Are Design Services the Secret to a Better Development Sector?

One of the opening sessions of PopTech was entitled "How (Not) to Change the World," and featured speakers like Mulago Foundation director Kevin Starr and Water for People founder Ned Breslin discussing the failures of development, and how to do it better. One of the things that I was struck by was how much of the problem was a failure of design, yet at the same time, how few people in the development space would label it as such.

Almost any organization working towards local or international development is in the business of designing products or services that are designed to change or amplify some behavior towards a certain goal. New diagnostics technologies are designed to shift how diseases are discovered and stopped. Sports for youth programs are designed to shift young people's perspective about team work and their ability to achieve. Agriculture support programs are designed to give rural farmers new tools or strategies to increase their crop yields. And the list goes on.

While these are all very different contexts, each of these programs require a design process in which the organization in charge figures out what behavior they're trying to change, which levers for change to focus on, and which resource, cultural or other constraints dictate the boundaries of the designs they can use.

These processes tend to be shared across just about all the domains of social change. Determining a theory of change, or more�prosaically�a desired shift in behavior. Understanding the array of constraints that face any environment in which a service or product will be deployed. Looking at the models that exist and the opportunities for innovation that could shape the product or service to be designed. While the manifestation may be different, together these questions and considerations comprise a design discipline.

Yet most nonprofits and international development organizations don't think of themselves as designers. And they certainly don't think about themselves as potential clients for design firms. There is an extreme lack of knowledge and recognition of "design" as a field of managerial and creative consulting that could dramatically reshape social impact outcomes.

I think part of this gap is simply the newness of "design" as a management discipline in general. It has really only been in the last couple decades that firms like IDEO have demonstrated that major companies can employ external design services to advance their offerings. This is still diffusing across the commercial world, not to mention the nonprofit world.

But I think part of it is an implicit or explicit feeling of possession on the part of nonprofits that leads them to believe that they should be able to do all of this on their own. After all, its their experience right? Their connections. Their ideas. Their approaches. What this fails to understand is that the function of design services is about helping organizations apply the discipline of thinking through product and service design to those things they already know, have and understand.

There is some hope that lack of understanding of design services for development are changing. Catapult Design, Project M Lab, Project H Design and more are blazing the way. But there's still a long way to go, and I hope the market for these services grows.

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