Human-Centered Design: Applications for Government-led International Aid?

“Design Thinking for Social Innovation”, by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, identifies a process for design thinking that can be applied to social innovation initiatives to improve our solutions and increase impact. The article outlines a process for design thinking that includes 3 “overlapping spaces”[1]: inspiration, ideation, and implementation.

In college, I had the opportunity to intern with the United States European Command (US EUCOM), in the Humanitarian Assistance Program. The US EUCOM is a joint command aimed at achieving strategic missions to fruition in Europe. The Humanitarian Assistance Program was created, along with similar programs in Africa, the Pacific Rim and South America, to create resiliency in local communities by building infrastructure, training for disaster preparedness, and promote health and human services. This is, of course, a mechanism to provide aid in communities that are under-served in a way that will deter regional instability.

As it stands, aid applications are submitted by foreign service officers working in US Embassies across Europe. The aid applications outline the specific problem and ideal solution, what the cost would be, and the benefits it will provide to the community. In the Humanitarian Assistance Program office, an officer would review, revise, and forward the applications to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who would sign off on the project.

This method leaves little room for the three stages of design thinking outlined in IDEO’s Field Guide on Human-Centered Design and Brown’s article. The Foreign Service Officer may be using the Inspiration place, but it would be difficult to move through the ideation and implementation spaces with any ease when using such an opaque and bureaucratic approval system. The IDEO Field Guide encourages social innovators to “Fail early to succeed sooner”[2], but the limitations on the Humanitarian Assistance Program forces results to come slowly, and significant resources would be lost before confirmation of the project’s success or failure.

Perhaps the best model for US EUCOM’s aid program to adopt is to expand a currently small aspect of the program. Projects with a total cost of under $10,000 can be funded without approval from the Joint Chiefs. If the Humanitarian Assistance Program can work with Embassies to use these smaller projects to test the efficacy of the projects before committing to a larger investment, the program would be able to utilize the design thinking framework to create long-term value for the communities involved.

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[1] Brown  , Tim; Wyatt, Jocelynn. “Design Thinking for Social Innovation.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2010, p. 33.

[2] “The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design.” IDEO.org, 2015, p. 21.