Applying a responsible innovation lens to design thinking
Part One: Research, Ideation, & Concept Selection
Over the last 10+ years, design thinking went from being a shiny, sought-after process pioneered by IDEO and practiced by a handful of consultancies to a core capability embedded in companies ranging from management consulting firms, to large CPGs, to healthcare systems, and beyond.
What comes next?
Today we face challenges such as the climate crisis, widening political polarization, online misinformation, limited governance over emerging tech, and growing social inequities. Design thinking’s focus on the intersection of desirability, viability, and feasibility isn’t sufficient for navigating the social, environmental, and technical complexities and nuances of today’s world.
The next iteration of design thinking needs to apply a responsible innovation lens.*
From the technologies we use, to the experiences we share, to the ways we exchange information and resources, designers help shape the world we live in and thus play a key role in helping to create a more just, equitable, and inclusive future.
Given the unprecedented pace of technological advancement and the rapid scaling enabled by today’s models of venture funding, we as designers cannot outsource questions of ethics and responsibility. Ethical questions are an inherent part of a designer’s job, starting from how the goals and design brief are framed all the way through to product launch and growth.
In this piece, I outline a few ways to incorporate a responsible innovation lens throughout different phases of the design thinking process, ensuring that ethics and sustainability considerations are integrated as products and services are designed.
*Here, I’m defining responsible innovation as an approach to creating products, services, and business models that integrates broader economic, societal and environmental considerations throughout the design process.
Conducting Research
Human-centered design is grounded in deeply understanding the needs, pain points, and desires of people. This understanding can be built through a variety of research methods, including qualitative interviews, desk research, ethnography, diary studies, focus groups, and surveys, to name a few.
There has been a lot of discussion in recent years within the design community about shifting from designing for to designing with. In other words, moving away from a model where designers are the ‘experts’ in users and the representative of their voice, and instead employing more participatory research methods that bring users and community members into the process to meaningfully co-create.
Responsible innovation requires us to zoom out beyond the direct user of a product or service and consider who the other stakeholders within the broader system are that can be impacted directly or indirectly. It also requires us to consider entities and outcomes whose perspectives can’t be represented in qualitative user interviews or usability testing, such as environmental sustainability, community well-being, and societal cohesion.
Consider what perspectives are represented in your research and who might be missing:
- Whose experiences are represented?
- Are your research approaches including historically marginalized populations?
- Is your research recruit amplifying or exacerbating existing power dynamics?
- Is your research framing making assumptions or hiding biases?
Making a map of different stakeholders within a system can be hugely helpful to see who the different players are within a system and help answer some of these questions. You can even draw out what exchanges between those players look like, in terms of dimensions such as money, information, decision-making.
A systems map can help clarify questions questions such as:
- Where is power and decision-making concentrated? Who defines the rules that impact your user or the broader system?
- Who is gate-keeping access?
- How is knowledge shared?
- What are the externalities within the system (both accounted and unaccounted for)?
By helping to tease out some of these questions, these systems maps can help you and your team continue to widen the aperture and identify who the multifaceted stakeholders are that you want to both understand and design with. They can also serve as valuable research tools or stimuli to use with participants to help you and your team build an understanding of the nuances of a given system. Depending on your project, another helpful mapping framework to explore is the Participatory Asset Mapping Toolkit.
It’s important to note that taking a participatory lens to design shouldn’t just happen in the initial context-setting and needs-finding research, but should also be applied to prototyping and concept testing phases of the design process.
There are a number of methods and best practices for conducting participatory, equity-centered research that you can explore more through the wonderful resources provided by organizations such as Creative Reaction Lab, The National Equity Project, and The Slow Factory.
Generating ideas
After research comes the messy and wonderful process of synthesis — bubbling up the themes, surprises, provocations, and patterns into insights and opportunity areas. It’s a simultaneously frustrating and energizing phase of convergence within the design process.
Once you’ve got a handle on the foundational learnings and how those translate into opportunity spaces (the process of which could be a series of posts on its own), you and your team get to be expansive. It’s that magical moment where you go broad and generative, picking up on the threads of inspiration you heard from your research and connecting lots of dots to create new ideas.
One of my favorite methods to leverage in the ideation phase of the design process is analogous inspiration. Drawing parallels from disparate industries or contexts and applying them to your given audience or topic area can be a great tool for sparking new ideas. It can also help surface different ethical considerations that can fuel your brainstorming.
As you and your team leverage a mix of different research inputs to fuel ideation, consider how analogous examples that illustrate best practices around social and environmental responsibility could translate to your given design brief to spark ideas for you. Who has approached a particularly complex or thorny problem well. How did they do so? What worked about that approach that could translate to your design brief?
For example, you and your team can ask questions such as — what would it look like if we:
- Optimized our product for repair and longevity, like Fairphone has done with the mobile phone or Patagonia has done with Worn Wear?
- Raised the industry standard for sustainable sourcing, like Danone is doing in regenerative agriculture with innovative contracts and an open source knowledge center?
- Took a leading stance on children’s digital privacy, like California has done in its first-in-nation bill to protect children’s online rights ?
- Prioritized tech literacy, data transparency, and strong governance mechanisms, like Estonia’s X-Road data exchange infrastructure?
- Differentiated our offer via privacy and user control, like Brave’s approach to safe browsing and ad blocking?
For more inspiration in the ideation phase, check out the Quick guide to sustainable design strategies and Nike’s Circular Design Guide.
Down selecting and refining concepts
Once you’ve got that wonderful wall (digital or physical) of ideas, then comes the phase narrowing and prioritization a subset of concepts to take into prototyping.
In traditional design thinking, we’re used to thinking about the three lenses of desirability, viability, feasibility (DVF) as filtering criteria to design at the “innovation sweet spot.” These provide a great framework for assessing the alignment of the thing we’re designing to a user’s actual needs and wants, and the underlying technical and commercial implications required.
However, layering a responsible innovation lens on top of the DVF framing can help unpack the assumptions that underlie respective ideas or concept directions. As you assess and prioritize your ideas, consider:
- What are the benefits to the user?
- What are the potential harms?
- What are the alternative or unintended ways someone might use this product or service?
- What are the social, environmental, and/or technological implications if the product or service scales?
- What inequities or biases might this product // feature // technology exacerbate?
- Is the product designed for modularity? Disassembly? Repair?
- What happens to the product after it’s discarded?
Weighing these answers to these questions can help you and your team surface the nuanced implications of your concepts and provide important lenses through which to filter down and/or your refine your ideas.
Design is iterative, and as such, the utility of these questions goes beyond just selecting which ideas to bring forward into your prototyping. You can continue to weigh these considerations as you move through design loops.
For additional resources, check out Ethical Explorer’s Tech Risk Zones, which surfaces a number of rich considerations to weigh throughout the design process around topics such as disinformation, data control, algorithms, and more. Microsoft’s Responsible Innovation toolkit also includes a range of helpful games and frameworks.
As the methods and questions throughout this article hopefully illustrate, incorporating a responsible innovation lens in the research, ideation, and concept selection phases doesn’t need to constrain creativity. Instead, responsible innovation can also serve as a catalyst for developing new, differentiated ideas — ideas that prioritize equity, inclusivity, and sustainability.
In Part Two, I delve into how to incorporate responsible innovation into the design of your business model.
