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Comments (1) Posted 10.27.11 | PERMALINK | PRINT

Bibliography

Design and the Social Sector: An Annotated Bibliography

Courtney Drake & William Drenttel



This bibiography was initiatied in early 2011 as an independent study project by Courtney Drake, a graudate student at the Yale University School of Management. It overlaps with William Drenttel's work as a senior faculty fellow at Yale SOM, where Design and Social Innovation Case Studies are published. Winterhouse Institute is adopting this bibliography as a larger project, and is publishing it as a collborative bibliography — working closely with the participants of the Winterhouse Education Symposia. Other suggested entries are welcome at designobserver@winterhouse.com, although publication within this bibliography is solely at the discretion of Winterhouse Institute. — William Drenttel


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Design thinking, user-centered design, service design, transformation design. These practices are not identical but their origin is similar: a definition of design that extends the profession beyond products. The rise of service economies in the developed world contributed to this movement toward design experiences, services and interactions between users and products. The literature about design thinking and contemporary ideas reveals common elements and themes, many of which are borrowed from product design processes. They include abduction, empathy, interdisciplinary teams, co-creation, iteration through prototyping, preservation of complexity and an evolving brief.

The implications of the rise of design thinking are twofold. First, corporate and organizational leaders concerned with innovative prowess are recognizing design thinking as a tool for developing new competitive advantages. Design thinking considers consumers' latent desires and thus has the potential to change markets rather than simply make incremental improvements in the status quo. Second, many organizations have encountered significant barriers to practicing design thinking internally. In some ways, design thinking runs counter to the very structure of a corporation — it is intended to break paradigms, which may mean questioning power relationships, traditions and incentive structure, and it may require a corporation to overhaul its business model and cannibalize its success. Additionally, many corporate leaders treat design thinking in a linear manner, a process that compromises the critical elements of conflict and circularity. In many instances, designers have failed to sufficiently translate and articulate their process, and businesses tend to favor past trends over the promise of new discovery.

With corporations struggling to use design thinking effectively, where does that leave the social sector? The organizational challenges facing corporations do not necessarily transfer to nonprofit organizations: more complex systems, higher stakes for failure, limited resources and intangible evaluation metrics. Designers may be attracted to greater complexity and more wicked problems in the social sector, but they need to be prepared to adapt their process and attitudes to create positive change. Perhaps the most significant adaptation designers need to make is in their role. Where product design connotes a sense of authorship, social design demands that designers be facilitators and educators of their processes. Further, they need to recognize they may not be well equipped to solve problems, but can identify problems and co-create with local leaders and beneficiaries.

The value of co-creation is a predominant theme in the literature surveyed here, particularly for Western designers contributing to foreign communities. Another critical factor is continual presence within projects, or better, a longer-term, sustained involvement. Authors speak of the importance of evaluation and metrics to gauge success, but find many projects lacking, perhaps for the same reasons the social sector as a whole struggles with impact measurement. Scaling, adaptation and replication are buzzwords that pervade the social sector, but are particularly difficult for the product of a design process. Because the process is founded on a deep understanding of a particular user group's needs, the solution for one community likely does not translate directly to another. However, authors suggest that it is the design process that is scalable and should be taught to local leaders. Failed projects support this assertion; benefits flow through the process of a project as well as the end-product, which further advocates for co-creation. Finally, the literature leave us with an unsettling question: Is breakthrough innovation possible in the social sector? Most veterans in this field suggest the answer is no — they recommend that designers start small and introduce incremental change because the complexity of the systems and problems they face will demand it. However, this finding does not negate the potential value of the designer. The social sector needs designers to identify problems, imagine possibilities for a better future and facilitate problem-solving processes.  — Courtney Drake


PART ONE: BEYOND PRODUCT DESIGN

Beckman, Sara L.; Barry, Michael. "Innovation As a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking." California Management Review, Fall 2007. Volume 50 Issue 1, p25-56, 32p. Print.
Sara Beckman, faculty director of Haas Management of Technology Program, and Michael Barry, consulting assistant professor of Stanford Design Program, integrate the second generation of design theory with experiential learning theory to derive an innovation process and insights for leaders of innovation. They overlay diverging, converging, assimilating, and accommodating learning styles with a design process that moves fluidly between analysis and synthesis and abstract and concrete conceptualization. The design process itself closely mirrors that used extensively at IDEO, but Beckman and Barry introduce learning styles to relate the process to constructing an innovation team. For each carefully detailed phase in the innovation pocess, they identify the most adept learning style along with Myers-Briggs type indicators, college majors, and career choices. Beckman and Barry encourage corporations to institute leaders who understand the innovation process, can recognize when to transition between phases, and can integrate a diverse team. Such a leader considers both professional expertise and learning styles while composing innovation teams, selects roles based on learning styles, and incorporates a high level of diversity in teams. [CD]

Brown, Tim. "Design Thinking." Harvard Business Review, June 2008. Web.
Tim Brown, CEO and president IDEO, discusses design thinking as an engine for innovation that is driven by a human-centered perspective. By briefly tracing the history of design and recent shift toward service economies in the developed world, Brown demonstrates the need to extend design to services and experiences. He simultaneously walks through the design thinking process and highlights the versatility of the approach through salient examples ranging from Thomas Edison's invention process, to operational adjustments at Kaiser Permanente, Shimano's development of the Coaster bicycle, and Aravind Eye Clinic's business model to serve rural India. Brown emphasizes the importance of persistence and hard work in the design thinking process; the benefits of a systems view to maximize value for customers, staff, and shareholders; and the emotional and functional inputs for a meaningful consumer experience. The article is grounded with a detailed profile of design thinkers and guidelines for integrating design thinking into innovation processes. [CD]

