How Can Design Make the Biggest Impact?

Jarrett Fuller:

Hi. Welcome to With Intent, a podcast from the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech about how design permeates our world, whether we call it design or not.

My name is Jarrett Fuller, and I’m your guest host for With Intent‘s second season. This season, I am turning the mics back on ID’s faculty for a series of roundtable discussions and interviews that explore questions facing designers, design educators, and design students today.

On today’s episode, we are looking at how design can influence civic engagement. Over the last decade or so, there’s been an increasing awareness that design can and should not be exclusively employed to maximize profit. The tools of the designer can aid in making the world better from a more equitable society to environmental considerations. Design for social good is a growing area of design practice. But this also doesn’t mean that we leave business behind. What is the role of more traditional design practices within a more socially conscious design field?

Today on the show, I am joined by John Payne and Weslynne Ashton, two designers and ID professors working at the forefront of these questions. Weslynne is an associate professor with joint appointments in ID and the Stuart School of Business. As a sustainable system scientist, her research thinking and practice are oriented around transitioning socio-ecological systems towards sustainability and equity. And her current work focuses on urban food systems and regenerative economies.

John Payne, who joined the ID faculty in 2020, is also the Director of Experience Design at Verizon and serves as chair of the board of directors at the Public Policy Lab, a nonprofit service design consultancy. A leader in human-centered interaction design, John’s work embodies this intersection of business and social good that is so interesting to so many designers today. I hope you find this conversation with Weslynne and John as insightful as I did.

So Weslynne and John, welcome to this episode of With Intent. It’s nice to talk to both of you today. The theme of this episode is around design for social good, the way design has involved itself in ways to help humanity, help the population, ways to think about design outside of commercial or purely business context. And so Weslynne, I’d like to actually start with a question from you. Your background is not in design. You come from an environmental engineering, environmental science background. And I’m wondering if you could talk about where design came into your work and how that background that you have maybe influences your perspective on design and the role of design?

Weslynne Ashton:

Good to be here in conversation with you all. I started my career as an environmental engineer, and I would say that I’ve been practicing design without knowing that it was design for a long time.

In my final semester of undergraduate, I took a course that was called The Politics of Sustainable Development, and within there, I was introduced to the concept of industrial ecology, which is how do we design our industrial system so that they might be more ecological, so operating more in harmony with nature. I just loved this concept because up until that point, the work that I had been doing was all about understanding environmental impacts of various activities that we are engaged in, how to clean up a lot of the pollution that we had created, and here’s this concept that says, “All right, let’s not just clean up the pollution, but let’s think about how can we design out the pollution from the get-go.”

And so for graduate school, I looked for and chose a program in industrial ecology with this mindset of design without having any of the design tools. And I really didn’t formally get introduced to design until several years into my position at Illinois Tech. And we have this interprofessional projects program at the undergraduate level that all of our undergraduates have to take, and maybe two years into being an assistant professor here, I was invited as a faculty member to participate in what was then called the IPRO 2.0, which was really trying to bring in more design tools into the IPRO. And so Jeremy Alexis led that, and we had maybe about five or six faculty from across the institution who were trained in design thinking as a part of this IPRO redevelopment process.

And so that was my first foray into formal design tools and I take little snippets here and there and try to inject into my classes. And I officially joined ID in the fall of 2020 after some more in-depth interaction with faculty and students, and being on a PhD committee at ID. So yeah, had a kind of circuitous path.

Jarrett Fuller:

I have a couple questions about that, but I want to turn it to John for a second. John, you’re the director of, is it Service Design at Verizon?

John Payne:

That’s correct. I’m the Director of Service Design at Verizon, have been for about four and a half years now.

Jarrett Fuller:

And so you’re doing that and then you’re also the chair of the Public Policy Lab. And I’m interested in how these roles fit together for you. With the Public Policy Lab, from what I understand, you’ve done a lot of work around designing for healthcare. How does that relate to work at Verizon and vice versa? How do you see these things fitting together?

John Payne:

Well, let me tell you a little bit about Public Policy Lab by way of answering the question.

