The Normality of Bad Design

Brown and Wyatt’s article on “Design Thinking for Social Innovation” detailed several examples where an innovation was enacted on a community, but was not being taken advantage of in a meaningful, impactful way. For example, a family continued to fetch water daily from an unsafe well despite there being a nearby, affordable water treatment facility. From a high-level viewpoint, it seems unbelievable that families in the community would not use the water facility. However due to the rigid parameters surrounding how much water the family had to take from the facilities, the water containers, and the payment process for that water, the family’s needs were misaligned with the design of the facility. Design thinking is about considering how systems, innovations, and structures actually fit on a practical level into lives of the people who are intended to use them.

Because social innovations are innovations that are directed for the improvement of society versus an investor’s pocketbook, it is especially true that a human-centered design process be considered in the implementation of an idea. Within that process, designers consider the needs of the users (the society who is benefiting) along with any other data that may influence the effectiveness of the proposed system. Those influences could be cultural barriers, internal budgetary restraints, or any other issue that needs to be mediated within a design solution. When this process is skimmed, skipped, or slighted, people suffer and problems perpetuate.

Bad design is a lack of empathy and a waste of resources! I can only imagine the frustration of the family who continued to drink unsafe water because the local water facility had inflexible policies. Conversely, the water facility is a wasted resource since it was established as a social innovation and fails to perform that duty. Unfortunately, bad design is so prevalent in our lives that we tend to shrug and think “That’s just way things are.” Most people are not consciously aware of the ways bad design inhibits their life. Even the keyboard layout I am using right now to type this blog post is slowing me down.  How do we find ways of reminding people that bad design exists unnecessarily? I propose that the definition of innovation could also include modifications to an existing system, a reconsideration of the design to encompass the habits and lifestyles of the people who use it or would like to use it but are currently unable. It may be the subtle change in design that could elevate an ineffective system to a world-changing innovation.