Designing a Different World (SoCap09)

Social change means thinking differently. For design firms like frogdesign and IDEO, thinking differently is at the core of their business. In the last few years, there has been a growing recognition that the process of understanding how people interact with their peers and their environments in order to design new products is not just useful for companies, but can be an integral process of producing better solutions to social problems, as well. Design thinking is on display at the Social Capital Markets conference, and one of the ways the conference is pushing the field.

The problem of access to clear water afflicts more than a billion people around the world. In addition to the myriad health concerns this creates, many speculate that water shortages are at the root of conflict like Darfur. Social venture funder the Acumen Fund has long been concerned with water access, and has years of experience investing in local companies and nonprofits trying to address these issues.

Last year, Acumen teamed up with IDEO to better unleash local talent and collaboration by trying to learn more about the root causes and impacts of water access issues and by helping grassroots level organizations learn to think like "designers."

Together, IDEO and Acumen used the "Human Centered Design Toolkit," to help their local partners think differently about how to provide sustainable access to water. The project, Ripple Effect, has involved a number of discreet phases in India and East Africa.

In each of these locations, IDEO teams worked first with local organizations to better understand how people interact with water; how did people view trade offs between quality and convenience? Did "clean" have variable definitions? Did water (or retrieving water) have other societal relevance beyond simply needing water?

From there, they convene a huge array of stakeholders to gather new insights and put into a public space all that has been learned. Finally, they provide grants and a hands-on training for local organizations to develop and prototype solutions.

According to project lead Sally Madsen, the results have been incredible, particularly in the way that leading local organizations have taken the Human Centered Design process and made it their own. One example was the Naandi Foundation, a large group that has water purification plants in Punjab and Andhra Pradesh. One of their staffers, Satyam, became so excited about the process of field research and understanding that since the collaboration with IDEO he has been facilitating discussions about how to incorporate similar processes across the organization.

This is disruptive because it's a way of seeing the world and a methodology to put that vision into practice. I think that connects it deeply with the sensibility of the emerging social capital market space, which is both advocating a way of seeing the world in which financial, social, and environmental good are inseperable - and is convening the actors who are creating the methodology for business to be and do good.

And although IDEO are leaders in this space, they're not the only ones who will be connecting design with social entrepreneurship. At least one of the bloggers from the absolutely brilliant designmind blog by frog will be in attendence as well, and I'm sure I'll be linking to them all week.

This is part of a series called "Pushing the Field at SoCap09," in which I'm attempting to understand how the conversation at this year's social capital markets conference are point the social entrepreneurship world in new directions. See the lead-in post here.

(photo: Nat'l Geographic)