The Public Policy Lab is a nonprofit, essentially service design consultancy that works exclusively with government agencies, philanthropies, research institutions to develop human-centered strategies for social innovation. In particular, they focus on developing policies and services through the research, designing and testing phases. And bringing service design into that realm is a fairly new construct. It’s not the typical way that government agencies do this work.

I’d say the thread between the two roles that I currently hold as chair of the board at Public Policy Lab and as head of service design at Verizon is just that it’s service design being the primary focus of work at Public Policy Lab. At Verizon, service design is also a fairly new discipline. It’s housed within a much larger design organization that is much more well established. But over the past four years or so, we’ve introduced service design approaches to address the deeply complex problems that a telecom faces when interacting with their customer base. The customer base of Verizon is about a third of the country. So there’s a significant amount of complexity in interacting with that broad set of people.

None of our favorite interactions are customer service interactions with a telecom company. So it’s actually a really wonderful laboratory for bringing service practices into the organization because there’s so much coordination that is required. And service design is a practice that allows a group of people to all engage with both the design artifacts, the events around those artifacts and the outcomes in peer-based ways when facilitated as a practice. And so the thread there is really the practice of service design applied to two very different realms.

Jarrett Fuller:

I have a follow-up question that I think will actually lead into the bigger discussion here. It would be really easy at face value to see those as two very different goals, very different activities. I think you did a nice job of talking about the service design connection and the interactivity of both of them, the events of both of them.

And I think what I often hear when I talk with students, when I talk with younger people interested in design is a frustration with the big corporations that are governing so much of our lives and the profit motive that we see. And so it’s like, “Great, Facebook is great for connecting with each other, but they also want us to spend more of our time on Facebook.” And I’m wondering how you think about that, and I’m not asking you to speak for Verizon, but at a for-profit company versus a nonprofit, does service design mean different things, or how do you see those and the goals of a for-profit versus a nonprofit overlapping at all, if they do? Does that make sense?

John Payne:

I think it does. I’ll try to answer it or at least talk around it and you tell me if I’m getting anywhere close.

Jarrett Fuller:

All I’m asking is for you to talk around it. That’s great.

John Payne:

I would say, interestingly, after having introduced service design practices at Verizon, of course, as a human-centered design practice, it’s going to have useful effects on the consumer experience, so I feel like that’s the baseline.

But the effect it’s having within the organization is a unifying effect that I started to allude to in my earlier statement, where the different groups from our technology organization, from our product management organization, from a marketing organization, as well as our customer experience organization which I’m a part of, all have roles to play in how an experience of a consumer unfolds. And the choreography of those roles, the practices, lends itself to allowing the teams to see where their roles manifest, how those touchpoints reach out to the customer, and how those interactions as a customer has all need to coordinate with each other. In a way, then simply the practice of the work helps to unify the approach of the organization in producing services.

So within the organization, I would say it’s having that significantly different effect, than when applied to government services, it’s also having novel effects which are less about coordinating many disparate parties and more about representing the needs and desires and lives of the public, in particular, at risk and underrepresented communities in the design process of the creation of public services. I’d say while the process is the same, it’s actually having very different impacts on the two simply because of the way the organizations are structured. One is Verizon’s essentially a laboratory for how to do this at a significant scale. And the Public Policy Lab as a small nonprofit consultancy is really doubling down on the true nature of human-centered service design, in that it’s about bringing the public into the process and allowing them a voice through policy creation processes and public service creation processes, where the way they had voice in the past wasn’t as far up in the innovation process. It wasn’t near the beginning. So I’ll stop rambling there, but hopefully that gets some of the-

Jarrett Fuller:

Yeah, it does. And it leads in really nicely to what I wanted to hear Weslynne talk about a little bit because I studied graphic design, specifically graphic design, and went to school in an era where there was this message that, “Oh, design can change the world.” It was right at the beginning of these ideas around designing for social good is what it was referred to at the time. And I think that was all really good, and I think having design students think about those things was really important.