Brown, Tim; Katz, Barry. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: Harper Business, 2009. Print.
Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, presents innovation, "a good idea executed well", in concert with his design thinking process and an extension to business and the social sector in the context of IDEO projects and strategic decisions in major corporations. Brown distinguishes innovation from increment as a long-term growth strategy that is difficult for competition to imitate. He encourages designers and executives to broaden the design process, by using it to make strategic decisions and consider relationships between people and the experience behind products and services. A portion of the book is dedicated to a detailed description of the design thinking process used at IDEO, which is a human centered, iterative process that operates in the spaces of ideation, inspiration, and implementation, constrained by desirability, feasibility, and viability. Brown advocates for executives to merge business thinking with design thinking to consider constraints realistically and create a balanced portfolio of incremental, evolutionary, and revolutionary innovations. He warns against limiting the creative process when systematically applying design thinking in an organization and encourages corporations to involve consumers. Brown also calls for designers to apply their skills to social problems and for educational systems and professional circles to preserve creativity. He concludes with practical suggestions for organizations that want to integrate design thinking to bridge information and practice. [CD]

Clark, Kevin; Smith, Ron. "Unleashing the Power of Design Thinking." Design Management Review, Summer 2008. Volume 19 Issue 3, p8-15, 8p. Print.
Kevin Clark, program director, and Ron Smith, designer and brand experience strategist of IBM Corporate Marketing and Communications, implore business executives to take up design thinking as a business strategy, particularly in a business environment focused on innovation. Clark and Smith view design methods as vehicles that can take intentions to reality and they attribute the divide between designers and business executives on designers' inability to translate design issues into the business language. Alternatively, they translate design thinking through three types of intelligence: emotional, integral, and experiential. Emotional intelligence is necessary to understand the emotions that drive customers to act, integral intelligence is used to reconcile customer needs and an organization as a system, and experiential intelligence helps businesses understand how customers interact with products. Clark and Smith exemplify each category with initiatives at IBM and culminate with a brief case study of IBM's Client Briefing Experience Initiative. [CD]

Cottam, Hilary; Burns, Colin; Vanstone, Chris; Winhall, Jennie. Transformation Design. Design Council, Working Paper, February 2006. Volume 02. Print.
Hilary Cottam, director of RED, and her design strategist colleagues define transformation design, consider successful examples of its application, and outline philosophical and practical challenges to its adoption in the design world. Transformation design is in essence what others term user-centered design, a process that allows interdisciplinary teams to address complex problems holistically. Cottam et al. distinguish transformation design from problem-solving by its outcomes that are both desirable and practical. It also departs from a traditional view of design, with a broadened scope that includes interaction, experience, and service design; emphasis on defining a problem rather than just producing a solution; and involving users in and empowering them through the design process. The six defining characteristics of transformation design include: an evolving brief, collaboration between disciplines, capacity-building for clients, extension of design beyond products, and creation of fundamental change. Cottam et al. consider the views of traditionalists who are sensitive to the loss of authorship when designers become facilitators of design processes, the shift to designing beyond form, democratization of quality definition, new contexts for design outside of the studio, and the evolutionary nature of transformation design. In a more practical sense, they identify challenges to wide-spread use of this design application: communication of the value of transformation design given its often intangible nature and the dearth of transformation designers. [CD]

Drews, Christine. "Unleashing the Full Potential of Design Thinking as a Business Method." Design Management Review, September 2009. Volume 20 Issue 3, p38-44, 7p. Print.
Christine Drews, aircraft interior and product designer for Virgin Atlantic Airways, presents design thinking as a method that appeals to business leaders but is not yet widespread, based on insights from European experts in business, management, and design. Like Clark and Smith, she translates design thinking into the language of business but in different terms: consumer-centricity, orientation to the future, and challenging norms. Drews attributes the gap between designers and business executives to segmentation of qualitative and quantitative disciplines in educational systems. She makes an argument for adoption of design thinking in business based on the need to make radical platform innovations to stay relevant and differentiate by challenging norms. For Drews, the two greatest benefits of design thinking for corporations are mitigating risk associated with new ideas through early, rapid prototyping and turning customer observations into accurate interpretations of patterns and unexpressed desires. She concludes by placing the burden of spreading design thinking on designers, to be transparent about their processes and avoid stereotyping project partners. [CD]

Erlhoff, Michael; Marshall, Tim. "Definition of Service Design." Design Dictionary Perspectives on Design Terminology. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2008. p354-357, 4p. Print.
Michael Erlhoff, founding dean and professor at Koeln International School of Design, and Tim Marshall, provost and chief academic officer of The New School, explore the meaning of service design, a discipline that is highly demanded by developed nations and the source of many new enterprises and subsequent jobs. Erlhoff and Marshall define service design as a process that "addresses the functionality and form of services from the perspective of the client" in a way that is "effective, efficient, and distinctive" for service suppliers. The theory and methodology behind service design closely parallels those behind product design, although the formal language for this newly emergent discipline is still in development. Erlhoff and Marshall assert that service designers can only shape the conditions that create an experience, rather than shaping the experience itself. Common tools for this somewhat intangible design application are blueprints, journey mapping, scenario planning, touch point analysis, and service enactment. As such, the performing arts serve as metaphors for communicating concepts in innovative ways for service design. Erlhoff and Marshall introduce points of debate around the purpose service design and how material and human factors interact and are integrated, issues they conclude must be resolved by design teams. [CD]

Forlano, Laura. "What is Service Design?" Urban Omnibus, October 2010. Web.
Laura Forlano, postdoctoral associate at Cornell University and adjunct faculty member in the Design and Management program at Parsons The New School from Design discusses the definition, origin, and future of service design. She is aided by reflections from her colleagues from Parsons and designers and researchers at Lucerne School of Art and Design, Polytechnic University of Milan, and ImaginationLancaster at Lancaster University in the UK. Forlano's definition of service design considers the perspective of both the client and supplier. She addresses service design in a less tactical manner than Saco and Goncalves, by focusing on the relative youth of this design application and growth with evolving demographic and economic trends. Forlano and her interviewees agree with Saco and Goncalves on the breadth of service design's reach, citing "almost infinite" applications, the importance of democratizing design by making customers co-producers, and the crucial role of aesthetics. However, they also trace the roots of service design to service management, product services systems, and interaction design. They consider the disciplines that merge in service design, predict a shift toward retrofitting in architecture, and highlight the demand for sustainable societies in increasingly populous cities. [CD]

