competitive advantage is no longer about the ability to produce better products than your competitors, but about being ahead of the game in terms of understanding how the societies in which we live are changing.

The definition of a company's meaning and values seems to me to be essential, although we must use the concepts of morals and economy with caution if we want to associate them. In the capitalist system, which, like it or not, has historically generated the most freedom and empowerment for people, the purpose of a company is still to produce added value and profit. It is up to businesses and society in general to share out this profit as fairly as possible. A task which is neither simple nor objective, and as such highly questionable. Producing wealth is virtuous and let us praise companies who strive to do so. Let us encourage them, our progress depends on it.

However, it is not reasonable to think that a company could sell products as a moral duty rather than out of self-interest. Morality and capitalism do not go well together. Without being immoral, it is certainly amoral. But once we have accepted this primacy, it is clear that companies must consider their ethical responsibility, the role they play in society, their values and their identity. Their ability to understand new market trends is at stake. It is not only a moral requirement but a strategic requirement. And it is entirely consistent with the goal of generating added value. This necessity is all the more urgent due to the troubled climate in which the values of the sacred are disappearing, and morals are being worn down by friction between cultures in a globalized world. It is a need as much as a requirement.

This need is perfectly embodied by the new managerial experimentation. People talk about corporate social responsibility, liberated companies, etc. The "Made in France" concept is also part of this desire to show off our virtues. These concepts should obviously be treated with caution. What about the corporate social responsibility of an automobile company which limits its vehicles' polluting emissions out of duty, but which continues to sell SUVs, others that would like to make us think that work can be seen as a liberating occupation... Or what about underwear that is "Made in France" from cotton sourced in India?

Considering meaning is something entirely different. It is a strategic and managerial requirement. The importance of being able to change quickly, to go from one line of work to another, has become vital in a world turned upside down by changing economic and social contexts. Change is no longer organized around the capacity to produce or sell such and such a product or service better than the others, but around meaning, a mission, a role played in building the future. Apple doesn't manufacture iPhones, Apple is Promethean, it claims to connect humans to God; La Poste no longer sorts the mail, or sells stamps: La Poste consolidates social ties between the entire population of a region; Nestlé doesn't sell yogurts anymore, Nestlé feeds the world... When the activity becomes an ethical and sacred mission, companies improve their intelligence with regard to change, their potential to go from one sector to another, without necessarily changing their line of work but by defining it differently from traditional industrial and marketing references.

Once again, design has this virtue of representing change and of making it meaningful. Imagining, representing and therefore explaining tomorrow, applying it to products, packaging, spatial planning, multimedia tools - all this helps us take ownership of the future and accept it. It gives meaning to the future and makes it less uncertain. And therefore less threatening. When companies question themselves about their future, it is a powerful strategic and managerial tool.

In a troubled world, designers alleviate uncertainty

Tomorrow is uncertain by definition. What world will we live in tomorrow? What world will we leave to our children? In other words, what world are our children preparing for us while the experience of the elders - which has formed the base of our societies - is replaced by a digital culture that we feel is systematically and irrevocably ahead of its time and therefore eludes us irremediably? Today we hear a lot about artificial intelligence, robots, the end of the work era, and even eternity in order to better substitute ourselves for God, the hereafter, the one constructed by humans to deal with finitude and the afterlife. In short, we are being told about the end of our humanity, replaced by something else with an alternative intelligence.

Tomorrow may be bright or it may be terrifying, depending on the meaning we choose to give it. For designers, tomorrow is an opportunity: they draw, represent and shape the future. They give meaning and expression to imaginary concepts to make them objective and acceptable. They experiment, apply, make things true and real. They look ahead with the aim of achieving progress. They examine alternatives - because our changing world needs something different - in a quest for continual improvement. Designers, in their ethical dimension, provide a solution to the problem pointed out by Marx about the world: "The point is to change it"*. It is up to designers to give it shape and depth.

At company level, leading change is a challenge, since it means throwing employees into a certain form of uncertainty which is potentially stressful. What will become of us? Will we be competent tomorrow in the new organization? Will we be able to adapt? Can I produce something different tomorrow from what I've always produced? Can I sell something different on new markets and with other clients than the ones I know well who recognize my expertise, encouraged every year by a system of bonuses on revenue?

