With more designers becoming founders and taking executive positions, the companies, products, and services we build have the potential to solve some of society’s systemic issues. Over the past two months, our team has conducted interviews with founders and read extensively on the concept of designer-as-founder. Steve Vassallo, an influential designer and venture capitalist, defines designer-founder as a person who has designed, built, and shipped things; done so with a human-centered, problem-solving mindset; and started a company to work on challenges that you have identified (as opposed to someone else’s problems).

Through our research, three key themes have emerged.

1. The role of the designer is transforming

Now is a great time to be a designer, particularly if you are entrepreneurially inclined. Historically, designers have been associated with physical products; the shoes you wear or the appliances in your kitchen. This ‘old world’ view propagates the idea of a designer making something beautiful, based on one person’s vision (the designer) and expects the rest of the world to adopt it. Peek inside Silicon Valley tech firms and you’ll see that the role of the designer is bleeding into other businesses, and in some cases, is core to a healthy business model. One of the most successful examples is Airbnb, founded by two designers from Rhode Island School of Design, whose valuation is worth above $30 billion, more than Hilton and Hyatt combined. Beyond the beautiful product, the founders used design tactics learned at RISD, such as customer research and in person product testing, to build something customers want to use.

The customer centric design tactics that are used at Airbnb are now being used in all sectors of business, regardless of their size. Design Thinking, a process made famous by IDEO and Stanford (and core to businesses like Facebook and Google) has gained widespread popularity and is introducing innovation to long established sectors like Government and Consumer Packaged Goods giants like Clorox.

“It’s clear to me that we’re in the midst of a massive transition in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, one in which designers are moving from 11th hour stylists to ground-zero founders of 100-year companies,” says Steve Vassallo, general partner at Foundation Capital and advisor to Designer Fund. Designer Fund, a venture capital firm, invests in initiatives co-founded by a designer. It was started by well minted designers (thanks to the IPO’s of Facebook and Adobe) and has paved the way to usher in the next wave of founders — those with design chops.

2. Designers have skills aligned with emerging leadership

From the organization to the individual and the processes overall, there is an alignment of design skills to leadership needs.

Organizations are living systems that are constantly evolving. Over time, companies have shifted from being organized around division of labor and control to cooperation and self-management. Leaders today are expected to be “servant leaders” and “systems thinkers”. Being able to visually map systems helps identify where there is leverage inside a system to create the desired effect.

Nathan Shedroff, former chair of the California College of the Arts’ DMBA program, defines a leader as someone who “clearly communicates a vision of the future that others want to follow.” Designers are uniquely equipped for clear communication through visual and collaborative mediums. Huang Kenji at Google believes “your power as a designer is visualizing what could be to inspire change.”

Designers skills apply equally well to launching a product to building a strong company culture. Barry Katz, the author of Make It New, A History of Silicon Valley Design, describes how designers-as-founders are “running the companies in the same way you could start a design project: start with research, working from the bottom up from observed human needs and create a culture that is obsessed with egality, risk tolerance, permission to experiment with ludicrous ideas.”

Lastly, designers love design research. Research with customers provides insights, and focusing on the customer voice creates influence. As Gaby Brink from Tomorrow Partners shared, “customers win arguments.”

A recent example is Moxxly, a discrete breast pump that fits underneath your shirt. The founders are three women, including one designer, and user-centered design is a core value at the company. They are tackling a wicked problem of women leaving the workforce through innovative design. “There are too many reasons why moms leave their workforce. Pumping should not be another one”, said Chloe Schama, the Executive Editor of Elle.com.

Combine the research, vision, and collaborative methods and you’ve created the foundations of a new venture.

3. Those same traits build amazing, inclusive company cultures

It’s true that companies don’t have ideas, people do. Barry Katz shared that “it’s in the self interest of the leader to ensure you have a culture that encourages those ideas to come out.” Creating a company culture where people feel a sense of belonging and their ideas are heard and valued is a great start.