Gerber, Elizabeth; Carroll, Maureen. "The Psychological Experience of Prototyping." Design Studies, June 2011. Web.
Liz Gerber, assistant professor at the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University, and Maureen Carroll, researcher at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner’s Institute for Design examine the psychological experience of the popular design practice of prototyping. They find that  while scholars have studied what work is accomplished when people engage in design practices such as user observation, brainstorming, sketching, and prototyping few have considered how people feel when engaging in these practices and how engagement help people to navigate the ambiguity and fear of failure associated with innovation work. Based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of a high tech firm that adopted design practices into their organization, they find that the practice of prototyping helped workers to reframe failure as an opportunity for learning, supported a sense of forward progress, and strengthened beliefs about creative ability. They discuss the managerial implications of adopting design practices. The perspective is unique and gives insight into why design practices are readily adopted independently of whether they “produce” results. [EG]

Johnson, Mark W.; Christensen, Clayton M.; Kagermann, Henning. "Reinventing Your Business Model." Harvard Business Review, Dec 2008. Volume 86 Issue 12, p50-59, 10p. Print.
Mark Johnson, chairman of Innosight; Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor; and Henning Kagermann, co-CEO of SAP AG; attribute success in innovation to good technology that is in tandem with an innovative business model. Because a lack of understanding of a company's current business model as a barrier to this type of innovation, they break down the elements of a business model to a customer value proposition, profit formula, key resources, and key processes. Johnson et al. also provide indicators of when a new model is needed to bolster their guiding rule: when a company needs to make major changes to all four elements of their existing model. They claim that a new model need not cannibalize a company's core business and leaders should be patient with new ventures regarding growth but not profit. [CD]

Lester, Richard K.; Piore, Michael J.; Malek, Kamal M. "Interpretive Management: What General Managers Can Learn from Design." Harvard Business Review, March/April 1998. Volume 76 Issue 2, p86-96, 11p. Print.
Richard Lester, director of MIT's Industrial Performance Center; Michael Piore, the David W. Skinner professor of Political Economy at MIT; and Kamal Male, research staff member of MIT's Industrial Performance Center; present an interpretive approach to management as a method for leaders to adapt to uncertainty and unpredictable markets and move organizations forward. Through a series of examples from the fashion, cellular technology, and biotechnology industries, Lester et al. demonstrate the importance of flexibility and contact with customers to interpret new situations. They are critical of strict use of analytical approaches to management, citing the tendency to apply artificial constraints; rather they recommend alternating between analytical and interpretive management depending on market conditions. They recommend that companies engage in information sharing and process variation to gain new insights that generate breakthroughs and warn managers against rigid standardization of core competencies. [CD]

Martin, Roger L. The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage. Boston: Harvard Business, 2009. Print.
Martin, Roger L. "What Is Design Thinking Anyway?" Design Observer, September 2009. Web.
Roger Martin, dean of Rotman School of Management, builds on Brown's definition of design thinking by considering its role in reconciling the prevalent schools of thought in business and helping companies balance reliability and validity. Martin presents abductive thinking as the core principle behind design thinking and a medium between analytical and intuitive thinking. For Martin, abductive thinking allows companies to move along the "knowledge funnel", which is composed of a broad mystery, a heuristic that narrows the complexity of the mystery, and an algorithm that transforms the heuristic into a fixed formula. Martin's knowledge funnel incorporates the principles of divergent and convergent thinking that lie behind Brown's design thinking process, but rather than focusing on the mechanics on the design thinking process, he considers how businesses exploit innovation and discover new opportunities. He claims that companies will see costs fall if they can balance exploration and exploiting knowledge stages. Inherent challenges to this balance are the tendency for companies to favor reliability over validity; the need to shift business structure, processes, and culture to employ design thinking; and absence of leaders committed to protecting validity and promoting design thinking. Martin builds off of his earlier publication, The Opposable Mind, to make recommendations for aspiring design thinkers who want to develop their personal knowledge systems and work with colleagues at the extremes of reliability and validity. [CD]

Norman, Don. "Design Thinking: A Useful Myth." Core77, June 2010. Web.
Don Norman, Apple VP, HP executive, and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, claims that the concept of design thinking is not unique, but is creative thinking used over the ages masquerading as a novel practice. He defines the term as an application of systems thinking that oven involves immersion into problems, frequent tests and revisions, and multidisciplinary teams. Norman cites the use of creative thinking in a broad range of industries. He attributes design consultancies' success to their ability to break paradigms anchored by politics, tradition, and financial incentives in organzations. For Norman, design thinking's redeeming value is the image it lends designers, extending their utility beyond aesthetics to functional and structural solutions to any problem. [CD]

Nussbaum, Bruce. "Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What's Next?" Co.Design: Fast Company,, April 2011. Web.
Fabricant, Robert. "Frog Design: Three Things Wile E. Coyote Teaches Us About Creative Intelligence." Co.Design: Fast Company, April 2011. Web.
Bruce Nussbaum, former assistant managing editor for Business Week and professor of innovation and design at Parsons The New School of Design, kicks off a discussion about the failures and obsolescence of design thinking and attempts to replace the process with the concept of creative intelligence. In response, Robert Fabricant, leader of the healthcare expert group and social innovation at frog design and professor at the School of Visual Arts, agrees that design thinking did not pervade business effectively but refutes the idea that creative intelligence will meet a better response. The two agree that design thinking made valuable contributions to society, but corporations implemented design thinking in a linear manner and in so doing lost the conflict and circularity that stimulate creativity and innovation. Nussbaum argues that creativity is a more appealing, accessible concept that will expand society's engagement with innovation. He defines creative intelligence as "the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions" but does not expound on how to use this new term or how to measure it. Fabricant claims that creativity is an inherent individual quality that is undervalued in organizations and, if quantified as a measure of creative intelligence, may be treated as a quota for human resource departments. Alternatively, he cites Wile E. Coyote's creative failures to stake out the necessary conditions under which creativity succeeds: through relationships that create tension between different perspectives, through externalization, and within strong social dynamics. [CD]