The role of the designer is to render future changes objective, and to apply that to all areas of the company. Its products of course, but also its environment, its strategy, its organization, etc. The aim is to get all the company's internal players but also the external ones sitting round a table and to get them thinking about tomorrow, to help them imagine, apprehend, understand and accept the changes. Design is a management tool. We talk about Design Thinking, but it is a malapropism. It's just design, pure and simple. In other words, designers alleviate the uncertainty of the future that we all, out of awareness and responsibility, apprehend in some way. Indeed, the meaning of the word "apprehend" is an indicator of the fear we feel about the future. "Apprehend" means both to understand and comprehend and, at the same time, to fear and consider as dangerous. It is speculation about what we don't know which makes us suspicious.

Designers have become project managers. In addition to their technical skills, they are also able to communicate, share, persuade, spark ideas in others and improve on them while respecting the original idea. Similarly, they understand the company as a whole: they are no longer confined to using their technical skills, even though these skills are vital to their managerial practice. They are the managers of tomorrow, in companies whose strategic intelligence should far surpass the reproduction of what has always been done.

Designers: from design thinking to design doing

Some people believe that creatives shouldn't get involved in economics and that designers shouldn't work for companies that are too capitalistic or not virtuous enough. That clearly makes no sense whatsoever. Art history teaches us that there would be no great artists without great art dealers, like it or not. For designers, they should be free to work with whoever they want: for who are we to judge for another what is virtuous and what is not? No-one would dream of denouncing all car designers on the grounds that they have contributed to the pollution we are now facing. We would also have to denounce all the designers who work in the world of marketing based on contract renewal, all the architects who have built airports, those that take the train or, even worse, their car to get to work. It is simply not realistic. The notion that "the most beautiful curve for a product is the sales curve," is self-evident and producing added value is virtuous. It is the wealth which must be distributed to all, as fairly as possible. And it is not the companies we must blame, but the politicians who no longer effectively control this sharing. As for designers, they have a role to play in all lines of business and all companies, because they need to change their methods of working, producing, selling and adapting to this tremendous rise in ecological awareness which will radically change our lives. And that is when the whole ethical and humanist dimension of the profession makes full sense. The company's corporate social responsibility, if there is one, is ensured through desig

1/ What is left of the "unique human dimension and the esthetic values of traditional small-scale production"? This sentence is borrowed from Jocelyne LeBoeuf - Art and Design Historian. http://blogs.lecolededesign.com/designethistoires/

2/ Thomas More - Utopia or Of a republic's best state and of the new island Utopia - 1516 - The word "utopia" is formed from the Greek ou-topos, which means in no place or place of happiness (from the Greek eu: "good, happily" and topos: "place". (Source: Wikipedia)

3/ "Theses on Feuerbach", Karl Marx, in Œuvres, Karl Marx, Maximilien Rubel, ed. Gallimard, coll. "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade", 1982 ( ISBN 978-2070109913), vol. III (Philosophy), p. 1033

4/ I am referring to "Modern Times" in which Charlie Chaplin's character is swallowed by the machine, and to the hero of Roger Vailland's "325000 francs". The workman Busard's arm is crushed by the press when he attempts to improve the way it operates.

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Design, ethics and humanism - Christian Guellerin - L'École de design Nantes Atlantique

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Design is in vogue, in vogue for companies who believe that creation and innovation are drivers of their future development. Managers talk about innovation

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Walking the Tightrope: Comments on Graphic Design in South Africa on JSTOR

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Marian Sauthoff, Walking the Tightrope: Comments on Graphic Design in South Africa, Design Issues, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring, 2004), pp. 34-50

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Human Dignity and Human Rights: Thoughts on the Principles of Human-Centered Design on JSTOR

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Richard Buchanan, Human Dignity and Human Rights: Thoughts on the Principles of Human-Centered Design, Design Issues, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Summer, 2001), pp. 35-39

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A South African take on human-centred design

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Human-centred design works well with the notion of finding uniquely African solutions to African challenges. Even the seemingly insurmountable challenges such as water shortages, sanitation and poverty might have viable solutions.

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“The solution is human-centered design (HCD), an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving.”

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“The solution is human-centered design (HCD), an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving.”

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― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

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A quote from The Design of Everyday Things

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The solution is human-centered design (HCD), an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs…

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UWC Centre For Entrepreneurship and Innovation

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Human-centred Design: A key approach to solving critical challenges in South Africa (Snippet)

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How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

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the power of design thinking an end to old ideas Practically everyone who has visited England has experienced the Great Western Railway, the crowning achievement of the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I grew up within earshot of