Measuring design’s impact
The school of Visual Arts recently completed its first six-week intensive Impact: Design for Social Change. Spearheaded by Mark Randall from WorldStudio and Steven Heller, the program is led by incredible faculty and guest lecturers, including Milton Glaser, William Drenttel and Michelle Mullineaux from DesignNYC to name a few.
The program offers two tracks: one theoretical and the other practical. In the first, you imagine the concepts and refine them; in the second, you execute and measure results. If you didn’t get to be one of the 15 students to take part, you might find the resources page of the site useful.
Claire Manibog was one of the fifteen and was kind enough to document her journey. Her big concept, called the Design::Effect is to develop a website that facilitates the measurement of design’s social impact. (I’m assuming that social impact encompasses social, environmental and economic dimensions as the projects displayed in her final presentation seem to include a breadth of topics.)
The site focusses on 4 dimensions:
1. Learning why impact measurement is important.
2. Measuring impact through a basic, dynamic learning tool.
3. Visualizing impact in a forum for sharing data visualization and mapping.
4. Delving deeper into the subject through resources of various types.
Whilst the idea—to my knowledge—is not fully developed and the work involved to complete the project might be overwhelming—if only in the advisory section which would require a flawless database and an endless supply of specialists to be truly useful—it would, in theory, bring designers much closer to the elusive “measuring of results”. As practising designers, how often are we able to offer reliable methods to measure the reach of our work that go beyond the number of direct hits and the dodgy tallying of “impressions”?
In social enterprise or in “design activism”, as it is now being called, this gauging of results might arguably be even more important, if only to identify and mitigate negative effects not foreseen in the design and implementation stages. In design as in business, results do much more than prove effectiveness: they measure worth.
Achieving or exceeding expectations allows you to clearly identify areas of strength or weakness, demonstrate to potential partners the benefits of your approach and eventually convince others to participate. In a world where everything has an assigned value, measurements are closely tied to the ability to persuade, galvanize and gather momentum for continued evolution and change.
It’s no secret—and predictable—that well-run, successful not for profits get more funding than those that fumble and struggle. It isn’t a reflection of the validity of their mission but a simple question of whether or not they can display results. How many meals were served? How many programs are offered? How many beds are filled each night? It used to be all you needed were campaigns to “raise awareness”, but I’d say, without cynicism, that audiences tuned out long ago.
It’s exciting to me that programmes such as SVA’s are popping up. Apparently the Art Center College of Design has a DesignMatters Concentration, Parsons has the Amplify project and a number of other schools in other countries—Emily Carr University has been a leader for years—are taking the same road.
Designers may just end up making a difference in the world. And not a moment too soon.
This is great information and I will read through the links with interest. My initial question about empirical values associated with design surrounds the scope of the work to be measured. Surely there has to be a large enough of a “campaign” launched, accompanied by appropriate follow-through on the part of the client, (if there is a client). My concern with measurement is that it could be determined that good design was unworthy due to a number of circumstances beyond its control.
Thanks Susan. To a certain extent I agree with you that the myriad of factors involved may skew the measurements. In terms of the scale of the campaign however, I think that if specific outcomes are identified as being quatifiable at the outset—how many new donors to a programme for example—then even a targeted brochure would be sufficient to gauge impact, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps it would even be easier because of the reduced number of external factor. X number of visits to prospects led to x number of donations. Changes in behaviour or attitudes would be impossible to measure of course but some precise indicators can be.
[...] what we’ve come to know as design for social change a form of activism? I previously briefly explored some of the programs that are cropping up in many of the top design schools. Their goal is to aid [...]
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