Design for impact
Speaking of impact in design warrants some clarification. What do we mean when we say impact? According to the dictionary, impact can be defined as “having an effect or influence on someone or something”. But who do we influence? We could continue by asking why, how, for how long and in which way do we affect them. Many designers — and a lot of other people, too — seek work that is meaningful and impactful. They strive for purpose in their jobs and want to see change happen in the world.
Design intends to make an impact. To quote Herbert Simon: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”*. But what is the preferred situation? What are the consequences of our actions? Take the designer-founded company Airbnb, for example. While millions of users enjoy its experience and convenience, the behaviours it enabled have had a severe impact on local neighbourhoods and the prices of flats around the globe. Beyond the connotation of positively impacting people’s lives, designers also have to consider the negative consequences.
In other words, what is the impact we want a service to have? We also need to think about the scope of our impact: Are we designing for a few individuals, a larger group of people or a whole society?
Moreover, designers do not act on their own. They work in teams, together with business analysts, product and service managers, all kinds of engineers as well as researchers and sometimes even policy-makers. Designers might have to re-think their role if they want to design for impact.
This second edition of The Service Gazette takes a broad look at ‘Design for Impact’ — applying a number of lenses to understand what impact can mean.
Opening this issue, Sarah Drummond shares her experiences as a civic hacker who works with local and central governments and the European Union to improve public services.
The next two contributors share examples of designing service experiences. While Designit portrays how they redesigned a breast cancer diagnosis experience, Moritz von Volkmann from BCG Digital Ventures gives an insight into the launch of a new urban electric scooter service. As service design resources move inside organisations, we have two different angles on this: that of the design agency Fjord who helped to build these capabilities inside one of Germany’s biggest banks, and that of Kate Ivey-Williams who worked in design agencies for many years before joining the British Government as an in-house designer and now reflects on the differences.
Next, we juxtapose the perspectives of a small owner-led agency and a large corporate one. Fuxblau’s Manuel Großmann envisions a new role for small agencies and how they can survive and contribute to the in-house movement by taking a radically collaborative approach. Marko Thorhauer from Aperto, now an IBM company, on the other hand, discusses how a digital agency that has been in business for 20 years changed and how its perspective on impact changed, too.
The centrefold spread is dedicated to the Berlin service design scene’s view on ‘Design for Impact’. Seven local businesses share their definitions of ‘impact by design’ and an example where their company made an impact.
Service design cannot exist without business design, so Marzia Arico makes a proposal of how the two can be integrated to increase both the feasibility of service design projects and the likelihood of their success. Sometimes starting small can make a big difference. Jan Schmiedgen, who studied the adoption of Design Thinking in large-scale organisations for years, recommends starting with smart little hacks that get the ball rolling. Daniele Catalanotto suggests a similar approach in his ‘manifesto for mini service design’.
Mike LaVigne from Clue penned something rather unusual for the male half of our readers: a manly guide to menstruation, informed by his experience designing a popular female health app. María Izquierdo Alfaro and Martin Jordan, both working at UK Government Digital Service, take a critical perspective on data and how — if not well designed — data usage by services can impact people in negative ways, emphasising the responsibility of designers.
Looking at the bigger picture of ‘Design for Impact’, Svenja Bickert-Appleby suggests we reconsider our linear economic view and move towards circular thinking, a business approach guided by the principle of sustainability. We share our view on creating an interactive conference format to foster inter-organisational peer-to-peer learning among service innovators. Last, but not least, our cartoonist Sebastian Müller envisions what banks would look like if they took inspiration from our favourite communication tools.
We hope you will find this Service Gazette thought-provoking and discussion-triggering. Let us know what impact by design means to you, what it needs and how to measure it.
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* Simon, Herbert A. (1988). The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial. Design Issues, 4(1 / 2), 67–82.