Saco, Robert M.; Goncalves, Alexis P. "Service Design: An Appraisal." Design Management Review, Winter 2008. Volume 19 Number 1, p10-19, 20p.
Roberto Saco, owner and principal of Aporia Advisors, and Alexis Goncalves, business innovation independent consultant, introduce service design, a discipline that mirrors design thinking in many aspects, as a core competency that is relevant for consultants, academics, and practitioners in a broad range of business industries. Saco and Goncalves follow the rise of service design, list service design activities and their associated tools, and progress to three case studies that feature different applications. While problem solving is mentioned as an outcome, Saco and Goncalves focus on service design as a means to construct a total guest experience, broaden corporate missions, and manage change. They also comment on the movement toward evidence-based methodology and a common language for service design, the potential to use service design achieve breakthrough innovation, nontraditional applications for social and environmental sustainability, and the essential strategies for successful service design. [CD]

Ungaretti, Toni; Chomowicz, Peter; Canniffe, Bernard J.; Johnson, Blair; Weiss, Edward; Dunn, Kaitlin; Cropper, Claire. "Business + Design: Exploring a Competitive Edge for Business Thinking." SAM Advanced Management Journal, Summer 2009. Volume 74 Issue 3, p4-43, 9p. Print.
Toni Ungaretti et al. of Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Minneapolis College of Art and Design discuss the benefits of adding design thinking to the business education toolbox, supported by findings from an empirical study of business students in a design thinking course. Their description of design thinking closely echoes Martin's and findings support his conviction that business school graduates armed with design thinking skills are better prepared to meet the demands of a contemporary marketplace. Like Lester et al., they contrast a traditional management approach with a design-oriented approach, but more concretely describe the latter in terms of having a can-do attitude toward complex problems, use of abductive reasoning, and employing a mix of collaboration and empathy. Ungaretti et al. introduce two concepts not often included in design thinking discourse: action learning and reflective practice. Their findings show student growth in design thinking skills, including teamwork, deep understanding consumers, abductive reasoning, and adoption of multiple perspectives. [CD]

Wylant, Barry. "Design Thinking and the Experience of Innovation." Design Issues, Spring 2008. Volume 24 Issue 2, p3-14, 12p. Print.
Barry Wylant, associate professor of environmental design at University of Calgary, delves into the elements of ideas, creativity, and innovation. He ties the economic concept of clusters to psychological innovation triggers to discover the experience, elements, and consideration of ideas. Wylant examines the interaction between stimuli and ideas, where thinking "outside of the box" constitutes innovation by taking a step beyond making sense of stimuli. Heuristics and innovative techniques, such as brainstorming, create stimuli that promulgate new ideas. Wylant claims that the innovation process is scalable and employs dominance and placements to arrive at a final creative outcome. He arrives at a concept of design thinking: a process that playfully considers placements to raise good questions rather than seeking the right answers. [CD]


PART TWO: DESIGN MEETS THE SOCIAL SECTOR

Aaker, Jennifer; Smith, Andy. "The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change." Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011. Web.
Jennifer Aaker, General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Andy Smith, principal of Vonavona Ventures, present a replicable framework for social media campaigns that follows the design thinking process and draws on principles of consumer psychology. The four stages of the "Dragonfly Effect" — focus, grab attention, engage, and take action — parallel design thinking, which moves from empathy to hypothesis creation, rapid prototyping, and testing. Aaker and Smith use examples from the social, public, and private sectors to demonstrate diverse applications of their model that employ social media tools in surprising, innovative ways. Central to their framework is the relationship between personal connection and action. [CD]

Bright, David S.; Godwin, Lindsey N. "Encouraging Social Innovation in Global Organizations: Integrating Planned and Emergent Approaches." Journal of Asia-Pacific Business, 2010. Volume 11 Issue 3, p179-196, 18p. Print.
David Bright, assistant professor in Raj Soin College of Business at Wright State University and Lindsey Godwin, Assistant Professor of Management in the College of Business at Morehead State University, present a framework for understanding social innovation and apply it to World Vision's strategic planning and innovation processes. Bright and Godwin extend Aristotle's concept of virtuous intent to organizational behavior, with the claim that social innovation occur in any organization that practices virtuous intent. They then consider two approaches to change, planned and emergent, where emergence can either occur naturally or artificially. Bright and Godwin demonstrate how an organization can balance and interweave planned and emergent change by characterizing the stages of World Vision's strategic planning process in 2004. World Vision integrated the two approaches with parallel feedback loops at the top and bottom of the organization, expanded internal networks, and a high systems awareness of the organization. [CD]

Brown, Tim; Wyatt, Jocelyn. "Design Thinking for Social Innovation." Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2010. Web.
Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, and Jocelyn Wyatt, leader of IDEO's Social Innovation group, discuss the design thinking process in the context of social innovations in the developing world, in more detail and almost identical language as Brown's earlier Harvard Business Review article, "Design Thinking". They analyze solutions to complex social issues such as malnutrition, malaria prevention, child eye care, safe drinking water, and TB treatment regimens to demonstrate where design empowered or failed communities. The article draws connections between positive deviance and design thinking and highlights aspects of the design thinking process that move an organization beyond incremental improvements toward breakthrough innovation. Brown and Wyatt explore the tensions a successful design thinking organization must navigate to conceptualize a project that is neither too narrow nor abstract. Such tensions include a diverse team of interdisciplinary individuals, a brief that allows for creativity and serendipity, preservation of complexity to generate ideas, selection of a viable solution, and use of prototypes to solicit feedback and refine products and services. For Brown and Wyatt, organizations that either use aspects of design thinking rather than the entire process, resist a human-centered approach, or fear failure may not successfully implement design thinking. [CD]

