Hasta La Ideas

Indian women gather water from a local well. The Ripple Effect project, done in collaboration with Acumen Fund and with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, improves access to safe drinking water for more than 500,000 of the world’s poorest and underserved people.

What would the world look like if we applied design-thinking to address poverty? Hunger? Gender inequality? Today, the global innovation firm IDEO is announcing their commitment to this huge question with the launch of IDEO.org this fall. Over the last ten years, IDEO has expanded its work in the social sector with projects like the Ripple Effect improving access to safe drinking water and the Human-Centered Design Toolkit (HCD Tookit) funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. IDEO.org will reflect the human-centered, design-based approach IDEO has championed since its inception in 1991. IDEO.org’s work with partners from the social sector will focus on design projects addressing health, agriculture, water and sanitation, financial services and gender equity. Through these projects, they’re looking to create tangible outcomes — a product, service, business, or system — that will directly benefit the community or people for which it was designed. In anticipation of the launch of IDEO.org this fall, Core77 had the opportunity to chat with IDEO.org co-leads Jocelyn Wyatt and Patrice Martin, to get an inside track on how IDEO.org came to be, what goals the organization hopes to accomplish and the importance of prototyping solutions for local problems.

Core77: My initial exposure to IDEO was in a Nightline segment about redesigning shopping carts where David Kelley (IDEO Founder) was running around, hanging things from the ceiling and crafting objects. And then, when I began working in this field professionally, I encountered your firm again, and suddenly there was this emphasis on nonprofits and doing social good. And at that time, I was curious about the back-story of this shift and was wondering if you could re-illustrate to me how that transition occurred.

Jocelyn Wyatt: Over time, as IDEO has grown as a firm, we’ve realized that what we have is a process around human-centered design, and that process can really be applied to taking on any number of challenges. Through IDEO’s evolution, there [arose] an interest in applying human-centered design first, moving from focusing solely on product design to focusing on designing services and systems, businesses and spaces. This also extends to thinking about how we might apply human-centered design in that process to different sectors as well. Now with the launch of IDEO.org we are moving from working with primarily private sector companies to focusing on working with public sector organizations and social sector organizations as well.

Especially in the transition to working on social innovation work, we really saw two different forces that were happening in the world. On the one hand we saw that designers both within IDEO and outside of IDEO were interested in applying their skills to these really tough challenges that face the world. On the other hand we saw an increased interest by foundations and nonprofit partners in innovation and in the human-centered design process. Doing social innovation within IDEO and now working through IDEO.org, is an opportunity to really scale the impact of our work but also to make it more accessible to foundations and nonprofits.

A man in India delivers water in his community.

Core77: What is IDEO.org and what do you hope to accomplish through this new direction?

Patrice Martin: IDEO.org is a breakthrough scalable model which allows philanthropic support to spread human-centered design and improve the lives of low income communities across the globe. We want to do this in three ways, when we think about our impact. First, dedicated design teams will work on design projects with nonprofit social enterprises and foundations on their pressing challenges related to poverty. The focus areas will likely be in agriculture, water, sanitation, gender, equity, financial services and health-related challenges.

The second is our commitment to fellows and using the fellowship program as a way to spread human-centered design. The residents who form the design team are a part of the fellowship program and will be senior designers from within IDEO that come to IDEO.org for an 11-month period as well as designers from outside of IDEO who will apply to be part of the program, with the intent that they will take that human-centered design process and the experience in working across these types of problems into their future careers.

The third is an emphasis on spreading human-centered design and looking at opportunities around knowledge sharing. This includes sharing our insights, our opportunities and our concept across the project work we’re doing with our partner organizations, and looking at opportunities around new tools, such as social networking and open innovation platforms.

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