SPEAKER 1: Design thinking has the power
to address major social issues by helping
designers and organizations understand how
their work impacts the world.
At the Sprint Conference hosted in November of 2017 at Google,
we brought together a group of practitioners
to share methodologies that support ethical design
and positive social impact.
ALEXANDRA LEE: I was part of the panel
on the civic and social innovation along with really
awesome panelists.
And I basically covered how we incorporate design sprints
in government.
AMISH DESAI: Given the resources that governments have available
or the problems they are trying to solve,
it's really important that being flexible, being lean
is key to solving some of the bigger problems
that we have as a society.
ALEXANDRA LEE: It's hard in the government, especially when
you're doing like community workshops,
to get people to talk about like real challenges and kind
of trusting us to kind of be the holder for those issues because
at the moment, like there is such kind of lack of trust
in government, full stop.
So I think this is a nice way to rebuild that with the community
by making a lot of our processes more accessible, and more
fun, and interactive, and also kind
of delivering on that expectation
by going back and repeating that kind of offer
so they come back for the subsequent workshops
and they get involved in it again.
So we're using Sprint as a way to build conversations
with stakeholders and using that as a way to frame how we
continue to engage community.
DREW BRIDEWELL: I thought it was really
interesting to see the design agencies,
how they approach for-profit, and then
how the nonprofits were approaching it.
And it was really important to see
like the day-to-day government and the experience
of what they're going through, and then
how you can actually make a really
big impact through design thinking
and through design education.
KARWAI NG: In today's session, we
spoke about "below the iceberg," which is a conscious design
framework for integrating unseen and unintended consequences
that we might not normally consider when we design things.
We feel that right now, we only design
products and services that live at the tip of the iceberg
and there's like a whole realm of unseen, unintended
consequences that we aren't considering.
I think a lot of us felt like we were kind of sleepwalking.
We weren't really aware of the sort
of consequences of the things that we design every day.
And so as soon as we introduced a concept,
we did find a lot of natural interest from our colleagues
because we might have heard about these things
on the periphery, but this is one of the first times
that in the quite structured, as well as abstract way,
we can integrate some of these issues
into what we do every day.
ALEXANDRA LEE: Sometimes, like you
have to show more than tell.
So since I'm working with the majority of people
that don't have design training, like I have to kind of warm
up and kind of give them opportunities to really see
themselves as like leaders in the process,
so that they can kind of engage in activities
as kind of someone that has ownership of the process.
And that warms them up and also makes
them comfortable to thinking about like design
thinking as a way to improve how they work.
When we work with the community, like it's just
kind of an exposure to how kind of letting them
know how government can be more adaptable
and also kind of be more open to like what community values are
and needs are.
And so in a way, when we work with the community,
it's more about like exposing them
to like how government is changing
and the potential for them to really
have a strong ownership in that process.
AMISH DESAI: The biggest takeaway
for me was really about the ability
to be nimble, and think about how resourceful social impact
requires you to be, and how we might
be able to leverage some of those learnings in that realm
when it comes to working with clients for a for-profit basis.
KARWAI NG: For me, this is a way of injecting the rigor back
into how we design.
So not just blindly following that process
using "how might we's," putting Post-its
on the wall that don't mean anything,
but adding purpose and meaning behind what we do every day.
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