Skip to main content

Design Thinking for Nonprofits

The Clinton Global Intiative theme for this year is "Designing for Impact" Designs must take account of needs and contraints (infrastructure, money, human resources, et cetera). Don't forget to consider cultural norms, demographics, technology, education levels, laws, and regulations. Designs need to match the social environment as well as being fit for a given natural environment. Technologies obiously need to be designed.

Design thinking should be applied to systems or processes too. Just introducing water purification devices or new software can cause new problems. The rest of the system doesn't really fit what you've done. Do people have the training or experience they need to really use that new software? Feeding hungry people and preserving historic buildings are process that might be designed to work more effectively.

Stanford Social Innovation Review describes the principles and give ss few examples of good and bad design thinking. For example, a water distribution center in India did a brilliant job of producing safe drinking water. But, the system for selling and distributing the water had serious flaws. This is the sort of thing that design thinking can help you avoid. The bulk of the article describes the three "spaces" of design thinking in depth and offers some examples of design thinking applied to social problems.

To get more information on how to use design thinking, you would definitely need more information than that article contains. Most of the books on design thinking focus on business or product design. Howver, The Human-Centered Design Toolkit from design firm IDEO, shows how to apply design thinking to problems in the developing world. The Power of Positive Deviance should help you design workable solutions to social problems. Design for Services should be helpful if your organization provides social services or education.

To convert your design thinking into action you need a different mindset. Implementing designs is really way outside the scope of this blog, but this report from the University of Toronto on Turning Design Thinking into Design Doing http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/about/fraser.pdfshould help. Don't be put off by the focus on businesses that are relatively big. Just read the principles mentioned in the report and take some time to think about how those principles could be put to work in your nonprofit.

Any nonprofit of any size might benefit from studying design thinking. The concepts take a little time to master, of course. Have a look at that Stanford Social Innovation Review and then at one of those books. A quick review of the listings on Amazon.com should help you decide which book to buy and study.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Crowdsource and Experiment Our Way to a Fairer Economy

Economic and social inequality should be treated as design challenges that, like designs in architecture or packaging can be solved by applying some creative thinking. That's hardly a new idea, but the recession and ongoing concerns about economic inequality make crowdsourcing seem like something worth talking about.  Crowdsourcing as an Economic Justice Tool: Most people have an idea of what  crowdsourcing is and how it works - you let a group work on your problem or challenge and see what they produce. Can they produce a better answer (whatever that means) than an expert or a small group of experts? You can't answer that question until you have some real-world examples to draw upon. That's where social experiments and simulations can prove useful. Maybe there should be specific crowdsourcing projects and a place to organize all of them. We could start crowdsourcing campaigns around a range of topics: New ways of using barter to meet peoples' needs Using buying co...
Post a Comment
Read more

Setting Good Social Change Goals: The Problem of Police Brutality

No one in the United States can say they are totally ignorant of the issues surrounding last week's death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. This post is not about the incident, which has been covered in great depth by others. This post is about setting goals to pursue in the wake of Floyd's high-profile death.  What do protestors want, exactly? This is probably unknowable right now. Sure, they call for justice or for an end to police brutality, maybe in those exact words. Each one of those goals has a huge problem. Let's see why. What does justice look like exactly? Will you know when justice has been served? Theoretically, some felony convictions for the involved officers would work. Right? Maybe.  The goal of ending police brutality is far more problematic. How can we ever achieve a state of affairs where no cop ever abuses any suspect? That is what an end to police brutality might look like. Achieving perfection is a bit too amb...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Technique for Generating Fundraising Ideas

I’ll return to the subject of strategic planning for nonprofits later. For now, I want to introduce another technique for generating ideas, for fundraising, planning, program design, advocacy, and other things. The Filament Technique was created by Edward De Bono, guru of creative thinking, and described in Serious Creativity . The technique is pretty easy to understand so I will just jump into demonstrating it with a nonprofit example. We start by defining a creative focus. In this case I want to focus to securing donations. You could also focus on fundraising generally or on another aspect of fundraising. The process is exactly the same. Having decided on the creative focus of “securing donations” I next need to list some of the normal requirements of securing donations. Here is my list: Potential donors Compelling case for donations Printed materials Objectives Note that those requirements are kept pretty broad. That was done on purpose. The list above is meant to be an illustrati...
Post a Comment
Read more