Campbell, Donald T. "Considering the Case against Experimental Evaluations of Social Innovations." Administrative Science Quarterly, March 1970. Volume 15 Issue 1, p110-113, 4p. Print.
Donald Campbell, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, rebuffs an article by Weiss and Rein (1969) in which they disagreed with Campbell's previous writings on the experimental method applied to social innovation. He concedes that experimenters should resist the temptation to solely use metrics that are easily gathered as sole criterion or allow them to distort programmatic goals. Rather, they should identify negative side-effects and pursue multiple variables and measurement modes. Campbell stands behind incomplete control groups, for their contribution to interpreting rival hypotheses. He warns against prematurely anticipating no-effect outcomes in social experiments, at the risk of crowding out incremental progress. Finally, he emphasizes the importance of learning from experimental process alongside outcomes. [CD]

Cary, John. The Power of Pro Bono: 40 Stories about Design for the Public Good by Architects and Their Clients. New York, NY: Metropolis, 2010. Print.
Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx and president of economic consulting firm Majora Carter Group; John Peterson, founder and president of Public Architecture; and John Cary, executive director of Public Architecture, analyze the presence of pro bono work in architecture and trends in design democratization. Their analysis provides a foundation and context for 40 examples of pro bono projects that impacted communities and nonprofit organizations that could not afford good design. Carter asserts that the built and natural environment directly impacts development factors that contribute to social ills such as incarceration, domestic abuse, educational underachievement, and teen pregnancy; it also indirectly impacts wealthy populations whose tax payments support social services. Good design disproportionally favors the wealthy and sends a message to poor populations that they are less valuable. Peterson examines pro bono design, calling it as an act that involves self-serving motives, is good for business, and can help nonprofits advance their missions. While there is little research on the societal impact of good design, Peterson claims that pro bono design helps organizations and communities identify and solve problems, engages a wider population than is traditionally influenced by architecture, and is most useful when it produces affordable, replicable models of service. Cary further defines pro bono design by contrasting it to community and humanitarian design; pro bono design integrates the public good and architectural practice, is scalable, and engages other players in the building industry. The featured 40 projects are products of Public Architecture's 1% program and exemplify the marriage of good design, critical needs, and positive impact on communities. The projects depended on partnerships between a wide variety of architecture firms, nonprofit organizations, and funders and cover six impact areas: arts, civic, education, health, and housing. For Cary, the projects attest that "architecture is a social act": people and nonprofits want good design, architects care about their communities, and pro bono design is a valuable investment for funders. [CD]

Chowdhury, Imran; Santos, Filipe M.. "Scaling Social Innovations: The Case of Gram Vikas." INSEAD Working Papers Collection, 2010. Issue 10, p1-34, 35p. Print.
Imran Chowdhury, research assistant, and Filipe Santos, associate professor of entrepreneurship at INSTEAD, consider the transfer of social innovation between organizations based on a case study of Indian rural development organization Gram Vikas. They contrast the Arrow core concept, which uses templates for transfers, to the institutional perspective in organizational theory that emphasizes contextual adaptation. Further, they delineate two methods of knowledge transfer, dissemination of best practices through intermediaries and knowledge sharing between partners. The former results in broad dissemination of practices with less control for the source firm, while the latter is best for slow growth and early scaling stages. The case of Gram Vikas is an alliance transfer through a partnership that moved through the stages of informal collaboration, transfer formalization, implementation, and maintenance over the course of seven years. As a result, Chowdhury and Santos have five primary findings: preservation of the core elements of an innovation is essential, social entrepreneurs benefit from their ability to focus on long term value creation rather than competition while scaling, transferring unpatented social innovations requires a high degree of control to minimize variability, there is a material tension between consistency and adaptation, and diverse partners benefit from formalized transfer agreements. [CD]

Darwin, Thomas. "From the Townhall into the Studio: Design, Democracy, and Community Resilience." Journal of Design Strategies, Spring 2010. Volume 4 Number 1, 29-33, 5p. Print.
Thomas Darwin, director of professional development and community engagement in the Office of Graduate Studies at University of Texas at Austin, applies principles from design and organizational psychology to community change. Darwin examines "wicked problems" that face communities and require a nonlinear, iterative processes to solve. He characterizes wicked community problems by their "thrownness", an attribute that calls for participatory design and resilience. The three defining qualities of resilience include acceptance of reality, the capacity to find meaning in situations, and the ability to improvise, all of which point to design as a tool for community change. Darwin uses the Community Studio in Austin as an example of a venue that teaches community members the design process, with the goal of empowering them to solve problems in the future. Darwin generalizes that communities that are willing to intelligently prototype and notice the resources and possibilities that emerge from difficult situations will most effectively catalyze change. Further, these communities will include individuals who have a "design mind" — that is, are systematic, participative, oriented to emergence, and positive. [CD]

Fabricant, Robert. "Design With Intent." Design Observer, September 2010. Web.
Robert Fabricant, leader of the healthcare expert group and social innovation at frog design and professor at the School of Visual Arts, extends the scope of user-centered design in response to a desire among designers to engage with social issues and have a more immediate impact on behavior. The traditional stance of user-centered design abstains from imposing personal values on a user experience, to the point that a designer and her choices are incorporated invisibly into user behavior. Alternatively, Fabricant introduces three types of design that give designers a less detached position. Persuasion design uses subtle cues to influence behavior and allows designers to use their decisions to create positive change. Catalyst design leverages participation and mobile agents to engage communities, shift mindsets, and suggest new possibilities for design before products or services are developed. Last, performance design is particularly useful when the impact of a design is delayed or remote; it uses simulations to prototype experiences and consequences. These active design stances create opportunities to impact behavior through the design process, rather than solely through a final product. [CD]

Hempel, Jessi. "How Venture Philanthropists Use Design Thinking to Help Solve Real-World Problems." BusinessWeek, March 2007. Issue 4025, p8-13. 5p. Print.
Jessi Hempel, Innovation Department editor of BusinessWeek Acumen Fund founder Jacqueline Novogratz's approach to poverty alleviation through design thinking. Acumen's strategy combines Brown's design thinking process with Johnson et al.'s insistence on business model reinvention for innovation. Acumen empathizes with the people in developing countries it serves to build business models from their perspectives and evaluate scalability. Acumen Fund works with entrepreneurs, donors, corporations, and government partners to build prototypes for businesses, which they iterate and improve to generate social benefits and monetary rewards. Hempel notes a key to Acumen's success is the frequency with which Acumen personally interacts with the communities it serves to partner with social entrepreneurs in innovation. Acumen Fund's experiments sometimes result in financial loss, but are compensated by the social benefits they generate. [CD]