Empathy, core to human centered design, allows people to bring their ‘whole selves’ to work. Additionally, enduring power comes from empathy. Human centered design requires that designers have empathy skills, such as active listening. Active listening ensures everyone at the company feels involved and invested, even if the final decision is different from what they wanted. Barry Katz shared, “If everyone has an equal voice in where you are going to go, you are not going to get anywhere. If one person has a voice you won’t have a very motivated crew. There is research that people feel more invested in a decision, even if they disagree if they had a role in making that decision. If I feel that my ideas were given a fair voice, then I’ll be more likely to accept the results even if it’s not what I wanted.”

Designers have lots of tricks up their sleeves to bring out ideas. Such as sticky note voting or feedback, which is critical to design. This tactic involves (quietly) voting or sharing your thoughts via sticky notes and sharing in a round robin style, allowing everyone to get a turn, even those who might speak up less frequently.

Jin Fan, CEO and co-founder of Clear LED, describes her philosophy towards leadership and management as “similar to how I always worked as a designer. I like to listen. I don’t feel like I’m a boss…We are a team and we worked together towards a common goal. When it comes to leadership, I like to listen. I want to have empathy. I want to think about what would benefit them.” This leadership style lends itself to how people collaborate within networks not hierarchies in organizations.

The world is changing at a rapid speed and companies have to keep adapting. Over six million startups are launched annually in the United States. Companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter that connect billions of people around the world were found in the last decade. By the time a company has designed a new structure, the world has changed. Rita Gunther McGrath’s research of more than 2,300 large US companies found that high-performing companies are both stable and rapid innovators. Pairing a great design leader with a structure-oriented counterpart could be the recipe for innovation into the future.

Are you the next Stewart Butterfield of Slack, Christina Brodbeck of YouTube, Joe Gebbia of Airbnb, or Evan Sharp of Pinterest? Only one way to find out: prototype it.

Shout-out to the co-authors and researchers Shiv Kehr, Vanessa Slavich and Yini Nie

Over the course of the semester, I’ve had the pleasure of working with two colleagues to address the needs of women affected by trauma, specifically domestic violence and sex trafficking. As it turns out, these groups of women are highly protected — and rightfully so. We also discovered that the organizations that support these women are spread so thin that they have little capacity to join a generative co-creation session with a group of designers.

Dick and Rick, a Visual Primer for Social Impact Design, created by the Center for Urban Pedagogy, helped our team wrap our heads around what we should and should not do in the field of social impact work. The nut of it is, the consultancy type model could lead to rejection of your final design. If the community you are designing for isn’t apart of the design process, you could miss valuable insights to inform the success and longevity of your work.

However, this model implies you have access and are embedded within the community you serve.

Sage Space was not embedded in this community and getting access was hard. At the end of this project, I didn’t learn new ways to connect with people. Instead, my definition of a prototype changed. We were working to create something that met our mental model of what a prototype should be. Something physical that represents your solution than can put in front of your target audience. However, the most valuable feedback point was a public presentation to judges and an audience of about 40. Emotions, and money, were on the line. To create that presentation, we have to shift to a ‘Dickish’ — or consultancy — type role where we devised ideas, by ourselves, in a studio.

Although our presentation challenged my idea of a prototype, the feedback we received from community partners and from the panel of judges was invaluable. The presentation we so carefully crafted became our prototype.

In the Lean Start Up, Eric Ries defines a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as a “version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort”. While we poured ourselves into the creation of a highly polished presentation, this was much less effort than actually building the physical healing space and the accompanying somatic program we were proposing.

This is a good thing, because our project didn’t get funded. More importantly, we received critical feedback from an architect and the host of a somatic open mic program who posed critical questions. As it turns out, there is a ton of this work already happening in the bay area — as designers, what could we bring to this space that would set our program apart? Or would our project just be another one of these programs?

This presentation became our MVP.