I think now I see a criticality around some of these ideas, not in that designers shouldn’t be working on big meaningful problems like this, but the ego of the designer that design alone can solve these problems or that these problems are specifically problems of design. And so Weslynne, I was really fascinated when you said that you were doing design before you realized it was design. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about, now that you have seen both sides of this from your environmental engineering, environmental science background and now working with designers, how do you see how design fits in here or the role of the designer in these big complex problems?

Weslynne Ashton:

Yeah. I think that designers have an important role and you’re precisely right, but you can’t do it alone. And so there are specific roles and opportunities. As I was listening to John talk, I was like, yeah, I mean the perspective that I come in from is more of systems design. So thinking about how do we understand how the current systems that we’re in are operating, what are their goals? Who are the key stakeholders? What are their interactions? What are the feedback mechanisms? And also, what are the opportunities for change? And so with that framing and is a more systemic perspective, how are things interacting? I think designers have an important role to help show these relationships, what is the system as it is, to really visualize that in a way that people can see and relate with.

There’s also a role around visioning and thinking about how we can create possible futures, create new visions of the future. Prototyping, looking at changes that can be made at various scales, making those changes, learning from them, adapting and where is it in the innovation cycle.

I also see designers having an important role facilitating and convening and bringing different groups of people together, different types of stakeholders to help bring out better understanding of systems, creating plural visions of the future and pathways to help get there. But certainly, something that they cannot do on their own. One of the courses that I teach right now at ID is around design for a change in climate. So there, I asked, “What are the fundamental things that designers need to know about climate change? And then how are the set of skills and way of working that designers have that can be applied to climate change, either within a private company or with a government agency or a broader system?” And so we’re playing around with different types of tools to help build design capacity for climate change as well as applying design tools to address climate challenges.

Jarrett Fuller:

That’s really interesting. And I have a really admittedly weird question that you might not be able to answer or maybe you don’t even want to try. But as you were saying that, I was thinking about your earlier comment, and I’m sorry to keep going back to this, that you were doing design before you realized it was design. And I’m wondering if these processes, these ways of working, that doesn’t need to be done by designers necessarily. And I’m wondering how you think about that. Are you teaching primarily people who will be self-identifying as designers or how do you think about using some of these tools and methodologies in context where there is no designer presence?

Weslynne Ashton:

I have a multi-level answer to that.

Jarrett Fuller:

Okay, go for it.

Weslynne Ashton:

I actually sit in a joint appointment between design and the Stuart School of Business and navigating these two worlds. So I’m teaching business school students on one hand and design students. And on the ID side, trying to expose designers to broader systems thinking, environmental, social issues, how we measure the impacts, and then can develop design tools to mitigate those impacts. And on the business side, it is also exposing them to sustainability issues, but also design thinking and the role of design in there. And so that’s within the realm of the university and the traditional learners that we have within the university.

But then through various projects that I have been working on in Chicago and beyond, but mostly in Chicago, there has been a concerted effort to bridge design, practice and share those design skills with our partners. And so using more of a co-design approach. So recognizing that we can build design capacity, so mindsets and skills and particular tools with partners. And so sharing that capacity with our partners. And so that has been having organically. It’s like, okay, what do we need on a particular project. And working with our partners to help them take on some of the responsibility or get some experience facilitating sessions and using particular design tools.

I remember one of my research collaboratives and it’s like, okay, well let’s do an empathy mapping about who is this research for and how are they being engaged and what do we know about them? And that was a really valuable exercise for us to think about our own mindsets. So I feel there’s an opportunity for designers to take these tools and have a deeper engagement with partners when we can do that on a sharing basis. So it’s not like I’m coming in as the design expert, but I’m here to share the tools, the mindsets, the approaches with the folks that I’m working with.

Jarrett Fuller:

I often talk about that idea of the design expert coming in. I call that the designer savior complex that like, the designer can come in here and solve all of these problems in one fell swoop. John, I’m curious how you think about that in your work, both at Verizon and at the Public Policy Lab. How are you interfacing with people who are designers and people who are not designers? And then, how do you think about, I don’t know, open sourcing these ideas, making some of these practices and methodologies available to more people? I’m going to just tell you my bias here and my experience. I see people talking a lot about wanting to make everyone a designer, make these design tools available, let’s be multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary. And then when they actually get into the projects themselves, things become very territorial and, this is what designers do, designers don’t do this. How do you think about the organization of these teams and the role of design in these complex problems?