Jankel, Nick. "Radical Reinvention: Why There Are So Few Breakthrough Social Innovations and 20 Recommendations to Overcome the Barriers." White Paper, 2011. Web.
Nick Jankel, founder and CEO of wecreate and creative director of wonderinc, defines breakthrough social innovation, considers the barriers to its prevalence, and lists recommendations alongside examples of successful innovations. Jankel extends an example of Netflix as a breakthrough innovation in the private sector to the social sector to define breakthrough social innovation as "leveraging ideas for social or public good in a manner that can permanently disappear or massively reduce a problem". For Jankel the defining characteristics of a breakthrough social innovation are systemic, sustainable, scalable, and self-organized. Each aspect imposes barriers, many of which occur due to a focus on symptoms rather than root causes, risk aversion among funders and policymakers, lack of funding for the proof-of-concept development phase of an innovation, and misaligned incentives for social entrepreneurs. Jankel's recommendations for overcoming barriers draw upon principles from participatory design and design thinking processes and strategize to both improve capital flow to breakthrough social innovation and increase collaboration and weak ties. [CD]

Jegou, Francois; Manzini, Ezio.. Collaborative Services: Social Innovation and Design for Sustainability. Milano, Italy: Edizioni POLI.design, 2008. Web.
Based upon a two-year study conducted by a panel of universities, European research centers and international institutions, this book looks at questions such as: What is a sustainable lifestyle? What will our daily lives become if we agree to change our routines? How do we reduce our environmental impact without lowering our living standards? It attempts to answer these questions and suggests an overarching scenario of 'collaborative services'. These include cases studies such as 'car-sharing on demand', 'micro-leasing system for tools among neighbors', 'a shared sewing studio', 'a home restaurant' among others. To implement scenarios such as these, designers must consider themselves as part of a complex web of design networks comprised of individuals, enterprises, non-profit organizations, local and global institutions engaged in creativity and entrepreneurship in service of a larger goal--sustainability. Combines tactics and theory. [TI]

Lasn, Kalle; Dixon Chris; Poynor, Rick. "First Things First 2000: A Design Manifesto." Adbusters, The AIGA Journal, Blueprint, Emigre, Eye, Form, Items. Fall 1999/Spring 2000. Web.
Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters magazine; Chris Dixon, art director of Adbusters; and Rick Poynor, founder of Eye magazine and co-founder of Design Observer; resurrect a manifesto drafted by Ken Garland and adopted by a multitude of British graphic designers in 1964. The manifesto responds to a consumerist society and economy and a trend among designers to use their talents solely in commercial applications and projects devoid of meaning. It challenges the perception of design in the general populous and the duties of the individual designer, extending their problem-solving skills to worthwhile pursuits including environmental, social, and cultural crises. The manifesto is paired with designer Jouke Kleerebezam's reaction; he recognized the importance of information for designers and created the Innovation and Design for Information Empowerment website to help designers reposition themselves in other industries. Other designers posted commentary, applauding and critiquing the manifesto and providing suggestions for action. Key criticisms claim that the manifesto is overly general and pretentious, commercialization and consumerism play an increasing role the social sector, information design is an occupation as opposed to personal identity, and that information design does not have the scope to intervene with all environmental and social issues. [CD]

Lawson, Cynthia. "‘Designed by' Versus ‘Made by': Approaches to Design-Based Social Entrepreneurship." Journal of Design Strategies, Spring 2010. Volume 4 Number 1, p34-40, 7p. Print.
Cynthia Lawson, assistant professor of Integrated Design in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design, considers two strategies for developing artisan communities in social entrepreneurship. She holds that social enterprises that leverage artisans' creative processes rather than externally imposing design achieve more sustainable development. She uses a "Made by" versus "Designed by" framework to explore this concept, where designs that are simply executed by artisans achieve less development and self-sustainability than designs that are created and produced by artisans. The latter "Designed by" strategy allows artisans to develop a broad range of skills, climb the socioeconomic ladder, and retain their heritage. Rather than catering designs to market trends, this strategy positions indigenous designs in the market and imposes limited guidelines on designs developed by artisans. Although the "Designed by" model is a more effective means of sustainable development, when Parsons The New School collaborated with humanitarian organization CARE to develop a business model for a community of Guatemalan women to export artisan goods, the "Designed by" model proved to be time intensive and called for intermediary use of the "Made by" model. [CD]

Lovett, Gina. "A Crucial Shift." Design Week, January 2010. p15-15, 1p. Print.
Gina Lovett, freelance writer and former senior reporter for Design Week, redefines sustainable design and the role of the designer in the context of social innovation. She claims that sustainable design needs to consider the web of social, environmental, and economic factors that are compounding with rising consumption from global population growth. Lovett calls for innovation over closed-loop production and consumption models or retroactive eco-efficiency and predicts that the predominant source of breakthrough innovation in the future will be in product service systems that change human behavior rather than making material changes in production and consumption. She considers existing corporate business models a barrier to breakthrough sustainable innovation and points to emerging economies as important players, given their ability to implement new systems and set standards for design. Lovett complements Smith's Design for the Other 90% and designates designers as facilitators and interpreters of social innovation that is user-centric, participatory, and employs metadesign. [CD]

Manzini, Ezio. "Design Research for Sustainable Social Innovation." Design Research Now: Essays and Selected Projects. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007. Print.
Ezio Manzini, professor of Industrial Design at the Milan Polytechnic and chair of Design under the Distinguished Scholars Scheme at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, indicates a need to transform of the role of users and designers for a sustainable future. Manzini cites the lack of a shared vision on sustainable living as the driving factor behind the dichotomy of designers who promote consumption and do-gooder but ineffective designers. Manzini claims that social innovation that improves wellbeing and social fabric while reducing ecological footprints occurs but is not perpetuated on a large scale. However, the rise of globalization and networking creates "cosmopolitan localizations" that are locally rooted and open to global networks. Further, creative communities have demonstrated their ability to reconsider assumptions about work, time, and relationships in a movement toward dependence on common goods rather than product consumption. Manzini holds that collaborative networks such as open source technologies have the power to connect creative communities and cosmopolitan localizations and effectively blur the line between user and producer. The convergence of these three elements creates a multi-level global society of interconnected local communities. Manzini's suggestions for design research draw on elements of service, transformation, humanitarian, and user-centered design. Researchers need to redefine the role of design as a replicator of social innovations, creator of new governance tools that will facilitate creative attitudes of users, and perpetuator of co-creation for active wellbeing. [CD]

