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Design Thinking for Social Innovation
by kamran.hanfi in

Design Thinking for Social Innovation

In an area outside Hyderabad, India, between the suburbs and the countryside, a youngwoman—we’ll call her Shanti—fetches daily from the always-open local borehole that isabout 300 feet from her home. She uses a 3-gallon plastic container that she can easily carry onher head. Shanti and her husband rely on the free water for their drinking and washing, and thoughthey’ve heard that it’s not as safe as water from the Naandi Foundation-run community treatmentplant, they still use it. Shanti’s family has been drinking the local water for generations, and althoughit periodically makes her and her family sick, she has no plans to stop using it.
image Shanti has many reasons not to use the water from the Naandi treatment center, but they’re notthe reasons one might think. The center is within easy walking distance of her home—roughly athird of a mile. It is also wellknown and affordable (roughly10 rupees, or 20 cents, for 5gallons). Being able to pay thesmall fee has even become astatus symbol for some villagers.Habit isn’t a factor, either.Shanti is forgoing the saferwater because of a series offlaws in the overall design ofthe system.
Although Shanti can walkto the facility, she can’t carrythe 5-gallon jerrican that the facilityrequires her to use. Whenfilled with water, the plasticrectangular container is simplytoo heavy. The containerisn’t designed to be held on thehip or the head, where she likesto carry heavy objects. Shanti’shusband can’t help carry it, either.He works in the city anddoesn’t return home until afterthe water treatment center isclosed. The treatment centeralso requires them to buy amonthly punch card for 5 gallonsa day, far more than theyneed. “Why would I buy morethan I need and waste money?”asks Shanti, adding she’d bemore likely to purchase theNaandi water if the center allowedher to buy less.
The community treatmentcenter was designed to produceclean and potable water,and it succeeded very well atdoing just that. In fact, it workswell for many people livingin the community, particularlyfamilies with husbandsor older sons who own bikesand can visit the treatment plant during working hours. The designers of the center, however,missed the opportunity to design an even better system becausethey failed to consider the culture and needs of all of the peopleliving in the community.
This missed opportunity, although an obvious omission in hindsight,is all too common. Time and again, initiatives falter becausethey are not based on the client’s or customer’s needs and have neverbeen prototyped to solicit feedback. Even when people do go into thefield, they may enter with preconceived notions of what the needsand solutions are. This flawed approach remains the norm in boththe business and social sectors.
As Shanti’s situation shows, social challenges require systemicsolutions that are grounded in the client’s or customer’s needs. Thisis where many approaches founder, but it is where design thinking—a new approach to creating solutions—excels.
Traditionally, designers focused their attention on improving thelook and functionality of products. Classic examples of this type ofdesign work are Apple Computer’s iPod and Herman Miller’s Aeronchair. In recent years designers have broadened their approach, creatingentire systems to deliver products and services.
Design thinking incorporates constituent or consumer insightsin depth and rapid prototyping, all aimed at getting beyond theassumptions that block effective solutions. Design thinking—inherentlyoptimistic, constructive, and experiential—addresses theneeds of the people who will consume a product or service and theinfrastructure that enables it.
Businesses are embracing design thinking because it helps thembe more innovative, better differentiate their brands, and bring theirproducts and services to market faster. Nonprofits are beginning touse design thinking as well to develop better solutions to social problems.Design thinking crosses the traditional boundaries betweenpublic, for-profit, and nonprofit sectors. By working closely with theclients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutionsto bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.


