When good design isn’t the right approach
Design for social impact lacks adequate, critical examination of the assumptions, values, and judgments designers bring to communities over which they clearly have power and privilege.
There’s something about the term “social impact” that rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it’s from my experience of working in a “social impact” focused consulting agency that had its own gains at the center of decisions. Maybe it’s from seeing “social impact” focused university organizations in college, where young adults with silver spoons of various sizes sought to “give back” to “underprivileged” communities quite removed from campus. Maybe it’s from engaging with the nonprofit world, where virtually everyone is focused on some kind of “social impact,” often competing with other agencies for the same funds meant to be allocated in some way to communities in need. Maybe it’s the covertly exploitative nature of “social impact” work — that is, the outward-facing benevolence met with the internal politics and distribution of funds away from target communities, who are often poor communities of color — that fuels critique.
Quite optimistic, right?
Kentaro Toyama, author of Geek Heresy and professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, recently visited DePaul University in Chicago to give a talk called “What if good design isn’t enough?” His talk centered on two core points:
- technology amplifies human behavior; and
- design for social impact differs from mainstream design in its focus on collective needs over individual needs, and on changing rather than accommodating behavior.
Toyama shared his experiences as a Research Director with Microsoft, overseeing upwards of fifty concurrent projects focused on India. He shared his critical perspective of design work, which is that technology, or any other products of design, are not panaceas of social problems like poverty on their own. Toyama’s research in India had shown that in fact, technology on its own does neither good nor bad. He argues, therefore, that technology amplifies human behavior — it can, for example, support literacy development for people who already have some basic literacy and familiarity with graphic user interfaces, but is not a cure-all for illiteracy.
What was most interesting to me about Toyama’s talk, though, was his delineation of “mainstream” design from “design for social impact.” Toyama argues that traditional schools of design, including existing design schools, is about “solving external problems so things are easier for people without any change on their part,” whereas social change “requires causing changes in people, often requiring hard work on their part, much of which is internal in nature.” Toyama asserts that traditional design is far too focused on accommodating people in their existing ways, and is focused on the individual as opposed to the collective (think Human-Centered Design.) If we want to address global socioeconomic problems like poverty, he says, it’s not enough to design sleek, innovative tools without effecting change. He suggests that design for social impact could require some user pain points, which effectively breaks a fundamental law of good design: avoid user frustration; deliver user pleasure.
Reflecting on Toyama’s distinction of mainstream design and design for social impact raises a few exploratory questions. When we think about designing for social change, the end users that frequently come to mind are the “have nots” — poor, undereducated, rural residents, typically people of color in the developing world — whose lives need to be “improved” with good design. Even with more lateral design approaches like participatory design or co-design, the target audience of users tends to remain the poor.
When I think about “design for social impact,” I’m automatically suspicious. I picture a team of educated, mostly white (and white collar) designers from the States, touting “solutions” for better toilet designs in water-scarce communities in developing countries. I picture sleek pamphlets featuring poor children of color and descriptions about a design firm’s “successes” in bringing innovations to communities in what industrialized nations classify as Third World Countries.
Design for social impact lacks adequate, critical examination of the assumptions, values, and judgments designers bring to communities over which they clearly have power and privilege.
The popular approach to design for social change focuses too heavily on enacting changes in behavior in poor communities. Currently, social impact-focused design projects typically seek to address an issue within poor communities and center the poor as users whose “bad” behaviors will be transformed through design solutions. Why doesn’t design for social impact ever look at richer people as target users? Why aren’t there more narratives about designing to address the problems of excess and greed, as opposed to problems of scarcity? If the end goal is to address broader systemic problems like poverty, designers cannot just focus on designing solutions for the poor while turning the other cheek on the wealthy and more privileged, whose socioeconomic choices and lifestyles are interconnected with persistence of bleak conditions for the world’s poor. Design for social impact pits the oppressed as the problem without critically examining the oppressors’ role in creating and perpetuating social inequities.
As designers, we must truly examine our own power, privilege, and profits, continuously and critically, especially when we engage in design projects with (or for) marginalized communities. We must also examine the assumptions and value judgments we produce and enable, especially about users over whom we have power. Designing for social impact doesn’t automatically make designers’ work “good,” “just,” or “more equitable” — it’s a privilege, requiring a commitment to humility, vulnerability, and honest self-reflection from designers. When designing for social impact, we have to consider — whose interests are primarily being served? Who benefits most from the process and the result? Are the designers’ needs being put ahead of the users’? No matter how good the design may be, design alone isn’t enough to shift the dynamics that perpetuate the very problems for which “design for social impact” is needed. To break the Catch-22, we, as designers, must first critically analyze power; if we’re serious about “good design,” we need to design to transform the systems that thrive on poverty.