As a team, we internalized the judges feedback and decided not to move forward. We pushed the project to failure but learned some critical things that I will take with me into my practice as a social designer:

1. An engaged partner who understands and is willing to work with you during the design process is critical, especially in the beginning and often ambiguous phases.

2. Access to the group of people you are designing for is key.

3. Have an idea of how success could be measured, and if it is realistic in the time frame you are working with.

4. Finally, be mindful about the projects you take on. While the cause may seem noble, is it feasible?

HUGE, a design agency, has done some commendable work (https://www.hugeinc.com/ideas/perspective/applying-user-centered-design-for-social-good) to create change for women involved in sex trafficking. Where we failed, they succeeded. Most notably, they created a week long round table that represented the voice of sex trafficking survivors and the organizations that support their recovery. While their model was a traditional consultancy based model, the involvement of people within the community fostered the creation of a product that could provide real impact.

Now that SAGE SPACE has been put to rest, I’ve had the opportunity to put my thoughts, and these learnings, towards another project. Most specifically, towards how to prototype and test a physical space as apart of the Platform team. The objectives of 1.) driving awareness of the AAACC and 2.) making it a social gathering place inform what a test could look like. Focusing just on awareness, our challenge could be “How might we get passerby’s to take notice of the AAACC?” This could be measure in head turns of passerby’s before and after a physical object is placed there.

In this scenario, the objectives and the metrics are clear, the prototype can go directly in front of the people we are designing for, and through the fellowship program we can actively co-design within the community. Finally, regular meetings and conversations can serve as check ins and ‘MVPs’ to get necessary feedback and alignment. These key pieces will create a recipe for success.

Rettig suggests that a new suite of design tools are required to tackle social problems. While the concept of co-design has existed since the 1970’s, it has not gained critical mass until recently. According to John Chisholm via Design For Europe “Co-design reflects a fundamental change in the traditional designer-client relationship. The co-design approach enables a wide range of people to make a creative contribution in the formulation and solution of a problem.” By involving key stakeholders and participants as co-designers, they will be invested in the solution driving higher usability and longevity of the solution.

This flies in the face of the traditional design consulting model, where the designer will take a problem away, develop a solution in silo and deliver it to the client who may or may not use it.

In this ‘design for good’ model, the primary role of the designer is to facilitate innovation. While you may use traditional design methods, such as graphic or industrial design in the project, the real opportunity to design is to make visible connections and methods that already exist within a system but are not widely practiced. Mai Ling Garcia and Kiran Jain do a nice job of teeing up what innovation means to them and how they were able to apply co-design to civic challenges in Oakland. They emphasize that designers must seek out “new ways of doing old things” where innovation comes from “the way we go about our work”. The emphasis, therefore, is on the process and the learnings that come from the process rather than the final thing that gets created.

This is evidenced by the ‘positive deviant’ work done by Jerry and Monique Sternin to address child malnutrition in rural Vietnam. Positive deviance “is an approach based on the insight that in any community, there are people who face similar challenges and circumstances as everyone else, but who have found a way to overcome challenges that others have not”. Through conversations with community members, families with healthy children were identified and were found to only be doing a few things differently than others. Those behaviors spread first within the village and later throughout the country via a program that Jerry and Monique Sternin created with the people that it would serve.

Human centered design is at the heart of co-design. By partnering with the community, designers “see like a citizen” and build deep empathy with the population they are designing for. But, building a relationship takes time. The benefit of the design-consulting model is that trust is paid and signed for. In social entrepreneurship, trust must be built over time. This can be particularly challenging if you, as a designer, are not already apart of the community in which you serve.

In that case, the best strategy is to 1.) find an ally and 2.) show up whenever possible. Because our work with the AAACC and the CCA Social Lab will only last a year, time is against us. A year seems like a long time, but becoming a community member can take a lifetime. Most recently, our class has begun working with a CCA alum and a resident artist at the AAACC. Her role in both circles is helping us to build trust with key community members so we can begin co-creating.