Design Thinking at Work
Jerry Sternin, founder of the Positive Deviance Initiative and an associate professor at Tufts University until he died last year, was skilled at identifying what and critical of what he called outsider solutions to local problems. Sternin’s preferred approach to social innovation is an example of design thinking in action.1 In 1990, Sternin and his wife, Monique, were invited by the government of Vietnam to develop a model to decrease in a sustainable manner high levels of malnutrition among children in 10,000 villages. At the time, 65 percent of Vietnamese children under age 5 suffered from malnutrition, and most solutions relied on government and UN agencies donations of nutritional supplements. But the supplements—the outsider solution—never delivered the hoped-for results.2 As an alternative, the Sternins used an approach called positive deviance, which looks for existing solutions (hence sustainable) among individuals and families in the community who are already doing well.3
The Sternins and colleagues from Save the Children surveyedfour local Quong Xuong communities in the province of Than Hoaand asked for examples of “very, very poor” families whose childrenwere healthy. They then observed the food preparation, cooking,and serving behaviors of these six families, called “positive deviants,”and found a few consistent yet rare behaviors. Parents ofwell-nourished children collected tiny shrimps, crabs, and snailsfrom rice paddies and added them to the food, along with the greensfrom sweet potatoes. Although these foods were readily available,they were typically not eaten because they were considered unsafefor children. The positive deviants also fed their children multiplesmaller meals, which allowed small stomachs to hold and digestmore food each day.
The Sternins and the rest of their group worked with the positivedeviants to offer cookingclasses to the familiesof children suffering frommalnutrition. By the endof the program’s first year,80 percent of the 1,000children enrolled in theprogram were adequatelynourished. In addition, theeffort had been replicatedwithin 14 villages acrossVietnam.4
The Sternins’ work is agood example of how positivedeviance and designthinking relies on localexpertise to uncover localsolutions. Design thinkerslook for work-arounds andimprovise solutions—likethe shrimps, crabs, andsnails—and they find waysto incorporate those into the offerings they create. They considerwhat we call the edges, the places where “extreme” people live differently,think differently, and consume differently. As MoniqueSternin, now director of the Positive Deviance Initiative, explains:“Both positive deviance and design thinking are human-centered approaches.Their solutions are relevant to a unique cultural contextand will not necessarily work outside that specific situation.”
One program that might have benefited from design thinkingis mosquito net distribution in Africa. The nets are well designedand when used are effective at reducing the incidence of malaria.5The World Health Organization praised the nets, crediting themwith significant drops in malaria deaths in children under age 5: a51 percent decline in Ethiopia, 34 percent decline in Ghana, and 66percent decline in Rwanda.6 The way that the mosquito nets havebeen distributed, however, has had unintended consequences.In northern Ghana, for instance, nets are provided free to pregnantwomen and mothers with children under age 5. These womencan readily pick up free nets from local public hospitals. For everyoneelse, however, the nets are difficult to obtain. When we asked a well-educated Ghanaian named Albert, who had recently contractedmalaria, whether he slept under a mosquito net, he told us no—therewas no place in the city of Tamale to purchase one. Because so manypeople can obtain free nets, it is not profitable for shop owners to sellthem. But hospitals are not equipped to sell additional nets, either.
As Albert’s experience shows, it’s critical that the people designinga program consider not only form and function, but distributionchannels as well. One could say that the free nets were never intendedfor people like Albert—that he was simply out of the scope ofthe project. But that would be missing a huge opportunity. Withoutconsidering the whole system, the nets cannot be widely distributed,which makes the eradication of malaria impossible.




The Origin of Design Thinking
IDEO was formed in 1991 as a merger between David Kelley Design,which created Apple Computer’s first mouse in 1982, and ID Two,which designed the first laptop computer, also in 1982. Initially, IDEOfocused on traditional design work for business, designing productslike the Palm V personal digital assistant, Oral-B toothbrushes, andSteelcase chairs. These are the types of objects that are displayed inlifestyle magazines or on pedestals in modern art museums.
By 2001, IDEO was increasingly being asked to tackle problemsthat seemed far afield from traditional design. A healthcare foundationasked us to help restructure its organization, a century-oldmanufacturing company wanted to better understand its clients, anda university hoped to create alternative learning environments totraditional classrooms. This type of work took IDEO from designingconsumer products to designing consumer experiences.