John Payne:

That’s a great question and I’ve been looking forward to this conversation to hear a bit more about Weslynne’s perspective on what the role of the complexity and the systems-based approach. So I’ll start with a quote from something that I use in one of my classes. I just finished a digital service design course and the quote is from an article by Kevin Slavin called Design as Participation. And he says, “Designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They’re hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes from an array of interrelated systems.”

And I start with that quote because that’s a framing mechanism that I use in both spheres. In Public Policy Lab, any introduction of a new public service or a revision to a public service exists in a very complex existing ecosystem. And our ability as designers, even if we wanted to be the design saviors, we couldn’t really adopt that perspective. We are participants in a complex system and we’re able to change parts of it, introduce new stimuli, and hopefully move things towards, in that case, a social good outcome.

And Verizon, the complexity of delivery, there’s a lot of it on the inside of the organization in how we reveal to the consumer the coordination of our experiences. And it’s quite similar. I’d say the role of designer in both instances has a strong facilitation component and definitely has an amount of expertise they’re bringing in to offer coming from a different mindset in a way than many of our collaborators, both in government and in business.

There’s a notion from a publication by Fred Collopy from a few years ago where that designers tend to think about how things could be different and they look into the world for ideas to manifest those new things as different. And what I’ve found in my career and what he writes about in this article is that in the business world and in the government space, people often look around the world for ideas to select and decide on as opposed to create and that the mindset of the designer, and it’s a mindset that we can share through collaboration, is that we are going to get together and create something as opposed to deciding on something. And that that’s one of the core ideas that I think underlies both of those instances. And again, not from the perspective of the designer with the capital D, but from the perspective of helping people step up to this different mindset and employ tactics that they might not be used to employing.

Weslynne Ashton:

I think that the mindsets are really important, and I think it speaks to how we are training designers to show up. Are we training them to show up as the experts with particular skills or as these participants and facilitators on equal footing? John, I love what you said that designers help to create. And so I think the recognition that everyone can create, and has that potential, but we don’t necessarily have the skills and opportunity to do it. And I think particularly, when we think about under-resourced communities, both in the US and abroad, there’s a dearth of opportunities for people to exercise that creativity, which is not to say that it doesn’t happen. There are breakthrough cases of people who, despite whatever their circumstances, are able to come up with new inventions and escape from wherever they are with inventions, innovations. But that training for creativity, maybe it’s something that we need to start a lot earlier in life. Do we need to be teaching design thinking to elementary school so that mindset is more pervasive throughout society?

Jarrett Fuller:

Yeah, it’s so interesting. It makes me think about this, I mean it’s almost cliche at this point, that design is problem solving. And yes, design is problem solving, but that’s actually just a very small part of it and it’s sort of the hammer and nail. If you keep telling yourself that design is problem solving, then if you’re a hammer, every problem is a nail or whatever that’s saying, where it’s like everything can be solved with design.

But what I love about what both of you’re saying is that the solution is much more complex, if there even is a solution, it’s much more interdisciplinary. And what design’s role is not actually in the solving, it is in the invention, it is in the platform creation. So this idea of design as platform creator or design as I don’t know, cultural inventor seems much more generative and generous than design as hero. I don’t know either of you have thoughts on that.

John Payne:

I couldn’t agree more. I’m dating myself, but I’ve been a designer long enough to have been at the beginnings of the introduction of human-centered design as a practice and now it is really the primary expression of design and it has that idea at its center, the idea of problem solving. That enabled the practice of design to be much more widely adopted, which is wonderful. But it is to your point, quite limiting. And we are not caring for the other side of it that you described, and I thought put quite well, design as cultural invention. There are many disciplines that solve problems. There are many fewer disciplines that create cultural artifacts, processes, services, events. And design, it isn’t the only one that does, but that side of our practice needs to be recognized and talked about and brought to the fore. And we need tools for that just as much as we need tools for the problem solving side.

