Jocelyn,

Timely discussion for us here in India. We are introducing Universal Design and Emotional Design thinking simultaneously in the disability community and the tourism industry. Heritage site design for social sustainability is emerging as the current challenge that has captured local imagination.

We just returned from spending the afternoon with Tourism Secretary Bannerjee and the evening with Javed Abidi Director of National Center for the Promotion of the Employment for Disabled People.

Tomorrow the leadership of the India chapter of the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA India) meets with Mr Bannerjee who has called in the Archaeological Survey of India to address design issues raised after I led students from the new Design for Aging program of the India Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT) on a site tour of Taj Mahal in our wheelchairs.

ASTA India is interested in doing follow-up trainings. Maybe there are participants in this discussion who are in India who want to be part of these trainings from design perspective

I was so excited to get my socialedge email today and to see this as the lead topic. Design thinking, particularly as it applies to service innovation, has such a huge role to play in the development of the nonprofit sector on both a domestic and international level. These are tools which can be taught and shared to increase the understanding of a constituent's needs in relation to the service they are receiving. This in turn will increase program efficacy and engagement of the constituent overall.

But the interesting thing that I have found in social enterprise is that we tend to focus on the individual and the idea rather than building a system that would promote intentional innovation across the nonprofit sector. For instance, where do program coordinators and managers learn how to design and develop programs? There are few resources online that adequately cover the subject and if they do, human-centered service design is prominently featured. We work hard to manage the metrics of the program process through evaluation, but could use a lot more focus on the front end to ensure quality and applicability and to diminish post-launch reiteration.

Ryan Jacoby and Diego Rodriguez from IDEO wrote a really great piece on innovation called Innovation, Growth and Getting to Where You Want to Go. In it, they not that "we believe that anyone pursuing innovation, given the right training and mindset, can think of himself or herself as a designer." So I think one of biggest design challenges facing the nonprofit world today is how to share with the social sector the tools and methods of human-centered design, to embed that practice in their organizations and to think of innovation as an intentional process in partnership with the communities they serve.

Ok, I'll quit geeking out now.

This is a great topic, and I love IDEO’s approach to designing not only products but increasingly customer experiences.

While Apple or Nokia would probably struggle to over-invest in design, I believe it’s possible to do so when looking at "appropriate technologies" for the poorest of the poor. Whether you’re dealing with irrigation pumps or cookstoves, I would argue that business models and value chains can trump design.

In the past, I’ve been involved in heated disputes over the best treadle pump design, and they started to ring hollow very quickly. If one pump has an output of a liter per second and costs $100 (hypothetically speaking) and another has double the output for half the price, surely the second is a better product. But even the second-best option would dramatically increase smallholder productivity if it were produced in large numbers and marketed effectively.

Perhaps when I hear “design” I think “starting from scratch.” The principles Joceyln lays out could also be applied to localization or adaptation of existing designs to better fit local needs.

The other point I would add is the value of working with local designers/inventors/technicians. Spending a night in the village is great, but even spending months or years à la Peace Corps may not give you sufficient mastery of the local context.

I edited an article several years ago about Carl Bielenberg, an unsung hero of appropriate technology, that may be of interest: http://www.enewsbuilder.net/whatworks/e_article000193305.cfm

Jocelyn, and everyone else, keep up the good work!

Hello,

I think design thinking is extremely important for us social entrepreneurs, especially for one like me who's in a third world country (the Philippines) where

(1) it's more challenging to break out of the norm of traditional nonprofit projects and

(2) the social inequality is so big that it's a feat to be able to create something that's relevant and understandable for both potential givers and beneficiaries.

We specifically need help in

(1) creating a window for potential angels to fund our projects where the idea of social entrepreneurship and hybrid companies are explained,

(2) introducing the concept of social entrepreneurship to existing nonprofit orgs that have fallen into the trap of over-dependency, and

(3) transforming successful ventures into replicable models.

Thanks for the opportunity to share. Hope this helped!

I was thrilled to read the article about Design Thinking and see Edison's light bulb/Industry mentioned. Here's a link to a blog article I wrote in 2006 to illustrate how I was applying this same thinking to design a support infrastructure to help volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs reach impoverished kids throughout inner city Chicago and other big cities. http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/2006/01/making-vision-of-dr-king-reality.html

Design thinking is critical to this process because it helps you visualize all of the components of a blueprint needed to build a house or a building. If applied to a social change activity, such as raising a child from first grade to first child, using this type of thinking can help people see the different resources that need to be available at different stages of a child's growth. My hope is that using such tools can lead to more people working together for a common goal, as well as more resource providers becoming more consistent and strategic in the way the provide funding for such collaborations.

I've been reaching out to people with design backgrounds, at universities, in businesses and via the Internet to find others who are creating their own blueprints of this mentoring to career, or pipeline to career, so that we can learn from each other, and work together to attract investors.

