For the second year in a row and third time in four years, we’re thrilled to announce Artefact made Seattle Business Magazine’s Best Place to Work list! Making this list each year is becoming more and more competitive, but the competition only drives us to raise our bar so we can continue to better serve our employees, clients, and community.
Each year, we reflect on things that are going well and focus on areas needing improvement in the studio and in client work. We frequently ask our employees and clients for feedback and hold ourselves accountable to make changes to the areas that need to evolve. We understand, that in order to be prosperous as an organization, it is essential to take the time to listen to this feedback and act on it. The 100 Best Companies List means a lot to us because it is driven and determined completely by employee feedback, so to make it on the list means our employees are speaking up and sharing what they love about working at Artefact.
It is truly an honor to receive this recognition. This year, instead of writing about Artefact, we wanted employees to speak for themselves and share why they love working here:
I love Artefact because (just as with our client work) people are at the center of everything we do. I’m supported through mentorship, empowered to grow professionally and contribute to my community, and connected to my colleagues in fun and meaningful ways. We get to tackle interesting and diverse projects, and I’m especially proud of the work we do for social good and underserved communities.
Joan Stoeckle, Design
I like that Artefact is a small company that always tries to figure out how to change for the better. Most companies resist change until it becomes too late, but Artefact is always hacking itself. I’ve been at a lot of companies and this is the only one that I’ve worked at that is serious about self-analysis and growth. It’s truly a learning organization.
Sheryl Cababa, Design
Artefact attracts great projects and the amazing talent who want to change the world, learn from each other, elevate themselves and those around them. The company itself is an exercise in great user experience, looking at pain points and iterating our approach to create a culture where you can do your best work.
Jon Mann, Design
Artefact consists of a group of skilled, passionate, inspiring, well rounded individuals that are always motivated to learn from each other and have an impact in the community. We yearn for the challenge to craft amazing things and we look for opportunities to design for a better future. What makes us stand out from other organizations is that we genuinely care and respect each other. As an organization, we do all we can to support each other through career and life obstacles. We create opportunities and provide the right tools for our employees to thrive as consultants. The key to Artefact’s success is our people and we don’t take any of our talent for granted. We value the unique aspect each individual brings to the table, and together, we’re a stronger company for it.
On the eve of a historical election, 2016’s Fast Company Innovation Festival was about hope and potential. In the wake of a historical upset, 2017’s was about resilience, values and impact that we as individuals, communities and organizations should strive for. What both conferences had in common is an overarching theme about how design-driven innovation is transforming established companies while giving non-profits and smaller companies new ways to disrupt obsolete tropes, engage new and underrepresented audiences, and improve lives. But is design enough and how should it evolve to address the complex, interconnected problems we face today? And could we have done more to prevent some of these problems from getting out of hand?
In the last 60 years, as Jo Szczepanska’s fascinating chart shows, design has done an outstanding job evolving to address the problems of the day, while extracting and incorporating insights from other disciplines. In fact, it is this endless curiosity and openness to ideas from other fields that has made design key to some of the biggest innovations of recent history – from the iPhone to the Tesla, from the eSight glasses for the blind to VICIS ZERO1 football helmet. More importantly, it is this focus on empathy and understanding of the users, their values and experiences that has made designers stand out as modern day humanists casting a renaissance light in a world transformed by technology. As a result, human-centered design and design thinking become part of the college curriculum, even outside of design programs, yesterday’s mothball behemoths are building design led innovation teams, demand (and compensation) for designers is through the roof.
But with recognition, comes responsibility. If followed blindly and left unchecked, this cult of designing for the individual today can have disastrous long term and unintended consequences. A platform designed to connect becomes an addictive echo chamber with historic consequences (Facebook); an automation system designed to improve safety undermines our ability to seek information and make decisions (the plane autopilot); a way to experience a new destination like a local squeezes lower income residents out of affordable housing (Airbnb). Each of these examples is recognized as a real product or service design feat. Yet by focusing on the individual person alone, we often fail to take into account the cognitive and social biases that lead to broad unintended consequences. By zeroing in on the short-term impact and benefits of our designs, we spare ourselves asking the really hard question: Are we designing a world we all want to live in today and tomorrow?