Manzini, Ezio. "Small, Local, Open, and Connected: Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability." Journal of Design Strategies, Spring 2010. Volume 4 Number 1, p8-11, 4p. Print.
Appadurai, Arjun. "Responses to Ezio Manzini." Journal of Design Strategies, Spring 2010. Volume 4 Number 1, p12-13, 2p. Print.
Ezio Manzini, professor of Industrial Design at the Milan Polytechnic and chair of Design under the Distinguished Scholars Scheme at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, reiterates his concepts of active wellbeing and cosmopolitan locality in a framework that establishes a base for sustainable solutions to social issues. For Manzini, solutions must involve small, local actors that are connected and open in a global sense. He offers his own definition of social innovation: changes in the way people think and behave. Social innovation in combination with technical innovation moves toward a sense of community and shared goods and a production system that links local and global parties. Manzini qualifies the terms small and local, where smallness can command great power and locality can be newly cultivated and exchanged globally. He suggests that the designer's role is to work with leaders in the social, technology, entrepreneurial, and public sectors to increase access to and scale of innovations. [CD]

Arjun Appadurai, professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University, questions Manzini's assumptions behind the relationship between smallness, locality, and openness. He claims that smallness should be gauged by manageability of connectivity, network, and flow rather than scale. Appadurai also extends Manzini's connection between local and global communities, insisting that sustainable design globalizes the elements that produce locality. Further, his nuanced view that global information flow may lead to either closure or openness implies that the combination of smallness and connectivity does not always breed openness. [CD]

Nussbaum, Bruce; Pilloton, Emily; Fabricant, Robert; Popova, Maria; Stairs, David. "Humanitarian Design versus Design Imperialism: Debate Summary." Design Observer, July 2010. Web.
Bruce Nussbaum, former assistant managing editor for BusinessWeek and professor of innovation and design at Parsons The New School of Design, sparks a conversation about the mode in which Western designers use their expertise to do good in different cultures, suggesting that the perception of cultural imperialism is often a result. Nussbaum advises humanitarian designers to consider how they are viewed by the communities they serve, involve local designers in their projects, consider domestic projects, and carefully choose partners. Emily Pilloton, founder and executive director of Project H Design, agrees with Nussbaum that designers are often drawn to international causes and humanistic design is by nature imperialist. However, she holds that he oversimplified the chaos that is inherent to humanitarian design and that it demands learning and failures. She defends Project H, citing early failures with the Hippo Roller that led her to engage in a domestic project in North Carolina through which she collaborates closely with end users, has a personal connection to the place and people, is invested in its success, and is committed to the benefiting community. Nussbaum responds apologetically to Pilloton but defends his position that Western designers should expect to encounter sensitivity and negative reactions to humanistic design. Later in the conversation Nussbaum asks questions about how to respond to local elites who oppose Western design intervention. [CD]

Robert Fabricant, vice president of creative at frog design and professor at the School of Visual Arts, enters the conversation with the insight that there is a tendency to celebrate the achievements of humanistic design prematurely. He offers strategies to avoid imperialism: build a strong design research practice globally, partner with local communities to introduce and adapt technology, establish a diverse group of affiliates for a local and global reach, opt for incremental design and small ideas that can scale rather than new inventions, and pair focus with a strong commitment to see designs through in the long run. Maria Popova, editor of Brain Pickings, suggests that the language surrounding humanitarian design excludes systemic elements of development and she advocates for new language and "bridge figures" that will encompass the intricate biocultural and psychosocial factors at play in Western poverty and the developing world. David Stairs, founding editor of Design-Altruism-Project, has the last say in this series of articles, calling Nussbaum's comments anachronistic and uncontroversial. He claims that a lack of early field experience will become very apparent later in projects and designers need to proceed carefully, recognizing that "where another nation's cultural heritage is concerned, we're all potential terrorists." [CD]

Pol, Eduardo; Ville, Simon. "Social innovation: Buzz Word or Enduring Term?" Journal of Socio-Economics, December 2009. Vol. 38 Issue 6, p878-885, 8p. Print.
Eduardo Pol, senior lecturer, and Simon Ville, professor at University of Wollongong School of Economics, derive a definition of social innovation from previous definitions of the term, contrast it to business innovation, and make policy recommendations for encouraging social innovation. Previous definitions consider social innovations movers of institutional change, new ideas that meet social purposes, ideas that work for public good, and needs that are neglected by the market. Pol and Ville's definition, which they insist is purely pragmatic and encompasses the common denominator of previous definitions, calls social innovation a "new idea that has the potential to improve either the macro-quality or the quantity of life". While many business innovations, which are uniquely profit-seeking, have wide social benefit, there is a subset of innovations that are "pure social innovations" and fall outside of market mechanisms. Pol and Ville claim that pure social innovations function as public goods and will thus receive underinvestment in a free market, which necessitates government-facilitated incentives for social innovation. [CD]

