Happy November! With winter right around the corner, now is a perfect time to sit inside with a hot cup of tea and enjoy your morning read. This month’s Design Breakfast is all about impact, and how we as designers might measure the impact of our own design practice.
Meet our curator of the month
Emily is a Stockholm-based service and digital product designer. She is passionate about tackling some of the complex design challenges we face today. She believes that good design practice has not only the ability to affect real organisational, social, and societal change, but also the potential to build upon and support people’s capacity for bettering the world around them. Emily's latest interest is how we as designers might assess the impact of our design practices.
In Finland, the City of Helsinki has developed a design game, the OmaStadi participatory budgeting game, to aid citizens in the development of budgeting proposals. In my MA thesis, I had the opportunity to explore the broader impact of this game from the perspective of inclusion, through interviews conducted with civil servants (at Helsinki’s mayor’s office), service designers, and the citizens who participated in the 2018-19 budgeting process. This was part of a broader effort by the city to assess and evaluate the long-term impact of its OmaStadi project.
As designers, one of the major challenges we face is how to demonstrate the strategic value that design, service design, and design thinking practices bring to organisations. Because the impact of design practice is often intangible, it can be very difficult to measure its direct effects. As a result, designers are often faced with the so-called ‘butterfly effect' in which they struggle to pinpoint definite results to specific practices. The New Design Frontier report by InVision explores what impact design has on business performance by looking at how design impacts product quality, operational efficiency, business profitability, and market positions at different levels of organisational design maturity.
Although some designers today have started to incorporate evaluation methods directly into their work processes, they often end up questioning the validity of their evaluation results, due to a lack of suitable metrics. In this article, the authors argue that organisations lack in actively assessing the significance of design in their working practices due to a failure to take into consideration the varying levels of organisational design maturity. This article explores common metrics at four different levels of design maturity; none-design, design as form-giving, design as a process, and design as a (business) strategy.
In traditional evaluation practices, impact has typically been measured through evaluations aiming to prove if something has worked, or that it will in the future. In design, we tend to also measure impact formatively, meaning that we use evaluation methods in order to learn from, reflect on, and improve upon what we are designing, as it is being designed. In her article, Cat Drew discusses why we measure impact, and for whom. As part of her work as a civil servant, she argues for designers to take a more iterative, experience, and practice-led approach to measuring impact, as this would allow us to reflect and learn about how well a design process is working, improve it, and create best and future practice.
My journey into service design has been a long one. After high school, I started studying in a bachelor's programme focusing on concept development and web design. It was an opportunity to explore business, communication, development, and design. However, the design seemed to be the only thing that really stuck. Once I graduated, I felt like there was still a lot more within design left for me to explore. I wanted to understand the theory behind how, why, and what we design. Two master's degrees later, I discovered service design and co-creation and fully fell in love with the practice. What fascinated me the most about design, is its potential to drive positive change. Today, my dream is to work as a designer in or with the public sector, using my design expertise to change the system from within. My journey toward this goal has only just begun, and it has begun right here at Futurice.
Something you feel very grateful for when looking back on your career.
While at Aalto University, I was lucky enough to be part of a course called “Design for Government”. This course brings students and Finnish ministries together and offers students the opportunity to work on complex societal challenges in collaboration with civil servants. Over 14 weeks, our team of five designers developed a new identity for Finland’s National Hiking Areas with education as the primary focus. Our concept addressed rising concerns regarding children’s declining knowledge and experience of nature and aimed to attract new and mindful visitors seeking to reconnect with the natural environment to the Hiking Area. This project has had a huge impact on my identity as a designer because it really showed me what service design as a practice can really achieve. Further, it is this project that has shaped my professional dreams for the future, drawing me in the direction of the public sector.
One thing you would recommend all designers to try out.
Think about how you would measure the impact of your design practice, your projects, your team, and your ways of working. Consider why you would want to measure, when, and for whom? What organisational changes do you want to see? What is the improvement in customer or client behaviour that signals project success? And finally, what quantitative and qualitative metrics would allow you to measure this?
Evaluating design impact takes a lot of work and creativity, but as long as we as designers are clear about what we are trying to achieve with our work right from the project's outset, we will have something to measure. As the report from InVision shows, design has huge potential for improving the business performance of organisations, but we as designers need to continue to prove the value of our practice.
Jobs
Senior Service Designer
Do you share excitement about innovative and beautifully crafted digital experiences that positively impact people’s lives and deliver real value?
Do you like to play a key role in helping the world's leading businesses develop compelling and well-thought-out design solutions? Here's your opportunity to raise the benchmark of the design practice.
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