To be agents of positive change, we as designers need to think more broadly about the direct and secondary consequences of our work. We need to be clear-eyed about what we are striving to do and minimize the chances of creating more problems than we are trying to solve. To do that, we need to integrate our discipline with systems thinking, which takes into account the linkages, interactions and underlying structures of dynamic systems over time. This will allow us to anticipate and mitigate the negative longer-term consequences of well-intentioned solutions. As a result, we will be poised to design systems that have minimum negative impact, create and sustain equity, and build on technological advances without disrupting the foundations of society. We have the responsibility to evolve from human-centered design thinkers to humanity-centered designers by changing our perspective, our timeline and our methodology. Here is how.
New perspective: Don’t just ask: “How might we?” ask: “At what cost?”
As designers and design thinkers, we have been preoccupied with questions like “What if” and “How might we.” They have undoubtedly unleashed our creativity and helped us explore new solutions to problems both big and small. How might we enable people to rent out their homes? What if we could digitize your personal health record? But these questions are fundamentally narrow. They overemphasize the individual direct user, without taking into account broader, longer term consequences. They absolve designers of the broader responsibility to society. We still need to do ethnographic research, create empathy maps, and understand the interests, biases, and motivations of the people our designs would affect immediately. The key difference when we adopt a systems approach is that we can examine broader implications: By providing a benefit to one group of people, are we negatively impacting another (in the case of Airbnb: local low income residents)? Are our values sustainable in the face of the behavior shifts our designs create (in the case of the plane autopilot: sustaining knowledge and expertise in the advent of automation)? What is the environmental and social cost of a product or what happens at the end of its life?
Focused attention on long term preferable outcomes, is a powerful, yet underused technique we are starting to use to improve our work, our society and our lives. When we take the time to collectively craft our desired outcomes, we can unleash our creativity to advance our shared interests. Outcomes thinking starts by defining a preferable future state then works backwards to identify necessary actions and steps that will connect the future to the present. Called backcasting, this technique has been long used in philanthropy. Unlike forecasting, which is reactive, backcasting is proactive as it requires you to define an ideal outcome and align your efforts to achieve it. And in defining the ideal outcome, you are forced to think about the negative paths you have to strive to avoid.
New timeline: Short termism must die
Present bias, or our tendency to prefer immediate gratification to longer term future payoffs, is universal. It is perhaps one of the reasons why the cult of Agile development and Silicon Valley’s “run fast and break things” ethos have become the prevailing way of thinking. When the result is a well-designed, relatively innocent but flamboyant failure like the latest silly gadget, we laugh it off and pretend that we would never make the same mistake.
But there is a more significant consequence: this short termism prevents us from solving the dizzying array of super challenging long term problems we face: climate change, growing political instability and polarization, growing economic inequality, unsustainable social systems like Social Security and healthcare, and the increasing impacts of digital systems from privacy and security challenges to the specter of joblessness from AI and automation.
Given our fetish with the new and our insatiable appetite for growth, people are often tragically focused on short-term improvements rather than thinking through strategies and long-term impact. This pattern repeats itself at the corporate, and government scale, with examples to spare: single use products leading to plastic in your seafood; short term government support for coal resulting in miners rejecting retraining.
Design thinking as a process with its emphasis on rapid prototyping, testing, iterating, is at least partially to blame. While it was never created to replace strategic planning in organizations, it struck a chord with organizations under pressure to transform as quickly as possible. The result is a cornucopia of gadgets, most of them destined for the landfill barely after the lights of the annual Consumer Electronics Show have dimmed.
