Design Thinking for Social Innovation

"...[S]ocial challenges require systemic solutions that are grounded in the client’s or customer's needs. This is where many approaches founder, but it is where design thinking - a new approach to creating solutions - excels."

Published in Stanford Social Innovation Review, this article explores the use of design techniques to tackle more complex problems, such as finding ways to provide low-cost healthcare throughout the world. "Design thinking - inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential - addresses the needs of the people who will consume a product or service and the infrastructure that enables it."

The article begins with an illustration of what can happen when design thinking is not integrated into efforts to develop better solutions to social challenges, such as the need to provide people with clean drinking water. The vignette tells the story of a young woman living outside Hyderabad, India, who chooses to fetch water daily from the always-open local borehole, even though it periodically makes her and her family sick, rather than fetching the safer water from the Naandi Foundation-run community treatment plant. The reason: the 5-gallon jerrican that the facility requires her to use is too heavy for her to carry. "The designers of the center...missed the opportunity to design an even better system because they failed to consider the culture and needs of all of the people living in the community."

Similarly, the authors assert that mosquito net distribution in Africa might have benefited from design thinking. "The nets are well designed and when used are effective at reducing the incidence of malaria....The way that the mosquito nets have been distributed, however, has had unintended consequences. In northern Ghana, for instance, nets are provided free to pregnant women and mothers with children under age 5....For everyone else, however, the nets are difficult to obtain..."

As detailed here, IDEO, a global innovation and design firm, coined the notion of design thinking as a way of focusing on creating products and services that are human centred through a process that itself is also deeply human. "The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps." These "spaces" are not always undertaken sequentially; the process is not a linear, milestone-based one. The spaces are:

1. Inspiration, the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions - Rather than starting with "the brief" - a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realised - it is suggested here that designers "go out into the world and observe the actual experiences of smallholder farmers, schoolchildren, and community health workers as they improvise their way through their daily lives. Working with local partners who serve as interpreters and cultural guides is also important, as well as having partners make introductions to communities, helping build credibility quickly and ensuring understanding."
2. Ideation, the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas - After spending time in the field observing and doing design research, a team goes through a process of synthesis in which they distill what they saw and heard into insights that can lead to solutions or opportunities for change. This approach is intended to help multiply options to create choices and different insights about human behaviour, such as alternative visions of new product offerings or choices among various ways of creating interactive experiences. As noted here, "more choices mean more complexity, which can make life difficult", so "it is important to have a diverse group of people involved in the process....Interdisciplinary teams typically move into a structured brainstorming process. Taking one provocative question at a time, the group may generate hundreds of ideas ranging from the absurd to the obvious. Each idea can be written on a Post-it note and shared with 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..."
3. Implementation, the path that leads from the project stage into people's lives - At the core of this process is prototyping, turning ideas into actual products and services that are then tested, iterated, and refined. Through prototyping, the design thinking process seeks to uncover unforeseen implementation challenges and unintended consequences in order to have more reliable long-term success. After the prototyping process is finished and the ultimate product or service has been created, the design team helps create a communication strategy. Storytelling, particularly through multimedia, helps communicate the solution to a diverse set of stakeholders inside and outside of the organisation, particularly across language and cultural barriers.

The article provides several illustrations of design thinking in action as a workable strategy, including one developed by Jerry and Monique Sternin, whose preferred approach to social innovation (positive deviance) is an example of design thinking in action. In 1990, the Sternins 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. The Sternins and colleagues from Save the Children surveyed 4 local Quong Xuong communities and asked for examples of "very, very poor" families whose children were healthy. They then observed the food preparation, cooking, and serving behaviors of these 6 families, called "positive deviants", and found a few consistent yet rare behaviours. Parents of well-nourished children collected tiny shrimps, crabs, and snails from rice paddies and added them to the food, along with the greens from sweet potatoes. The Sternins and the rest of their group worked with the positive deviants to offer cooking classes to the families of children suffering from malnutrition. By the end of the programme's first year, 80% of the 1,000 children enrolled in the programme were adequately nourished. In addition, the effort had been replicated within 14 villages across Vietnam. "Design thinkers look for work-arounds and improvise solutions...and they find ways to incorporate those into the offerings they create. As Monique Sternin, 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 context and will not necessarily work outside that specific situation'."