Designing for Positive impact
By Liya Zheng and Jeanine Harriman
Published - 18 March 2009
As we live through the worst economy of our lifetime, many of us are asking what can we do to help secure a better future. That is a task too daunting and impossible for any individual to do. We thought a lot about this the last year because we are doing a lot of work in the finance industry where we create products and services that help mutual fund managers invest people's retirement funds to yield positive returns. A lot opportunities came our way that beg the question of how we can make sure that we help leaders we work with to make decisions that have positive impact on the future state of the finance industry. As experience designers and researchers, what is our point of leverage? We realized that our sphere of influence lies in the insight we draw from our research and in the way we do our design strategy work to uncover opportunities business leaders we work with will focus on. We began by taking a look at our design process and approach.
Our core competency is in human insights and helping leaders see opportunities
In the past our design approaches were focused around using our craft in experience design to deliver great products and services. We take our client's problem statement and create products and services to solve the stated problems. We did user research to inform our design work. We synthesized the user research into behavior patterns. And we use those insights to inform great product or service design. We were often called upon to work on projects that has a release cycle of anywhere from 1-3 years.
As we took on projects that were further out in the future and had focuses outside of one product or service problem, we found ourselves adding new methods to our toolkit. We began to do broader research, our analysis was more strategic and design work became more collaborative. We saw our sphere of influence growing larger. We took each of these opportunities to help business leaders take on more holistic views in solving their business problems. And we also built into our methods ways to help them see that making a positive impact can help them come up with more novel business models and taking sustainability into account gave them an edge instead of costing them more.
As we took on strategic projects, our roles changed
When we did user experience projects that are in the 1-3 year release cycles, the business came to us specifically for product or service deliverables. We were practicing our craft as designers. When we were called upon to work on projects farther out in the future and that are not specifically around a product or service but the task at hand is to envision new businesses and systems, we found it necessary to assume other roles within the context of those projects in order to create greater impact.
When we are asked to work with novel technologies 5-10 years out. We go through a typical design approach: we conducted primary customer research, synthesize human insights to uncover opportunities. We did strategic planning around a software or service. We then design scenarios around how we can apply a novel technology or inventing new interaction paradigms to solve complex human problems we uncovered. For the sake of showing the progression our journey has taken us, we are calling this role designer as pioneer of new technologies.
When we were asked to help a business get into unchartered territories, we work closely with them to envision the future of their business. We expand the research we do to include social, economic, environmental and technology trends on top of the human insights research we already do. We synthesize those research and envision how their industry might look like. We collaboratively design scenarios with the leaders of the company to see how the different user constituents they serve in 5-10 years could work with their offerings. We help them play out the future scenarios visually to see what consequences that might have on the larger world. We also help them develop a coherent vision of how they can move towards some plausible directions we design. This work informs new business models to develop. We create visual artifacts to help the company develop strategies around how they can leverage their existing resources and competencies to propel the market towards a future to positively impact their own business and constituents they serve. We used research and insights to share this perspective with business leaders to inform their decision making. We try to highlight as much about the impact they can make to bring positive influence to the world as possible by helping them see that it can help them develop more interesting business models - taking a sustainable and socially responsible approach to re-envision a business model doesn't cost more. We call ourselves strategists when we do this kind of work.
Whether we are practicing our craft as designers by designing products and services or working on new business strategies initiatives, we find that sustainable business should be open and empowering. So we adapted co-creation techniques to practice our work as openly and iteratively as possible with as many leaders and owners as we can involve. We provide the thinking tools and research insights for the teams we work with to innovate within, enabling them to be design with us. We aim to create ownership and long term sustainability by creating ownership early on through sharing the ideation process. When we do this, we call ourselves facilitators. We are still developing methods in this area and found it to play an increasingly important role in our work. We are beginning to explore new research methods that involve business owners and other leaders in the business even earlier than the ideation stage so they can come out to the field see insights with us in the field and become truly a part of the design team.
Designing thinking for positive impact
Many corporations today think of social responsibility as separate from their core business. We attempted to create methods that will help our clients bake social awareness into the visioning process of their strategic initiatives. When business leaders come to us with a problem statement, we help them craft new challenges by uncovering opportunities through research and deriving insights that show opportunities they may not have seen before. We help them arrive at design solutions that would create long term positive ripple effects to their industry and the world at large.
Join us!
We invite you to start taking a look at your process and think about how you can influence businesses you work with to think about the bigger picture. We also encourage you re-frame problems by delivering insight to your client from your research and expand your sphere of your influence. Bake in some form of social analysis into your early research work and use that to drive new business models.
We began a series of workshops to share with anyone who would like try our methods out in their work so they can also enlarge their sphere of influence in the future of our world. And if you are already doing work like this, we invite your feedback and share your stories with us and help us build a community of designers who would like to transition into strategist and facilitator roles.
 Here are some designers who joined us in the recent Interaction Design conference workshop. This team is presenting their design called "UpLabel" where they reinvented a the business model to replace a traditional retail chain model. They attempted to create a world where recycling is the social norm. They designed a business that sells designer pieces people buy to "patch" up their clothes rather they purchasing new items of clothing. |