Be Good, Do Good: A Social Table Event Recap
We often talk about pursuing work that creates good in the community. Doing something good feels like success. But what is that good? Is that successful? Who decides? And are we doing harm along the way? These questions and more were discussed at Social Table, May 2018.
Social Table is an evening of lightning talks about design for social impact. If this below recap looks like a good time (it IS!) you should come to our next one on July 12!
Ian Go, Product Designer at Capital One, hosted the event, guiding us through discussions with our wonderful speakers and topics like doing no harm, moral licensing, what it’s like to be a client, and distributing the power of defining success.
Stephanie Lewis, Director of the T Lab at Tipping Point Community, opened her talk with a sobering statistic: 1.3 million people in the Bay Area can’t meet their basic needs.
Tipping Point invests in non-profits nurturing early childhood, education, gainful employment, and housing. T Lab is the in-house R&D team to research and prototype solutions, while doing no harm in the communities they serve.
Oftentimes when people approach non-profits, they try to use for-profit tools, said Stephanie, but that doesn’t always work. If you’re working with low-income people, they experience trauma due to hunger, violence, abuse, and more. There’s often a fatigue of researchers and designers coming in to the community taking stories, and not being able to give back.
To do-no-harm, T Lab has the following tips:
- Work at the pace of the community. If you’re building relationships with people, it takes time to build that trust and to co-create. You cannot work fast and break things the way you would in a for-profit process.
- Mitigate the risk of each experiment with a safety-net strategy for participants. For example, T Lab worked with Year-Up to do a micro-pilot of an adjusted program, and met with faculty every single day to check in. In a for-profit context, that might feel excessive, but for a community that needs to feel safe, it’s another crucial way to build that essential trust.
- Incorporate Trauma Informed Care Techniques. Case workers use this in the behavioral health sector to avoid triggering trauma. One way of doing this is intentionally removing violent words from your vocabulary, like “I would kill for a snack right now.”
- Have the community member choose safe meeting points, empowering them to inform awareness about things like gang territories.
“Blending human-centered design and do-no-harm techniques, it’s our hope to see more designers integrating these approaches into their work,” Stephanie said.
Jimmy Chion, Co-Founder of By the Bay, informed us of the traps of moral licensing.
Jimmy worked on educational toys and medical devices at IDEO. But, he said, the dot org people were across the street, going to Africa, doing the hard work in the field. Because of this separation, he didn’t consider the social impact of his work.
Then he and a friend started ballot.fyi, creating a non-partisan voter guide that had about 1 million views in its first month. This year, they created BytheBay.cool. Local politics is one of those things that people want to do, but don’t actually do, he said.
Working on these political engagement projects, he realized it’s the small actions that make you start to become socially impactful. But then he fell into moral licensing.
“If you believe you are non-prejudiced, you are more likely to do something that contradicts that later,” said Jimmy.
How can good people do bad things, you might ask yourself? Surely, Jimmy, who built a civic engagement tool would think and act fairly at all times. But, you see, that’s exactly the challenge.
He told us a story about meeting a friend for coffee, where he parked his bike outside. As he sat down, he saw a man going at his bike with a screwdriver. Jimmy was embarrassed to admit that he immediately ran outside and yelled at the guy. Certainly, he didn’t want accessories stolen off his bike, but in retrospect, he could have handled things differently and not escalated the situation by shouting.
The key to avoiding moral licensing is, “Remember to stay good despite thinking that you’re good,” said Jimmy.
Federico Villa and Neil Torrefiel are Senior Experience Designers at fuseproject, where they work on innovative projects pushing the boundaries of design.
They gave an example of their successes in the field with Spring — an accelerator transforming the lives of girls in developing economies. Their work is going to reach over 2.4 million adolescent girls providing products and services, with a $50 million increase in equity, and a 500% maximum growth in revenue for the businesses they’re helping.
So, how can we surpass our own expectations doing this kind of work? (Or any work, really.)
- Focus on quicker, purposeful wins. Federico and Neil’s design intent is to be able to connect dots, establishing positive momentum!
- Teach your partners how to iterate so they, too, can find ways to bring design intent to their work.
- Recognize that design needs are similar, systemic, and pervasive globally. The same needs are also prevalent locally. Federico and Neil find that their clients’ solutions to design challenges in Kenya are solved with similar approaches for their clients in Austin, TX. How can we learn from each project and integrate the learnings into the next one?
“A lot of these businesses lack access to the things that we in the US have a wealth of,” they said. “We work with a lot of community managers that understand these communities.”
Carlos Pierre, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Kiva told us about working on a social enterprise UX engagement from the client’s perspective.
His team noticed that social enterprises sometimes struggle to get financing, while social investors often don’t know which social enterprises they should be financing. This led to CrowdVet.org, where individuals review applications of companies to decide which companies should be getting financing.
“In order to harness the power of the crowd you need a really good website,” said Carlos. “In order to build a really good website, we needed to be able to prove that we could harness the power of the crowd.”
So, Carlos and his team worked with Capital One’s Design Pro Bono team to build a functional prototype. It was a pleasure working with the Kiva team on this one, but like any endeavor, the planets didn’t align immediately.
“They couldn’t understand why I could not speak clearly, and I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t understand me,” he remembered working with our team. “We’re specialists in our field, and they’re specialists in their field!”
Ultimately, the process led to the first steps towards a viable platform for CrowdVet as well as a $100,000 grant to build it! But that discomfort is where learning happens, so we asked Carlos to share his experience — what he liked about working together, what got us to our shared vision, and how to be a good client.
His hints for designers were:
- Give homework with guidelines. For example, when describing empathy interviews, ask your clients, “What are the emotions people feel when they come to our website?”
- Do the Children’s Story exercise early. For experts in our fields, we get caught up in the language of our expertise, but explaining it to a five year old helps you speak more clearly, and get to the true essence of what you’re trying to solve.
- Don’t focus on technicalities, aim for the higher-level view. No project has infinite time, and how valuable is the fifth personas exercise, really?
And finally, Carlos encouraged designers to be proactive in offering solutions. He said, “Go find those chicken-and-egg problems that are out there that can use the design help to make them more concrete.”
Pierce Gordon is a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley, and he shared some of his research work on “Evaluating Social Innovation: Expanding Perspectives of Success”.
Pierce started by pointing out that success is a sticky concept. Is the success we’re looking for the right success? Who defines it? Turns out it’s not so simple!
“What makes a good meal?” he asked. “What you determine as success changes depending on who you are and where your values lie. What you define as success determines your reality. If you state what success is, you lose the opportunity to see the unintended consequences of your actions.”
For example, if you create a prototype that doesn’t make it to full-fledged product, that could be seen as a failure by your product team or the people in power who asked you to make it. Say that prototype ended up in the hands of another community who were able to execute, iterate, and create a life-saving technology being used by hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Is that a success? Depends on who you ask…
“What is defined by success is usually defined by the powerful,” Pierce said. “Share power with communities that would not normally have power. The work you do does impact society in some way, whether or not you’re in the non-profit space.”
To integrate this into your work, rethink the processes you use every day. Can you invite people who don’t have design power into your process? Performance metrics are important, but maybe there’s room to explore our end goals to allow success to define itself through the intended and unintended impacts of our work.
Thanks to our wonderful speakers and to the San Francisco design community for coming out! Our next Social Table is July 12 at Counterpulse in San Francisco. We hope to see you there!