Jarrett Fuller:

That is so well put and well articulated. Weslynne, you started talking about this a little bit. I’d love to hear from both of you about, if we think about this, what are the things that we should be teaching designers who are working in these big complex problems that are societal? It’s not just about how to move somebody through a checkout flow. That’s just one part of design now. But thinking about food systems, thinking about voting, thinking about these democratic issues that designers are increasingly involving themselves in are default is to think about how can we solve it, but what are the skills or the ideas or the methods that we could be teaching designers to be thinking more expansively when they are injecting themselves or being asked to be a part of these larger multi-disciplinary teams?

Weslynne Ashton:

The entry point for most designers working either in the public or private sector is that you are issued a problem to solve. And often, there’s a scope of work, a brief that sets the parameters of what the understanding of what the challenge is. There’s a certain number of hours that you’re expected to spend working on that project. And it takes much more than that to really be able to understand the systemic challenge. Sometimes, if there’s space and opportunity to educate your client about the larger perspective.

And so I’m thinking that a couple weeks ago I had Jessica Nelson, who’s one of our recent alums who works for ChiByDesign, which is the Chicago-based design firm where a number of our alums, along with Chris Rudd, who used to teach at ID. And so she was sharing with our systems theory class now some of the work that they’re doing and when you’re given a particular challenge, given a problem to solve, but seeing that that problem is also intertwined with the justice system, the incarceration complex, racism, you can’t just solve for one thing that’s embedded in this larger system. And so there are some organizations that might be willing to take on that larger challenge.

And so in a way, a designer has to make the case for why the organization should take a more systems based approach or try to tackle something that’s bigger than what they got in the design brief. One of the things that we talk about, sorry… So we talk about mindsets, how you’re showing up as a designer, as a savior, as a participant and facilitator.

Now, we talk about using design to better understand the problem and reframe the problem for your clients or whomever you’re working with, helping to envision futures. But I think it’s also important to understand what are the intervention points and what are the opportunities for leverage. So if you change the rules as opposed to trying to reduce the number of people who are being served by a particular service, that requires some different skills like different tools and there may be distinct opportunities.

So there are times where all you might be able to do is try to reduce the service time, the amount of time spent on dealing with a particular problem. And there may be other opportunities, perhaps you need to show to make a proof that you can create value with the specific thing that the client wants, but also show them the opportunity for making a larger change, trying to tackle the rules, the values that are underlying that problem and be able to make the case by for why they ought to invest in that additional work. And that’s not only like an additional contract workflow for you as a designer, but also really involves a lot of hard work and time from the people in the client’s organization. So I think mindset, these tools, but also being able to sell the value of design and more of that systems-based approach.

Jarrett Fuller:

Yeah. It reminds me from John’s quote about designers hinting at things. I think this idea of selling making the case speaks to that. John, do you have any thoughts on skills and methodologies that we can be teaching the next generation of designers so they’re better equipped to work on these teams, dealing with these complex problems?

John Payne:

Absolutely. One of the things that I’m working on in a couple of my classes are developing methodologies for developing more cultural and social sensitivity around the impact that the things we put into the world will, could have. We can’t ever guarantee or predict the impacts things will have. But clearly, the designers who created the Facebook interface probably didn’t ever consider the effect it might have on American political life. The designers of the Uber product probably didn’t think far enough ahead to imagine that its participation in labor practices around the world. So our practices currently are excellent at designing our individual and sometimes small group interactions with a product or service. But we don’t, as a design practice, yet have very many robust methodologies for thinking about and developing ways to make decisions and be intentional about the impacts that our work might have.

And so the idea of a consequence scan where you look at analogous products that might have rolled out into the market. And generally, as products scaled, that’s when the impacts are felt most strongly looking at what analogous product impacts might have been. Working on something around the social structures that underlie services. We can engage in a service if it conforms to norms that we’re used to. But if it introduces new behaviors or new mental models, then we struggle to figure out how to engage with it and it might have a potentially detrimental effect on something that we didn’t intend it to have. So these are emergent, these kinds of practices, but they’re important I think to add to our quiver.

