Social Design to Effect Social Change

When I think of traditional design thinking, I think about chairs. 

                  Credit here                            Credit here                          Credit here 

All of these chairs look very different; colors, shapes, or materials used. These chairs have evolved from the first chairs created by the Egyptians, but still serve the same purpose: sitting. Designing can be seen as evolving process.  The concept of design has been expanded from physical objects like chairs, to the non-profit sector. 

In “Design Thinking for Social Innovation” coauthors Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt highlight many design thinking examples in the social sector that I personally related to, though one stands out more than others. I served two years of AmeriCorps with Public Allies Pittsburgh, a national AmeriCorps program, who’s mission is “to advance new leadership to strength communities, nonprofits, and civic participation.”  As a Public Ally, I worked on a Team Service Project (TSP), were my team and I immersed ourselves in a community or a cause. My first year my TSP team worked in the community of Greenfield in Pittsburgh and my second year my TSP team worked to help eliminate childhood obesity in Allegheny County where Pittsburgh is located.

I immediately related to Jerry Sternin and his wife.  Brown and Wyatt explain how the Sternins and their team immersed themselves into four poor communities in Than Hoa, Vietnam.  The team wanted to learn how “very, very poor families” kept their children healthy.They learned it was from food handling and choosing food with high nutrients, even if some foods with high nutrition value were usually not eaten by children for fear of making them ill. From this experience of working with these “positive deviants,” the social change of offering cooking classes to those with malnutrition children helped improve the health of 800 children in the first year of the program alone. 

Brown and Wyatt tell readers, “Sternins was skilled at identifying what and critical of what he called outsider solutions to local problems.” There were two routes he could have taken during his stay in Vietnam. The first option would be going into the Quong Xuong communities, disregard the culture and the needs of the community, and designing solution to the pre-determined program without fully understanding what their challenges were or seeing the assets the community bring into finding a solution. The second option is how Sternin spent his time in the Quong Zuong communities; learning about the people, providing and supporting the communities, and allowing the community to development their own solution with facilitated guidance of outside support. 

As a member of a TSP group through Public Allies, we followed the route of Sternin.  We helped communities design solutions to challenges the community members identified as being challenges. In my first year working in the community of Greenfield, my team helped facilitate and design an oral history project in response to the major gap between the older Greenfield generation and younger Greenfield generation.  My second year, we partnered with a two local non-profits working on a project to eliminate childhood obesity.  We helped support the pair in creating their strategic and marketing plans, as well as an immersion guide (to work with other communities) 

Jerru Sternin and Public Allies may not have be designed chairs, but chairs are not designed without keeping the consumers in mind. Focus groups and sales tell chair designers what direction to move in. Communities and communities members partner with social innovators to move those communities in a new direction.