While the interdisciplinary approach and customer focus of design thinking is as valuable as ever, it needs to be bolstered with critical thinking about long-term business, social, and environmental impacts. If you are building a product that enables people to manipulate how we perceive the world, for example, how do you design it in a way that provides absolute transparency so users can recognize what’s real and what is not? If you are designing a new farming technology, how do avoid reinforcing the short term consumerism that is at the core of so many of our environmental troubles?
New methodology: Build on best practices but capture the flag
We are not the first to wake up to the need to think more deeply about the impact of our work. Corporate social responsibility, triple bottom line, and shared value are practices that are gaining mindshare, with all kinds of large organizations declaring their commitment to creating sustainable positive social impact. But without the tools and investment to turn mindshare into action, that commitment is not enough.
Initiatives like The Designers Accord, Circular Design and Inclusive Design are steps in the right direction – building on human-centered design practices to address the reality of our interconnected world or what the Ellen Macarthur Foundation calls the circular economy. Designers are well-positioned to lead this evolution. Having secured a seat at the proverbial table, we have the influence to start these conversations with other stakeholders –business leaders, scientists, marketers, environmentalists. Our training in research and empathy can help reconcile diverging priorities. We are good at solving complex challenges and reframing problems. Above all, we are masters at creating the tools that help people with different backgrounds, ideas, and priorities align on big ideas and intangible concepts.
The Fast Company Innovation Festival left us hopeful yet aware of how much work we need to do. Thought leaders and innovators stated their commitment to building a better future again and again. However, examples of making the tough choices to do what’s right rather than just say it were few and far between. It is on us as individual designers and an industry to broaden our perspective, extend our timelines, and develop the tools and methodologies to remain at the vanguard of positive change. We have to do more and faster.
The word robot was coined by Czech author Karel Čapek, who used it in his 1921 play R.U.R. to describe a fleet of intelligent machines. He named his invention based on the Slavonic word “rabota,” which means labor. More tellingly, rabota is also the root of the word “rob” or slave. And in fact, automation promises to get away with some of the most tedious, repetitive tasks we love to hate.
Take telemarketing for example, one of the most slave-like occupations in the 21st Century. I think, it is safe to assume that no one has ever dreamt of a career in telemarketing or would miss it if it were to disappear. Luckily for us, it is the job most likely to disappear, according to Carl Benedikt Frey’s and Michael A. Osborne’s excellent study The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization. They examined some 702 occupations and evaluated the level of risk for each one of them.
The extensive list and ranking is interesting in an of itself (you may want to consider a career in recreational therapy. Whatever that is — it is least threatened.) More importantly, the study identifies three factors that impact that level of risk, allowing us to start thinking about how automation will impact our own specific fields. These three criteria are: perception and manipulation, creative intelligence, and social intelligence. I’ve added to that framework the concept of predictability. In a nutshell, the occupations that are most likely to resist automation would:
1. involve complex perception and manipulation activities,
2. require the ability to come up with clever ideas, or new ways of solving problems,
3. involve negotiation, persuasion, empathy and caring,
4. demand the individual to be highly adaptable to different contexts and situations
My interest is not only in exploring the topic of automation broadly, but looking at how these apply to various design professions. A quick examination of the above list and you might think that since that sounds a lot like a designer’s skill set, you must be safe. The reality is a bit more complex, so let’s take a look at each factors and relate it back to design professions specifically.
Perception and manipulation
This class of automation challenges begins with perception systems mostly related to 2D computer vision and 3D spatial sensing technologies — for example, jobs that involve simply recognizing objects or aspects of objects through jobs that involve lots of fine finger dexterity or precise manipulation of small irregular objects. At a higher level, manual dexterity tasks combine the challenges of micro-manipulation with broader physical movements, like opening a door, climbing stairs, or stacking a set of boxes. If you combine these two tasks and add in the challenge of working in tight physical spaces, then you have a job that is highly resilient to displacement. Plumbing is one such example. Another, less obvious one is car assembly lines — while huge robotic equipment seems to do most of the work, you still see humans doing various micro-manipulation tasks inside the cramped, half-built vehicles.
