Innovation for Social Impact
Innovation for Social Impact
With an academic track record in teaching design thinking and leading human-centered design projects in the social sectors, Emily Rose Skywark serves as a consultant at Bridge Innovate. She guides client service delivery capabilities and serves as a Design Sprint and Foresight Scouts™ coach.
Prior to joining the Bridge Innovate® team, Emily served as the inaugural Design Thinking Fellow for Innovate Carolina, advocating for the integration of design thinking across the University of North Carolina's campus through teaching, training, and consulting for students, faculty and external partners. Additionally, she co-developed and served as the teaching associate for a new Design Thinking for the Public Good course for 54 interdisciplinary graduate students. Through her work at Carolina, Emily remains connected to and publishes alongside thought leaders at the forefront of human-centered design, social innovation and rapid experimentation.
July 6th, 2022
Watch the full webinar in the video above, or read the recap below.
How might innovative methods traditionally used to develop profitable products and services benefit those striving to make an impact on social issues? Emily Rose Skywark, MPH and Consultant with Bridge Innovate as shares her story tips for adapting design thinking and strategy tools for social impact in both the industry and academia.
Design Thinking in the Social Sector
Design Thinking is an approach to problem solving and improvement that often takes a non-linear path, allowing a product or service to go through multiple iterations with a focus on addressing the real needs of real people. These principles began in the product design sector, but has found its place in the corporate world and now the nonprofit sector. It’s an innovation tool that considers three components: 1) Desirability – is it something people actually want? 2) Feasibility – is it something we can actually accomplish? And 3) Sustainability – is it something that can actually last?
Empathy Tools
It takes a human-centered process to create a human-centered product. When implementing a new service for your nonprofit, how can you use empathy—putting yourself in someone else’s shoes—to ensure its success? Consider these tools:
Identify Stakeholders: Define who will be directly impacted by the new product, service, or system and include them in the design process. Include those who may experience the challenge in an extreme way, so you can design for the margins rather than the average.
Interviews & Focus Groups: Gather together unique and valuable perspectives to identify opportunities and challenges, and by doing so, deepen your relationship with decision-makers within your organization.
Analogous inspiration: Research and experience solutions from similar situations, but in different contexts. The forced shift in perspective can often open up new possibilities on how to approach the problem.
Immersion: Spend a “day in the life” of your user, and observe and record your experience—everything you see, hear, think and feel.
Photovoice: Similar to Immersion, have an individual take photos during an “in the field” experience, then gather further insight by conducting an interview with the individual on the photos they took.
Find themes: After gathering your insight through the methods above, organize the thoughts and feelings you’ve gathered around the central themes that arise
Set goals and time constraints for this part of the process, so you know when to move on to the next stage. You could always gather more insights and do more testing, but eventually you need to take the next step.
Co-Creation, Prototyping, and Testing
After compiling your findings around the central themes, it’s time to test and implement. Why take time to test again and again when you could just hit the ground running? To fail, and fail early in a low-stakes context. Through the procedure of determining what went wrong and what could be improved, you’ll gain new insight and learn new routes to solve the original problem. However, you cannot, nor should you, test every part of your solution. Identify three to five make-or-break assumptions so your test stays lean, affordable, and effective.
To conduct these tests, create and iterate on a simple, low fidelity prototype. If you’re designing a product, craft it with pen and paper. If you’re implementing a new system, storyboard it. Design exactly what you need to test and nothing more. Describe the process to real users and allow them to identify gaps. By doing so, you bring them into the design process, and they become co-creators with you, putting people at the center of every part of your organization’s mission.
Are you a nonprofit organization seeking to collaborate on a new service? We would love to learn how Bridge Innovate® can help you help others.
For more from Emily on design thinking in academia, check out some of her published work:
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