Jarrett Fuller:

Yeah, I love that because it so connects to what Weslynne was talking about the systemic issues below the problem that you are working on, sort of the turtles all the way down. There’s all these other things that have to be considered that don’t always fit into these methodologies. And so actually thinking about designers creating new ways of working to solve for these new problems is a really fascinating prospect.

I have one last question. Something I’ve noticed in the history of ID and the history of your program is for a long time, it was very business-focused, it was very connected to industry. And there is a newer focus and excitement around civic design and design in these other forms. And I’m wondering if both of you could just talk about the relationship between business and civics, this move happening at ID, but also happening generally in design, towards working on systemic cultural, societal problems does not mean to just completely stop designing for industry. So how do those fit together? How are those in dialogue or what is the role of each of them in the other? Do you have thoughts on this expansion of design as opposed to just replacing old forms of design?

John Payne:

I can start. So I’m a graduate of ID from the era you speak of where it was very business-focused and I found it, at the time, so just a very quick little personal history, industrial designer by training originally from a very methodology, traditional industrial design program at Auburn University. Being introduced to design at ID and how it applies to business in the early days of human-centered design and design thinking was quite refreshing to imagine design having an impact on that type of problem, that type of-

Jarrett Fuller:

As opposed to just designing an artifact.

John Payne:

Exactly. I actually really love designing things too, but the idea that design could be applied to something as abstract as a business model was fascinating. And in a way, I see this as concentric circles radiating out so that’s pretty well established and now we’re moving to, there’s some analogous types of things in the civic space that are quite similar to business problems that design, There’s a easy jumping over point. It’s an easy bridge from design thinking for corporate life, corporate policy, corporate strategy to thinking about, let’s say in government. But then there’s the more complex wicked problem space of social problems, of potential cultural impacts of climate change, to Weslynne’s point that feel like a layer, or 100 out, on the onion past our ability to have an impact with the ways that we work now. So it seems like a logical progression and it’s an exciting one, just the way I felt early on when I discovered and started to practice design in the business space.

Weslynne Ashton:

Now, Anijo Mathew, who’s the Dean of ID, talks about this 85-year history as eras, and that we don’t leave things behind but we’re building upon. And so we expect to continue to work with industry and to use human-centered design tools, but we’re in a yet unnamed era of design, that is more civic engaged, that is thinking about how do we tackle these bigger problems than developing a product or developing a service for particular client. We see organizations, particularly like the big tech companies who give their employees a certain number of hours every week to work on side projects or volunteer, that there’s a recognition that on many levels, so like on an individual level, people are looking for more purpose. That on an organizational level, we’re seeing organizations really grapple with what’s their purpose and how to live up to that purpose. So is it’s not just about being the most profitable, but that’s still really important.

How do you be profitable with serving a bigger purpose and then a larger scale? I love the onions. So if we go up to a larger scale, there’s so many challenges. So the challenge of plastics, what do we do with plastic? So we have manufacturers, we need to think about supply chain, we need to think about governments. And so there’s many of the problems that we have that are going to take multi-stakeholder collaborations to address. And so within each of these, that purpose I think needs to be the North Star, like what are we working towards? And there are going to be roles that business will maintain and roles that the public sector, and there’re going to be collaborations across the two.

And for individuals working in many of these spaces, I think we’re seeing, and John, I guess you’re a good example of this now doing both. So working for a large corporation while also sharing this board, this nonprofit. And so we’re going to see more and more people going throughout their careers between public and private sector, and that line is really blurred. And so I think there’s definitely still space and opportunities for our work to be valuable to industry. And most of our students are going to look for jobs in the private sector, but more and more, there are opportunities in the public and places for them to connect.

Jarrett Fuller:

I think that’s great and I think that’s a great way to end this conversation. Also, I really, really enjoyed talking with both of you about your work. So thanks for having this conversation and thanks for being on the show.

Weslynne Ashton:

Thank you.

John Payne:

Thanks for having us.

Jarrett Fuller:

Absolutely. With Intent is a production of the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. This season is produced in collaboration with the school’s 85th anniversary as part of the 2022–2023 Latham Fellowship. A special thanks to all of our guests this season and everyone at ID for their support. My name is Jarrett Fuller. Thanks for listening.