Hasta La Ideas

Image above from the Safe Agua project courtesy of Designmatters.

As part of a new interview series on the Autodesk Foundation’s new blog, ImpactDesignHub.org, Allan Chochinov, Editor at Large of Core77 and Chair of the MFA Products of Design program at SVA discusses the Impact Design with Mariana Amatullo, a writer, educator, speaker, and student of design and social impact. She is the Vice President of the award-winning Designmatters Department at Art Center College of Art and Design which she co-founded in 2001. Mariana is a Design and Innovation and Non Profit Management Fellow at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, where her doctoral research focuses on the evolving role of design as a locus for social innovation. In the excerpt from the interview, below, Amatullo shares the 5 things we “know” about the working world in social innovation:

1. Interdisciplinary collaboration is the name of the game

Engaging in social innovation work through design is inherently about stepping into complexity; there is often a need to deal with “wicked problems”—a class of challenges that are complex and systemic in nature. The chances one has to succeed in coming up with new ideas that can be helpful and enhance society’s capacity to meet unmet needs typically requires a set of complementary expertise and experiences on your team. 

2. The ability to learn from mistakes matters

We touched a bit on this earlier: the importance of tolerating ambiguity, taking calculated risks, and accepting failure is part and parcel of the process of invention and experimentation. Social innovation briefs are often devoid of real clues that answer the question, “What does success look like?” So there is a lot of framing and reframing that happens, and it becomes paramount to not only fail fast, but to fail better and learn from that process. 

3. This is not work for the faint of heart

It takes patience, tenacity, courage, initiative, intrinsic motivation, resonant leadership, flexibility, integrity, maturity, humility and of course, imagination, intelligence and skill. 

4. Social innovation work can surprise you—for how addictive it is 

I think that sometimes there is an ingrained perception that social innovation work goes hand-in-hand with altruism. When you talk to folks who are hard-core social activists, social entrepreneurs, humanitarians, etc., you learn that yes—a drive for social change and finding purpose in one’s work—“making a difference” in people’s lives is an important driver. It is exciting and it is rewarding. But as a famous physician and founder of a global NGO once shared with me, as you get more and more immersed in the space, you pretty quickly learn that there is such adrenaline generated from the possibilities of action and impact. It can become a compulsive engagement of sorts that is hard to shake off…in the best possible way!

5. (And my all-time favorite): The sky’s the limit

I think it was the designer Bruce Mau that was once quoted as saying “now that we can do anything, what will we do?”   

Read the full interview with Mariana Amatullo on ImpactDesignHub.org