Our Approach

Governments, companies, and NGOs are increasingly turning to design as they recognize that many of their most vexing problems cannot be met by reductive processes currently behind engineering, economics, policy and other traditional fields. Problems with behavior, culture, and emotion at their core need more than new or improved accounting methods. 

For design to meet this new demand, it needs to move from a perceived reliance on informal knowledge to build reliable theories and methods usable at scale, with evidence they are effective, easily understood by others, and expandable through further research. 

There is evidence of this kind of transformation at work in other fields. Leading schools of public administration saw that the challenges faced by governments were no longer being met by an education based on the personal experiences of practitioners. With the support of the Ford Foundation, these schools became schools of public policy that conducted research and tackled the difficult problems of policy-making rather than policy management alone. Similar transformations occurred in schools of business and other fields. 

A similar transformation is needed in design. Design has no agreed-upon theories of prototyping, user experience, and value creation. It has processes that use false objectivity. Examples are the ubiquitous post-it note sorting with pseudo bottom-up objectivity and the creation of personas based on designers’ imaginations rather than on real data. 

Design can help the world deal with some of its most difficult problems; but this potential will be limited if the field does not shift from a base of case histories to evidence and logic. Public health offers a perfect application for design to address challenges while preserving the analytical rigor which is the discipline’s strength.