If you generate impact and no one is there to evaluate or measure it, what impact did it really have?
This isn’t a frivolous question.
The Design Council recently shared a post with the provocative title “Impact that’s designed to be measured.” The post links to the Design Council’s 2021 publication The Design Value Framework. It’s a worthy initiative to get people talking about the value that design creates, for whom, and how to think about it more systematically.
see: https://lnkd.in/gX5iFECe
While the LinkedIn article (see below) has a title that is surely going to drive eyeballs, its provocation is misaligned. As designers — especially those in the health and social sector — we are seeking to mess with what’s in place. Our role is to shepherd research, creativity, engagement, and craft toward making things better by making better things.
This is innovation at its best. It’s what designers do.
Treading Carefully Using Evaluation
Innovation and our design efforts are also a recipe for making things worse if we’re not careful.
To paraphrase Charles Eames, we’ve created more horrors in the service of innovation than anything else — so tread carefully. Evaluation helps us to know whether we’ve made things better or worse. It means it’s worth doing, no matter what we expect from the impact of our work.
All impacts are worth measuring, not just the ones we think will work, garner attention, be big and bold, or just sit at a high profile. Our “great ideas” can turn out to cause harm, and our most modest work and efforts can yield benefits beyond our imagination. This is what strategic design with complexity is all about: recognizing the systems we’re a part of, the dynamics that influence our designs, and their impact.
Strategic design is linking what we make with what we put into practice, tied together with systems and evaluative thinking.
Evaluate, always. Every design strategy should include some form of evaluation.
To quote Uncle Ben from Spiderman (not a designer, but still wise): “With great power comes great responsibility.” When we design, we’re messing with our health systems, our communities, and our environments. We do this because we believe the mess we help create is better than the mess we have — but we’re still messing with things. We have a responsibility to understand what happens when we do.
When we do it well, we achieve positive impact for what we put into the world and limit the harms from well-intentioned ideas that might work well in a prototype but not in our practice.
Let me suggest a less catchy revision to this title: all impact is designed to be measured.
(This post was adapted from an original first shared on LinkedIn by Cameron Norman)
Photo by The 77 Human Needs System on Unsplash