Sacchetti, Vera. Design Crusades: A Critical Reflection on Social Design. Thesis. New York: School of Visual Arts, 2011. Print.
Vera Sacchetti, a Fulbright scholar at the School of Visual Arts and contributor to Change Observer, Arte Capital, and Proximo/Next Future, wrote this masters thesis for SVA's D-Crit program through which she critiques the emergence and future of American social design abroad. She fundamentally disagrees with the claim of well-intentioned social design enthusiasts that design can change the world. Rather, she asserts that the successful application and implementation of design in complex social systems is limited and efforts to evaluate and communicate success lack sophistication. Core to the evolution of social design is the extension of design from product development to services and opportunities in emerging markets rising from the 2008 financial crisis. Sacchetti notes the asymmetry between social designers and "underprivileged", "other" users and suggests that the Western designer's perspective employs stereotyping and generalizations that threaten the success of projects abroad. She incorporates the perspectives of Maria Blair, vice president of Rockefeller Foundation, and Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, who disagree about whether the core process of design is translatable across cultures, and cites One Laptop per Child and Project H's Hippo Roller as examples of process failure. Brown resonates with John Cary's suggestion designers' primary contributions to development is their ability to see things differently than clients and identify problems rather than just solving them. Sacchetti makes several recommendations for social design education, that students should be knowledgeable about development efforts, the weight of cultural differences, the value of collaborative teams and co-creation, and the inherent responsibilities of social design. She and Brown question designers' use of metrics to assess successful implementation and Sacchetti suggests that, with rare exceptions, media promoting social design projects oversimplify cultural context, promote stereotypes, and prematurely celebrate successes. She concludes with guiding principles for social design that she admits are difficult to implement due to the complex nature of social issues: shed cultural bias, co-create with target communities, partner with local organizations, start small, and be willing to adapt ideas to cultural context. [CD]

Smith, Cynthia E. Design for the Other 90%. New York: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum / Editions Assouline, 2007. Print.
Cynthia Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, catalogues an exhibition to affordable solutions to factors impacting impoverished populations and the insights behind it. Aided by so-called societal entrepreneurs in the field, Smith discusses tactics for designing sustainable, low-cost solutions that provide shelter, water and sanitation, food, energy, healthcare, education, and transportation for the 90% of the world population that lacks access to these basic goods. She presents these strategies alongside innovative designs to introduce a conversation about designing for the poor, celebrate successful solutions, and propagate this application of design. Like Norman, she extends the utility of designers beyond aesthetics, but directs their intentional problem-solving orientation toward the alleviation of suffering. Contributors emphasize the need to have a deep understanding of end-users to create designs that generate income and are affordable, replicable, scalable, participatory, and financially and environmentally sustainable. The exhibited solutions demonstrate the range of approaches to development: mass distribution versus high levels of local involvement, focus on basic needs versus root causes, and concurrent solutions to multiple development barriers versus targeted designs. [CD]

Stohr, Kate. "100 Years of Humanitarian Design." Design like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises. New York: Metropolis, 2006. Print.
Kate Stohr, managing director of Architecture for Humanity, recounts the influence of architecture on low-income and temporary housing, starting with the design of portable cottages in response to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She walks through stages of technological development, the rise of manufacturing, urbanization, and modernism in connection to housing in the United States. The fascination with technology during the 20th and 21st centuries resulted in phases of questioning the utility of design professionals and a shift of power toward the "educated few" architects, who no longer need direct dialogue with their low-income clientele. Stohr recounts efforts by Walter Gropius and R. Buckminster Fuller to introduce mass-manufactured housing that were stunted by financial impracticality but trailed by the introduction of automobiles and later mobile homes. She also discusses the role of policy, notably the National Housing Act of 1934 that markedly increased homeownership in the U.S. and the Housing Act of 1937 that funded the construction of low-income housing and cleared substandard structures. The 1930s saw an attitudinal shift about the poor, to view them as a resource rather than a burden through self-help and sites-and-services programs. Stohr lifts up Fred Cuny for his design and implementation of temporary housing for disaster victims and Samuel Mockbee for his customized low-income housing in Alabama that reintroduced conversation between architects and clients. She suggests that successful architectural responses to disasters are characterized by forceful leaders, use of local materials and labor, a third party presence that contributes to governmental and NGO efforts, and keeping temporary housing in the vicinity of original neighborhoods to preserve social and economic structures. [CD]

Tonkinwise, Cameron. "Politics Please, We're Social Designers." Core77, September 2010. Web.
Cameron Tonkinwise, chair of Business Design and Sustainability at Parsons The New School for Design, considers the political stance of the Parsons DESIS Lab research project and exhibition, Amplifying Creative Communities, and by extension that of social innovation design. The exhibition featured examples of what Tonkinwise calls "the sustainability of sustainability", or the role design plays in enabling people to more effectively provide for themselves and be collectively more innovative. He focuses on local redesign, echoing the debate sparked by Nussbaum on the inherent imperialism of humanitarian design that design for social good is most effective when it is indigenous and designers are committed and follow through. The core of Tonkinwise's argument is that ethical design is political because its mere existence aligns it with a side of policy and debate. He offers examples of design that make government services redundant and communicate support for smaller government. The implication for the design brief it that it must include effective lobbying, because scaling social innovation often opposes some part of the law. [CD]

Uehira, Taisuke; Kay, Carl. "Using Design Thinking to Improve Patient Experiences in Japanese Hospitals: A Case Study." Journal of Business Strategy, 2009. Volume 30 Issue 2/3, p6-12, 7p. Print.
Taisuke Uehira, senior director at Daishinsha, and Carl Kay, services sector consultant, analyze the effective implementation of deep user research on patient experiences in Japanese hospitals by furniture manufacturer Okamura Corporation. This qualitative methodology was novel in Japan given the dominance of incremental product and business model innovation, risk-averse organization dynamics, and continued focus on manufacturing despite a rising service economy. Okamura enlisted the services of marketing consulting firm Daishinsha to determine the most critical element in the patient waiting experience, develop portrayals of types of patients, and prototype to help patients understand their route in the hospital and anticipated waiting time. This case demonstrates how a corporation successfully reworked its business model to exploit an opportunity for innovation and describes a design process that mirrors those presented by Brown and Martin. It has deeper implications for the future of exploratory consumer research and breakthrough innovations in Japan in the medical field and beyond. [CD] 


CREDITS FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

[CD] Courtney Drake is a graduate student, Yale School of Management.

[EG] Elizabeth Gerber is an assistant professor, Segal Design Institute, Northwestern University.

[TI] Terry Irwin is a professor and Head, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University.  

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