To distinguish this new type of design work, we began referringto it as “design with a small d.” But this phrase never seemed fullysatisfactory. David Kelley, also the founder of Stanford University’sHasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the “d.school”), remarkedthat every time someone asked him about design, he found himselfinserting the word “thinking” to explain what it was that designersdo. Eventually, the term design thinking stuck.7
As an approach, design thinking taps into capacities we all havebut that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices.Not only does it focus on creating products and services that arehuman centered, but the process itself is also deeply human. Designthinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns,to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as beingfunctional, and to express ourselves in media other than words orsymbols. Nobody wants to run an organization on feeling, intuition,and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the analyticalcan be just as risky. Design thinking, the integrated approach atthe core of the design process, provides a third way.
The design thinking process is best thought of as a system ofoverlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. Thereare three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation.Think of inspiration as the problem or opportunity thatmotivates the search for solutions; ideation as the process of generating,developing, and testing ideas; and implementation as the paththat leads from the project stage into people’s lives.
The reason to call these spaces, rather than steps, is that theyare not always undertaken sequentially. Projects may loop backthrough inspiration, ideation, and implementation more than onceas the team refines its ideas and explores new directions. Not surprisingly,design thinking can feel chaotic to those doing it for thefirst time. But over the life of a project, participants come to see thatthe process makes sense and achieves results, even though its formdiffers from the linear, milestone-based processes that organizationstypically undertake.




Inspiration
Although it is true that designers do not always proceed througheach of the three spaces in linear fashion, it is generally the casethat the design process begins with the inspiration space—the problemor opportunity that motivates people to search for solutions.And the classic starting point for the inspiration phase is the brief.The brief is a set of mental constraints that gives the project teama framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they canmeasure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized—such asprice point, available technology, and market segment.
But just as a hypothesis is not the same as an algorithm, the briefis not a set of instructions or an attempt to answer the question beforeit has been posed. Rather, a well-constructed brief allows forserendipity, unpredictability, and the capricious whims of fate—thecreative realm from which breakthrough ideas emerge. Too abstractand the brief risks leaving the project team wandering; too narrowa set of constraints almost guarantees that the outcome will be incrementaland, likely, mediocre.
Once the brief has been constructed, it is time for the designteam to discover what people’s needs are. Traditional ways of doingthis, such as focus groups and surveys, rarely yield importantinsights. In most cases, these techniques simply ask people whatthey want. Conventional research can be useful in pointing towardincremental improvements, but those don’t usually lead to the typeof breakthroughs that leave us scratching our heads and wonderingwhy nobody ever thought of that before.
Henry Ford understood this when he said, “If I’d asked my customerswhat they wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse.’” 8 Althoughpeople often can’t tell us what their needs are, their actualbehaviors can provide us with invaluable clues about their rangeof unmet needs.
A better starting point is for designers to go out into the worldand observe the actual experiences of smallholder farmers, schoolchildren,and community health workers as they improvise their waythrough their daily lives. Working with local partners who serve asinterpreters and cultural guides is also important, as well as havingpartners make introductions to communities, helping build credibilityquickly and ensuring understanding. Through “homestays” andshadowing locals at their jobs and in their homes, design thinkersbecome embedded in the lives of the people they are designing for.
Earlier this year, Kara Pecknold, a student at Emily Carr Universityof Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, took an internshipwith a women’s cooperative in Rwanda. Her task was to develop a Website to connect rural Rwandan weavers with the world. Pecknold soondiscovered that the weavers had little or no access to computers andthe Internet. Rather than ask them to maintain a Web site, she reframedthe brief, broadening it to ask what services could be provided to the community to help them improve theirlivelihoods. Pecknold used various designthinking techniques, drawing partly fromher training and partly from ideo’s HumanCentered Design toolkit, to understand thewomen’s aspirations.
