Designing Outside Your Comfort Zone

By Nick Crampton

As designers, we rely on tried and tested tools, methods, and standards to help us arrive at a solution that should work. Often though, we find ourselves designing things for people whose situations bare some pretty strong similarities to our own. We design things that require people to have the latest smartphone or some disposable income in order to gain access to what we create. So what happens when you’re faced with a design challenge so completely outside your frame of reference that you don’t know where to get a foothold? I learned some lessons leading a recent service design project with AdaptivePath.org and GLIDE that could help.

A bit of context

GLIDE is an organization focused on alleviating the suffering and breaking the cycle of poverty and marginalization in San Francisco. They are widely known for their meal services, yet they have a myriad of services that many of their clients do not realize are available. Together with GLIDE, we designed, piloted, and helped launch a physical storefront, GLIDE GOODS, to familiarize clients with the breadth of services while getting much needed clothing, personal hygiene, and sexual health items into the hands of people who need them, free of charge.

Starting this project, I noted that I’ve lived a pretty comfortable life. I’ve never had to make the choice between feeding myself or putting a roof over my head. I’ve never had to battle with an addiction or mental illness. I’ve never had to make any major changes to my lifestyle in order to find and keep a place to live. I wondered what right, or qualification do I have to dream up solutions to other people’s problems. But through the course of the GLIDE GOODS project, I learned a few things that helped me–and I think could help others–design outside their comfort zones.

Do the things that make you uncomfortable.

On our first few visits to their center in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, I felt like an intruder. Conducting research interviews is nothing new to me. Yet, the thought of intercepting clients on their way out the door made me extremely anxious. But the stories people shared were humbling, and the candor with which they spoke was so refreshing. Usually it’s the researcher’s job to put the participant at ease, but the people I spoke to did just that for me.

Joining the outreach team to hand out harm reduction kits one night in the Tenderloin was another “fake it till you make it” moment for me. I went in not knowing what to expect, or what I might see. Within minutes, though, all of that melted away. Bill and Jorge from GLIDE’s outreach team had such a confidence, and a genuine rapport with the clients we interacted with on the street. By the end of the night, my hang-ups about walking around that neighborhood at night, and talking to people in some pretty desperate circumstances had pretty much disappeared.

Don’t be afraid to throw out the rule book.

Best practices and protocols are great for approaching problems in a proven and consistent way, but it’s important to acknowledge when something just doesn’t feel right for the context you’re designing within. Approaching the design problems of this project, it became clear that our research approach couldn’t be business as usual. We wanted to understand the context and needs of GLIDE’s clients, and normally that would mean conducting generative research, with a protocol, a set of activities, a discussion guide, and spending 60 to 90 minutes with each person we wanted to interview.

We knew it would be totally inappropriate to get in the way of the clients’ right to the resources and services they were coming to GLIDE to access, so we held 10–15 minute chats with clients whom we approached as they finished their lunch or were waiting for an appointment. Instead of a formalized protocol to read from, we put together a list of questions ahead of time to spark conversation, and quickly jotted down notes after the participant left so that it felt as non-clinical as possible, as many of GLIDE’s clients have had negative experiences with correctional and clinical institutions in the past.

You can’t win on your own, so find your champions early.

Being in unfamiliar territory can feel paralyzing. But one of the first steps is identifying who your guides are and what they can teach you. We had the pleasure of working with an incredibly caring and motivated team of people at GLIDE; having an ally like Ken, our project sponsor at GLIDE, within the organization was invaluable. He was able to connect us with the people we needed to meet, and worked tirelessly to navigate the politics of the organization to help figure out logistics so we could actually launch the pilot we designed.

Building bridges early also helps when you need to ask for help later. When you’re working quickly to get something off the ground, it helps to have people who can say yes to your crazy requests, or know the people who can get others to say yes. Before our service pilot become a reality, we were able to switch the location to a more desirable and accessible spot, hand out a wider variety of products, and operate alongside other teams all because of the relationships Ken and our core team had fostered early on.

Do your homework… But don’t agonize over getting it right the first time.

We knew it would be foolish to try and build out a full-fledged service, launch it cold, and then hope it hits the mark, so building a service pilot was crucial for us. We took what we learned, co-created some service concepts, refined those into a narrative that felt right, and then built a lightweight service to test our hypotheses, building in ways to gather feedback and capture opportunities to improve the service before it was fully rolled out.

Simply asking clients for feedback on the products we offered was hugely informative. We learned that the lotion we were handing out was the same kind that is given to prison inmates, and that the combs we had ordered were useless to our African American clients. Knowing this allowed us to make more informed inventory choices before launching the service. Piloting the service rather than launching cold allowed us to play around and make the service feel right before any of it was formalized.

I’ve already felt the impact of the work we did with GLIDE on my own design practice at Adaptive Path and in my personal life as well. I find myself more empowered to take risks and lead my team into the unknown and to change course and bend (or throw out) the rules when the situation calls for it. And I’ve gained a new perspective on a situation that I think all residents of San Francisco (and many other cities for that matter) could do with gaining a little empathy for.