In this section of my web site you can find links to other sites that illustrate ideas of design and visualization. http://www.tutormentorconnection.org/LinksLearningNetwork/LinksLibrary/tabid/560/rrcid/13/rrscid/25/rrpid/1/rrepp/20/Default.aspx

I am glad that you emphasize empathy as one of the core components of the design process. I'm starting a social enterprise venture called "WALLED" and we're planning to work with out of school youths in the philippines in making marketable contemporary wall arts. I admit that sometimes I get too excited about my own concepts that I tend to be insensitive about the realities of our primary stakeholders. While great ideas have their value, things would not work if the rest of the players do not see them in the same light.

thanks

I am an anthropologist and curious to know, whether IDEO and similar initatives are in contact with the growing number of corporate anthropologists/ethnographers, who are using exactly the same kind of methodology – short-time fieldwork, empathy, story-telling - to „get to know their customers“, either to localize existing products or come up with completely new ideas. Many of them are doing great work by using the ethnographic perspective. They are dis-aggregating the often stereotypical notions found in ethnic marketing, which presuppose the exsistance of huge cultural groups – „Black Americans“, „Indians“ - and which result in pidgeon-wholing, rather than understanding.

Since 2005 corporate ethnographers gather for an annual conference, called EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference). Here is the next one, to take place in Copenhagen: http://www.epic2008.com/

Here are some examples: - „Nokia’s Design Research for Everybody,” Business Week, 14 March 2007. http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/mar2007/id20070314_689707.htm - Stokes Jones, “From Ancestors to Herbs: innovation according to the ‘protestant re-formulation’ of African Medicine”, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2006(1):177-197, (this is an illuminating piece of ethnographic research for Procter&Gamble, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be online anymore)

As a co-founder of www.betterplace.org, a Berlin-based plattform for online donations, I have also been involved in a design project for the bop-market. „The other“ WTO (world toilet organization) posted a project on betterplace, looking for designers to come up with stylish toilet designs. http://www.betterplace.org/projects/236

Since the project started, I have been amazed at how many people in the German design world are eager to contribute to a project with a social goal. 2 well-known German designers, Axel Kufus and Werner Aisslinger, signed up as volunteers and are working with their students on appropriate sanitation design. Guided by Jack Sim, founder of the WTO they are starting to collaborate with two local NGOs in India and Bangladesh. The German development agency GTZ has also supplied the team with expertise and we are currently trying to enlist the support of Wall AG, a major German „city furnisher“ who combines public santiation with advertising and is interested to gain know how about new local markets. The potential synergies of projects like this are really exciting!

Hi Jocelyn, excellent topic, thanks for posting this for discussion. some food for thoughts on the 3 questions asked: question 1> in many ways, but to make it simple - combine imagination, feelingisation, simplification and desirability with the social entrepeneur innovative, energetic and unreasable thinking which is rooted in the entrepeneur's can do attitude - create tangibles for their ideas - as a communication platform, design is a great tool to facilitate diverse languages (from the entrepeneur, to technical partners, to business and users)

question 2> biggest challenges - first is how to be understood...there is a serious language gap between what Design is and what the general public and some professions think it is. we should address this challenge and maybe create a new set of names to label what we are about and what we want to be - as an activity of many activities, i think one of the biggest challenges is about sustainability. Design was used to promote the world of consumption, and most problems we face now - from environemnt to economics and social - are rooted in design decisions. we can solve them through good design thinking, which means new thinking and the shift from ROI to COI (consequences on investment) - the new culture: I feel (and think) our world is moving from an economy of products, plenty and profit - which the metrics of success is MORE, to the world of people, planet and profit, in which the success metrics is BETTER. the challenge for design is how to create credible metrics and promote them, together with the business and political drivers of our economy.

question 3> fascinating question! - from my experience, social entreprises do use design thinking, from their own nature (they are solving a problem, improving a service, creating opportunities for excluded users, as well as vision-driven, empathic and highly creative...that is a lot of design thinking and innovative process already!) - part of the barriers for design/ers to get involved is the image of design (percieved as either expensive or a tool for pretification of useless products), therefore we should work seriously on establishing the right image for design in this market - generousity: i feel today's best brands and business success is rooted in a formula of shareability, i.e. give and share as much as possible what we have, where the returns are generated by the value created to a significant community, and not direct pay. Design and designers may need new models of working, such as being more generous and able to share their ideas and knowledge. - evidence: a lot is being said and claimed, but not that much care is put on building evidence of what design is doing in our world. Quoting Bruce Mao: For most of us, design is invisible. Until it fails. we may need to make it more visible when it doesn't fail!

I will continue to follow this thrilling debate, and would be great to share experiences. Maybe we could make some group case studies, to raise our awareness, or unlock new thinking!

Cheers! Maria Ana