Because Pecknold didn’t speak the women’slanguage, she asked them to documenttheir lives and aspirations with a camera anddraw pictures that expressed what successlooked like in their community. Throughthese activities, the women were able tosee for themselves what was important andvaluable, rather than having an outsider make those assumptions forthem. During the project, Pecknold also provided each participantwith the equivalent of a day’s wages (500 francs, or roughly $1) tosee what each person did with the money. Doing this gave her furtherinsight into the people’s lives and aspirations. Meanwhile, thewomen found that a mere 500 francs a day could be a significant, life-changingsum. This visualization process helped both Pecknold andthe women prioritize their planning for the community.9




Ideation
The second space of the design thinking process is ideation. Afterspending time in the field observing and doing design research, ateam goes through a process of synthesis in which they distill whatthey saw and heard into insights that can lead to solutions or opportunitiesfor change. This approach helps multiply options to createchoices and different insights about human behavior. These mightbe alternative visions of new product offerings, or choices amongvarious ways of creating interactive experiences. By testing competingideas against one another, the likelihood that the outcomewill be bolder and more compelling increases.
As Linus Pauling, scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner, putit, “To have a good idea you must first have lots of ideas.” 10 Trulyinnovative ideas challenge the status quo and stand out from thecrowd—they’re creatively disruptive. They provide a wholly newsolution to a problem many people didn’t know they had.
Of course, more choices mean more complexity, which can makelife difficult, especially for those whose job it is to control budgetsand monitor timelines. The natural tendency of most organizationsis to restrict choices in favor of the obvious and the incremental. Althoughthis tendency may be more efficient in the short run, it tendsto make an organization conservative and inflexible in the long run.Divergent thinking is the route, not the obstacle, to innovation.
To achieve divergent thinking, it is important to have a diversegroup of people involved in the process. Multidisciplinary people—architects who have studied psychology, artists with MBAs, or engineerswith marketing experience—often demonstrate this quality.They’re people with the capacity and the disposition for collaborationacross disciplines.
To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individualneeds to have strengths in two dimensions—the “T-shaped” person.On the vertical axis, every member of the team needs to possess adepth of skill that allows him or her to make tangible contributions tothe outcome. The top of the “T” is where the design thinker is made.It’s about empathy for people and for disciplines beyond one’s own. Ittends to be expressed as openness, curiosity, optimism, a tendencytoward learning through doing, and experimentation. (These are thesame traits that we seek in our new hires at IDEO.)
Interdisciplinary teams typically move into a structured brainstormingprocess. Taking one provocative question at a time, thegroup may generate hundreds of ideas ranging from the absurd tothe obvious. Each idea can be written on a Post-it note and sharedwith the team. Visual representations of concepts are encouraged,as this generally helps others understand complex ideas.
One rule during the brainstorming process is to defer judgment.It is important to discourage anyone taking on the often obstructive,non-generative role of devil’s advocate, as Tom Kelley explainsin his book The Ten Faces of Innovation.11 Instead, participants areencouraged to come up with as many ideas as possible. This lets thegroup move into a process of grouping and sorting ideas. Good ideasnaturally rise to the top, whereas the bad ones drop off early on.InnoCentive provides a good example of how design thinkingcan result in hundreds of ideas. InnoCentive has created a Web sitethat allows people to post solutions to challenges that are definedby InnoCentive members, a mix of nonprofits and companies. Morethan 175,000 people—including scientists, engineers, and designersfrom around the world—have posted solutions.
The Rockefeller Foundation has supported 10 social innovationchallenges through InnoCentive and reports an 80 percent successrate in delivering effective solutions to the nonprofits posting challenges.12 The open innovation approach is effective in producinglots of new ideas. The responsibility for filtering through the ideas,field-testing them, iterating, and taking them to market ultimatelyfalls to the implementer.
An InnoCentive partnership with the Global Alliance for TB DrugDevelopment sought a theoretical solution to simplify the current TBtreatment regimen. “The process is a prime example of design thinkingcontributing to social innovation,” explained Dwayne Spradlin,InnoCentive’s CEO. “With the TB drug development, the winningsolver was a scientist by profession, but submitted to the challengebecause his mother—the sole income provider for the family—developedTB when he was 14. She had to stop working, and he took on theresponsibility of working and going to school to provide for the family.” Spradlin finds that projects within the InnoCentive community oftenbenefit from such deep and motivating connections.13




Implementation
The third space of the design thinking process is implementation,when the best ideas generated during ideation are turned into aconcrete, fully conceived action plan. At the core of the implementationprocess is prototyping, turning ideas into actual products andservices that are then tested, iterated, and refined.
