Impact: A Design Perspective
As a mission-driven design organization, IDEO.org sits at a pretty unique intersection of the design world and the social sector.
To one side, we see the kind of Silicon Valley innovation that has fueled this century’s explosion of products and services designed to make everyday life easier and more enjoyable. IDEO, the global design and innovation firm that launched us in 2011, is just across the street from our San Francisco office. And our New York studio actually shares space with IDEO’s Manhattan office. Thanks to IDEO’s pioneering methodology, we’re the kind of problem-solvers who keep people at the core of our process.
On the other side, we see the social sector, a vast network of NGOs, foundations, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs dedicated to improving lives. We love the passion, gravity, and rigor the social sector brings to the world’s biggest problems, and we see an opportunity for creativity, experimentation, and empathy to join the mix.
Finally, dead ahead of us are the people who, for the past four years, we’ve traveled the world and worked incalculable hours to serve — the billions living in poverty. They’re the ones we’re working for, and the ones we believe will lead the way to new solutions.
So we’re asking, how can a design organization, one that relies on its partners to bring new-to-the-world solutions to market and to scale, be as impactful as possible? What’s the right sort of work for us to do? In which sectors? With which partners? As we’ve taken a rigorous look at our portfolio, it turns out, a lot of the conventional methods the social sector uses to chart its impact don’t totally work for us because we’re not a conventional nonprofit.
We’ve looked far and wide, and truth is, there’s just no roadmap for how a mission- driven design outfit like IDEO.org tracks and understands its impact. So, true to form, we’re designing one.
Every solution starts small, and at the moment, pretty much all of ours are. But we’ve learned that our solutions count most when we and our partners understand them less as a race to a million outputs, but a trajectory toward improved lives, stronger communities, and brighter futures.
We have to look at the early signals and the quiet shouts in order to know if our solutions are working at all. And because we’re constantly progressing our solutions, outputs — the number of people visiting a clinic or buying a product — can be a powerful indicator of whether we’re on target. In fact, with our prototype-early-iterate-often approach, usage is pretty powerful data. Not just because early returns can tell us how to rapidly evolve our designs, but because if we’re in this to change lives, we just can’t sit back and wait for longitudinal data.
We see opportunities to gather data and improve our designs everywhere. Even in situations where things seem uncertain or difficult to quantify, we simply can’t hold for the perfect conditions before we iterate then measure the impact of our work. We’re a scrappy little organization, so in fashion, we’re looking for data and feedback wherever we can find it. We’re constantly making; we’re constantly measuring. We see the power of long-term measurement tools like randomized controlled trials, but they can take years to complete, far longer than we want to wait to add a new offering to a service design, to more finely tailor a product to a community’s needs, or to learn that what we’ve designed is wide of the mark.
This flurry of activity, of collecting data and plugging it right back into our design process is all down to the fact that we won’t stop at outputs. We seek outcomes and lasting impact. We’re working to get girls into the reproductive health clinic not because we’re looking to boost contraception use, but because fewer unintended pregnancies means that more girls will finish school and own their futures. And sure, we want every household to have light, not as a stopgap for electrification, but because families with four additional hours of clean, healthy light have a better shot to study, work, and control their own destinies.
As we chart the trajectories of our products and services from small
to big, we’re tracking both outputs and outcomes. A mother bringing her child to a clinic we helped design is an output; reduced childhood illness as a result of that clinic is an outcome. All of which is why, to us, a community building schools and churches next to the health clinic is as powerful an indicator of impact — of catalyzing the belief that there’s a better future out there — as the number of doctor’s visits. By taking a trajectory view, we keep sight of the big picture, and we’re reminded to work as agents of change, not bean counters.
Four years ago, as today, our ambitions were tremendous. We’ve aimed for the stars, but our designs are just starting to clear the atmosphere. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot, we’ve gotten a lot better at designing for impact, and we’re mapping what it takes for a mission-driven design organization to affect real change.
Design as a discipline has always been about impact, about delivering on a better version of life thanks to whatever new product, service, or experience you’re working on.
When you’re designing consumer goods for the West, it can be pretty easy to know if you’re having impact. How many units did you move? Did your partner come back for more work? Has your product spawned scores of imitators?
What’s less easy to understand is how to use design to impact people who live their lives on the margins, to design what Ray and Charles Eames famously called “the best for the most for the least.”
We’ve learned that one of the best ways to make sure that trajectory is headed onward and upward is to build solutions with partners who have real expertise in tracking and understanding the outcomes of their work. We have to formulate a way to know and understand the outlying effects and unintended consequences of what we’ve designed and introduced into the world. Working closely with impact-minded partners, those dedicated to mapping the lifespan of a swiftly evolving design, is critical. Ultimately, we rely on the implementing prowess of our partners, and the recipe for serious impact includes working with organizations who make our designs real, rigorously track the effect, and are ready to pivot based on what the data tells them.
The social sector needs a design organization that is willing to do things differently. It needs smart, nimble designers who are willing to explore, test, and innovate their way to the kinds of questions that need design-led answers.
As such, we’ve come to see the value of a portfolio approach to our work. Like any innovation organization, we’ve had hits and misses. And the truth is, if there weren’t any misses we probably wouldn’t be pushing the sector, or ourselves as designers.
Building a diverse portfolio of cross-sector work allows us to keep experimenting, to push the edges of technology, make small bets, and push ourselves to understand the next frontier for human- centered design. Once we identify those areas where we can make a real difference — financial and reproductive health are two — we’ll already be on track to build the teams, resources, and relationships to double down on specific programmatic areas.
As we reflect and share what we’ve learned as an organization, it’s probably also worth looking at IDEO.org on some kind of trajectory. We started four years ago with the bones, if perhaps not the heart, of a design consultancy. And in that time, we’ve prototyped, iterated, (and yes) failed, our way to becoming a mission-driven design organization that is making real change.
This post is excerpted from IDEO.org’s Impact: A Design Perspective. Read the whole thing to learn how a mission-driven design organization can have real impact in the lives of poor and vulnerable communities.
