Three paths for measuring the impact of social design
A challenge for social impact designers is that they are often contributing primarily at the front-end of a social change intervention (whether social enterprise or development/humanitarian-oriented). This can lead to the “tree falling in forest syndrome,” meaning that the added value of design and design thinking may go unnoticed because there are no boots-on-the-ground to observe or measure the outcomes of the intervention.
This essay outlines three paths for measuring the impact of social design (also called design for social change). The first path is to “follow the data” by applying design to a program that already has a built-in measurement system. The second path is to query the “design allies” who are implementing social change interventions in collaboration with designers or by using human centered design and other design-centric approaches (or both). The third path is to design the measurement system you want to see in the world.
While some have contributed in recent years by defining the field, others have focused more concretely on the word “impact” in social impact design. Writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2014, Robert Fabricant of the Design Impact Group asked: “When will design get serious about impact?” Fabricant proposed integrating design more fully within the spectrum of implementation. One opportunity, he wrote, was to:
Contextualize design within a broader model of analysis and strategic planning, working with colleagues who have a richer and deeper tool set in strategy, finance, operations, and M&E [monitoring and evaluation] that has proven its value in development.
Catapult Design’s co-founder Heather Fleming, a featured speaker at the 2016 American Evaluation Association conference, is another contributor to the conversation on impact. One step toward “getting serious” about impact, she suggested, is to recognize that evaluation professionals have a lot to offer designers, and vice versa.
The ongoing conversation about design’s impact (or contribution) in the social sector, and how to measure it, continued in early 2017 at the “first summit on measuring the impact of design” hosted by New York’s School of Visual Arts. The three paths that follow are a contribution to this discussion, informed by 15 years working in the field of international development, and more recent experiences as a design researcher with a front row view of several collaborations between social impact designers and international organizations working on social change issues around the world.
Path 1: Follow the data
One way to think about measuring the impact of design, is to bring design to where large data sets already exist. In the context of international development and/or large-scale humanitarian efforts, national governments and partners have easy access to large data sets, including vaccination rates, and how many births are duly registered. When designers team up with national governments and United Nations agencies, there is a great opportunity to influence a system that has data collection built in.
Path 2: Ask the implementers
John Snow Inc, Alight (formerly American Refugee Committee), Mercy Corps, and International Rescue Committee — just to name a few — are international non-profit organizations bringing human centered design (HCD) research and principles into their social change interventions. They do so either through direct implementation, or in collaboration with design firms.
While I was at UNICEF/Chad, our team of field communicators from the Polio eradication unit used French-language research cards adapted (with permission) from IDEO’s method cards to learn about community members habits and attitudes related to vaccination. The result of home visits, the “personal inventory” technique and rapid prototyping was the “Staircase to Health” (L’escalier à la santé). The Staircase was a simple vaccination calendar to be hung visibly in the house, helping parents see the cumulative benefits of vaccination and track the dates of their health center appointments. The calendar wasn’t pretty from a western-design perspective, but it was a reflection of what people were willing to use and the colors the wanted to see. An added advantage of the Staircase is that it allowed health promoter to track progress over time through check-in home visits (Labor-intensive but effective).
Two key question for international development organizations using human centered design:
Q1: What difference has it made, using human centered design in your work?
Q2: How do you know it made a difference?
Path 3: Design the measurement system
Designer involvement and/or the use of design research methods in the conception of systems for measuring social change is an ideal scenario. Implementing organizations benefit from designers’ creativity and systems-thinking, and designers gain access to the data they helped to generate, as a demonstrable result of their contributions to international development.
While Director of Research at Equal Access, an NGO specializing in community radio, I heard from field teams that radio soap-opera listeners were storing episodes on SD cards to play later on their cell phones and share with others via bluetooth or Xender (very popular in Chad, we learned). We began documenting how, and how often, digital content was being shared by listeners. What remained invisible to us, unfortunately, were the types of conversations that emerged after listening. A designer’s insights on how to develop a more robust measurement system would have been extremely valuable. (If anyone out there wants to share ideas for the design of a measurement approach, please get in touch!]
Experienced designers and evaluation professionals may recommend alternate paths or approaches for measuring the impact of social design. Given the complex and ever-changing nature of human behavior and social change initiatives, the more minds applied to this challenge the better.
Spanish poet Antonio Machado once wrote, “we make the path by walking” (se hace camino al andar). If we’re serious about impact, we can design and walk a range of paths to social change, but we’ll only improve if we measure along the way.
With gratitude to Cynthia Hannah for her comments, and to Olaf Hajek for permission to replicate here his lovely illustration, which has been brightening my day since I clipped it out of the newspaper years ago (Yellow measuring tape added to image)
