Mission-Driven Design
As a mission-driven design leader, I was originally drawn to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative by the ability to work on socially impactful projects. Little did I know just how much potential there was for design to play a role in achieving CZI’s mission. As our co-founder Priscilla Chan recently stated, CZI is “pointing the promise of technology towards the challenges that will shape the future.” By pairing subject matter and issue experts with designers and engineers, we are not only informing each others’ work but are truly co-creating; a new and unique approach to building the best possible experiences for users of our products and tools.
The design process — and thereby designers as practitioners — are inherently empathetic. We know how to look at a problem-space, identify the needs of users and interpret this into solution-driven opportunities. But we are not the experts in that problem-space.
Working as a design or research practitioner at CZI is a unique opportunity not only because of the ability to work on meaningful projects, but because you are designing the future alongside some of the world’s foremost subject matter experts in Science, Education and issues related to Justice and Opportunity. Accelerating progress in our fields of focus means developing ground-breaking technologies and models and working alongside expert partners like those at the Biohub and Summit Public Schools. Whether it’s new ways to experience learning in a classroom or helping to surface new scientific insights to users through machine learning, these advancements hold the potential to revolutionize our future, and as designers here we have the opportunity to be at the center of it all.
However, novel ideas don’t always get easily adopted, and top-down or closed approaches to innovation have inherent challenges. For this reason, designers and researchers often act as the champion for the user of a product or service, helping to identify and surface areas for better solutions. We must also be mindful of any inherent biases users unknowingly bring to the table that reinforce existing systemic barriers. In order to prevent these biases in our own work and to drive towards solutions that stand to make a real difference in our world, designers at CZI are asked to abandon common approaches and try new ways of working: ones that require co-creation and participatory methods and that both leverage traditional need identification and deep subject matter expertise.
Examples of our Work
The design and research team within CZI’s Education Initiative has supported the launch of the Summit Learning Platform with Summit Public Schools. Summit’s model, used by more than 380 schools through the Summit Learning Program, rethinks the way classrooms are structured, with a heavy focus on tailoring learning experiences to individual students and building deep mentorship relationships. Brain science has demonstrated how critical relationships are for learning and development, and so this past school year, the Summit Learning Platform launched a new mentorship tool to help foster successful student/mentor sessions. In addition to engaging with teachers and students to understand their current mentorship structures and strategies for having the most successful mentoring sessions, we also spent time with CZI experts like Brooke Stafford-Brizard and our partners in the field to understand how mentorship, when fostered successfully, can develop learner habits like self-efficacy, agency, and social awareness. Side-by-side, subject matter experts and designers co-created a tool that will be used nationwide by thousands of teachers and students to advance high-quality mentorship in schools.
Another example lies within CZI’s Science Initiative. Designers and user researchers within our Meta team partner with biomedical researchers and engineers to address the growing problem of scientific publication overload. Did you know that more than 4000 scientific journal papers are published every day? Keeping up with biomedical literature is challenging, and discovering the right article related to a biomedical researcher’s area of study — and when it’s not too late — could change the trajectory of that individual’s work. Meta was designed and built to address this need by discovering, ranking, and delivering the most relevant papers and preprints to scientific researchers in real-time.
This allows researchers to stay on top of specific disciplinary intersections or view the most important papers from broader fields. Designers on the Meta team spent countless hours with on-staff and external biomedical researchers to gather feedback and then make iterative usability and relevancy improvements to the product. This ensures the platform is familiar so that it is faster and easier for scientists to stay updated, thereby allowing biomedical researchers to spend even more time on new discoveries that will propel science forward. The partnership between the designers’ user-driven lens and scientific research processes is a critical function in the platform’s future success.
By collaborating with industry redefining experts at CZI, designers are challenged to reframe their skills and work in novel ways. They must continue to act as advocates for the users we serve, while consistently calibrating with our experts to ensure design is simple and easy to use. This is no small undertaking, but by working so closely with subject matter experts to co-create solutions, CZI’s design team has the potential to help dramatically improve the lives of future generations.
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