Through prototyping, the design thinking process seeks to uncoverunforeseen implementation challenges and unintended consequencesin order to have more reliable long-term success. Prototypingis particularly important for products and services destined forthe developing world, where the lack of infrastructure, retail chains,communication networks, literacy, and other essential pieces of thesystem often make it difficult to design new products and services.
Prototyping can validate a component of a device, the graphicson a screen, or a detail in the interaction between a blood donor anda Red Cross volunteer. The prototypes at this point may be expensive,complex, and even indistinguishable from the real thing. As theproject nears completion and heads toward real-world implementation,prototypes will likely become more complete.
After the prototyping process is finished and the ultimate productor service has been created, the design team helps create a communicationstrategy. Storytelling, particularly through multimedia,helps communicate the solution to a diverse set of stakeholders insideand outside of the organization, particularly across languageand cultural barriers.
VisionSpring, a low-cost eye care provider in India, provides agood example of how prototyping can be a critical step in implementation.VisionSpring, which had been selling reading glasses toadults, wanted to begin providing comprehensive eye care to children.VisionSpring’s design effort included everything other than thedesign of the glasses, from marketing “eye camps” through self-helpgroups to training teachers about the importance of eye care andtransporting kids to the local eye care center.
Working with VisionSpring, IDEO designers prototyped the eyescreeningprocess with a group of 15 children between the ages of8 and 12. The designers first tried to screen a young girl’s visionthrough traditional tests. Immediately, though, she burst into tears—the pressure of the experience was too great and the risk of failuretoo high. In hopes of diff using this stressful situation, the designersasked the children’s teacher to screen the next student. Again,the child started to cry. The designers then asked the girl to screenher teacher. She took the task very seriously, while her classmateslooked on enviously. Finally, the designers had the children screeneach other and talk about the process. They loved playing doctorand both respected and complied with the process.
By prototyping and creating an implementation plan to pilotand scale the project, IDEO was able to design a system for the eyescreenings that worked for VisionSpring’s practitioners, teachers,and children. As of September 2009, VisionSpring had conductedin India 10 eye camps for children, screened 3,000 children, transported202 children to the local eye hospital, and provided glassesfor the 69 children who needed them.
“Screening and providing glasses to kids presents many unique problems,so we turned to design thinking to provide us with an appropriatestructure to develop the most appropriate marketing and distributionstrategy,” explained Peter Eliassen, vice president of sales and operationsat VisionSpring. Eliassen added that prototyping let VisionSpringfocus on the approaches that put children at ease during the screeningprocess. “Now that we have become a design thinking organization, wecontinue to use prototypes to assess the feedback and viability of newmarket approaches from our most important customers: our visionentrepreneurs [or salespeople] and end consumers.” 14




Systemic Problems Need Systemic Solutions
Many social enterprises already intuitively use some aspects of designthinking, but most stop short of embracing the approach as a way tomove beyond today’s conventional problem solving. Certainly, thereare impediments to adopting design thinking in an organization. Perhapsthe approach isn’t embraced by the entire organization. Or maybethe organization resists taking a human-centered approach and failsto balance the perspectives of users, technology, and organizations.
One of the biggest impediments to adopting design thinkingis simply fear of failure. The notion that there is nothing wrongwith experimentation or failure, as long as they happen early andact as a source of learning, can be difficult to accept. But a vibrantdesign thinking culture will encourage prototyping—quick, cheap,and dirty—as part of the creative process and not just as a way ofvalidating finished ideas.
As Yasmina Zaidman, director of knowledge and communicationsat Acumen Fund, put it, “The businesses we invest in requireconstant creativity and problem solving, so design thinking is areal success factor for serving the base of the economic pyramid.”Design thinking can lead to hundreds of ideas and, ultimately, real-worldsolutions that create better outcomes for organizations andthe people they serve.