For sustainable social innovation, we need to rethink human-centered design
If we want to make even the smallest dent in some of the most intractable social sector challenges, we need to match our current ability to design for individuals with equal ability to understand and design for context.
Human-centered design (HCD) — once the purview of a small squad of product folks driving innovation in the consumer goods and technology space — has become ubiquitous. Proponents of HCD speak of the way it opens up a world of new possibilities and generates products and services that effortlessly integrate into people’s lives (sometimes simultaneously shifting entire business models). As the story goes, it’s an approach whose potential use and impact knows no bounds. And so, as HCD blankets the commercial sector, playing an ever-greater role in the way consumer-facing products and services are developed, we bear witness to exploding interest in the approach from the social sector. From communities across the U.S. to the streets of Kampala, HCD is spreading like wildfire, and proponents and converts alike are making big bets that this approach could really revolutionize the way we address some of the world’s most complex challenges.
Indeed, many in the social sector have been engaging the mindset and methods of human-centered design for decades (without explicitly naming the practices such). Participatory action research has been practiced in the social sector long before HCD was popularized in commercial settings. This history, in combination with the prevalence of wicked problems facing our society, means that social sector should be fertile ground for HCD. Yet in a great many cases the application of HCD in the social sector has been largely anticlimactic with the approach failing to deliver the anticipated results. Remember the PlayPumps that were supposed to solve the challenge of access to clean water in Africa? Supported by a $60 million dollar investment from the U.S. government and heralded by celebrities like Jay-Z, the clever device used children’s play as the energy source for water pumps in rural areas. Upon implementation however, the pumps broke easily, replacement parts and labor were not easily obtained, and the children quickly lost interest in the new “toy”. There are so many stories like this — where a seemingly brilliant innovation underperforms upon implementation — that haunt community development efforts here in the U.S. and abroad, which led us to wonder, why does HCD so often fall short? How could it be better?
HCD, as it is traditionally practiced, focuses on improving an individual’s experience with a given product or service. We employ human-centered methods to dive deep into the lives of individuals and develop a nuanced understanding of their desires, needs, and priorities in order to develop the best possible product. Yet in the social sector, we are called to do something much more abstract: it isn’t about developing a product, it’s about improving lives, as Panthea Lee pointed out in her 2016 plea to redefine user-centered design. And human lives are inherently complex and embedded within unique contexts that shape every step we take and every decision we make. So to effectively design for social impact, we have to examine and take into account the context in which lives are led. We have to adopt an ecological approach to design in which we seek not only to understand people as individuals, but also actively consider the context of their relationships with each other, the institutions in which they operate, the systems in which they are embedded, and the broader context of culture and history as it shapes their contemporary lives.
HCD doesn’t explicitly take these contexts into account. It doesn’t adequately address how humans interact with each of these layers of context and how each layer shapes — and in some senses even determines — certain human behaviors. This oversight results in a number of really interesting innovations that appear promising and exciting early on but fail to thrive when implemented. For HCD to be effective in the social sector, it has to proactively contemplate each layer of context from the beginning. Just as designers have traditionally crafted methods for building empathy and developing a deep understanding of the individuals at the heart of the design challenge, those of us designing in the social sector must make adaptations to our existing methods so that we can develop equally deep and nuanced understanding of the relationships, institutions, systems, culture and history at play. This is especially true when we are designing with or for the most vulnerable or marginalized in our society; if we neglect to account for the myriad ways that layers of context contribute to continued marginalization and oppression, we will at best design something with only moderate impact, and at worst we may end up reinforcing the injustice and inequities that pervade our society and impede true progress and prosperity.
In our Studio, we emphasize co-design because, contrary to traditional design wisdom, the people best equipped to explore and interpret context are often those embedded within it. Co-design allows us to sit side by side with members of the communities affected by the design challenge and place consideration of context squarely on the table. We weave it through each step of the design process as we learn, ideate, test, and adapt. Together we build research plans that specifically involve stakeholders at each layer of context. We build persona profiles that explicitly call out the relationships, institutions, systems, culture, and history that are relevant. We frame and reframe the design challenge by holding up each of the relevant contexts to the proposed challenge and seeing how it alters the way we think about and understand the challenge. We bring stakeholders from each layer into the ideation process so they are actively involved in generating new ideas and developing promising concepts and use layers of context as categories within which to ideate. We hold each of the promising concepts up to the layers of context and ask how (or how not) an idea addresses the assets and inhibiting factors we identified in each context.
As part of this process, we have also started to explicitly discuss and explore contextual elements like identity, power, historic oppression, and systematic racism within our co-design process. Because the kind of change we’re aiming for can only be achieved if we design for the context of the real world, and the real world is replete with inequity and injustice. By designing side by side with those at the heart of the issue, not only are we able to identify and center local knowledge and experience, but we are also better able to take a strengths-based approach and construct solutions that build off the inherent creativity that individuals and communities facing adversity apply every day as they navigate and overcome the challenges in their own lives. In doing so, the collaboration generates solutions that build agency and it also uplifts narratives about ideas, people, and places that are often ignored or drowned out by those who hold privilege and power.
As others have pointed out before, it turns out we were all a little naïve to think we could just pick up HCD from the commercial sector and implement it in the social sector with the same fanfare and success. It is also a little naïve to think that it will only take a few tweaks here and there to turn HCD into the magic elixir for our sector. The social sector is messy and complex and its challenges affect billions of people, each embedded in her own network of relationships, institutions, systems, culture, and history. If we want to make even the smallest dent in some of the most intractable social sector challenges, we need to explicitly acknowledge, explore, understand, and attend to the complexity of context. It follows then that we need to match our current ability to design for individuals with equal ability to understand and design for context. No small feat for sure, but in doing so we have the power to multiply the impact of our efforts by ensuring that our design integrates seamlessly with its context and advances individuals, communities, and society in ways that transcend our current capability.