For designers, visual perception is a critical skill and for those crafting 3D objects, so is spatial manipulation. So you might quickly conclude that if computers aren’t yet good at these things then we are safe, and you’d be partly right. Yet in the last few years, computer vision and deep learning systems have been deconstructing massive datasets of 2D images and 3D objects, working to inform a algorithmic designer as to ways to manipulate compositions, form, texture, etc.
Take the Prisma app, for example — our Sunday night dinners and backyard parties can suddenly look like a Van Gough masterpiece, not by design, but by data. Tools like that will disrupt the illustration profession, potentially reducing hours of laborious craft into software processing that spits out image compositions of any objects, in any art style.
In web page design we have the controversial (at least in the design community) Grid.io, which in some cases appears to do photographic and typographic composition based on high level parameters set by the designer. The combination of deep learning systems with simple codified heuristics, rules, best practices and principles means that many of the perceptual activities that a human designer thinks of as their idiosyncratic “eye and craft,” will be replaceable by AI systems sooner or later.
As for 3D manipulation, 3D printing techniques are making it possible to create physical objects far beyond the capability of even the best human craftsman.
Creative intelligence
The second area that is hard for AI technologies is creative intelligence. This is the ability to come up with valuable ideas and figure out ways to solve different kinds of problems.
In a recent piece, I shared thoughts on the nature of creativity, or the ability to create ideas or artifacts that are novel and valuable. By dividing creativity this way, it becomes clear that ascribing value (in the broadest sense) to an idea is fundamentally a subjective assessment. Value changes in context, culture across time, and with different individual identities and personalities. It’s why attitudes and preferences for art, music, fashion, vary so greatly.
In design, a valuable or clever idea may also be the result of a particular insight or perspective on behalf of the team. That breakthrough may result from rigorous research and understanding, or simply from social perspective, philosophical bias or what is commonly identified as individual “genius” or “talent.” Ideas are extremely resistant to codification. In their early form they are slippery, elusive and often feel good for seemingly emotional reasons. As many design thinkers have reflected, great design is as much about the hunt for the perfect framing question, as it is about coming up with a valuable answer, which makes the challenge of codifying valuable ideation even tougher.
Advances in overall computing power have made simulation possible so that similar parameter driven designs for objects and buildings can be created and millions of variations evolved to find the optimal engineering tradeoffs. This has been termed Generative design, and its been around for 30 or so years in various research facilities. Autodesk Dreamcatcher has been on the forefront of demonstrating the early proof of concept of this idea.
Tools like Dreamcatcher make creating novel solutions, an aspect of creative intelligence, highly susceptible to automation. Especially in the visual realm, there are many known techniques that can be applied to the creation of novelty. Computers armed with a reasonable understanding of goals can simply create massive numbers of design variations, remixing content, techniques, principles and patterns infinitely. They can also analyze the technique and emulate it, when sufficient example data exists.
Focusing only on creating novelty, however, is fake creative intelligence. While machine intelligences will be an increasingly powerful tool, it seems hard to imagine computers spontaneously challenging themselves with creative questions, generating creative solutions and evaluating the value of those solutions to find something optimal. To quote Picasso “[Computers] but they are useless. They can only give you answers.” Something that is perhaps inherently human is the ability to formulate the right question.
Social intelligence
Social intelligence is about real time recognition of human emotions. It poses a hard to overcome set of problems related to the complexity of codifying human social, cultural and emotional behavior. Codifying “common sense” and how senses and experience inform an awareness of the dynamics of situations, emotions, behaviors and contexts is hard to program. Examples range from the most basic kinds of understanding and prediction of physical interactions, like playing Jenga, to subtle cultural norms, like etiquette, politeness, taboo, political correctness. It also spans understanding human intent, motivations, emotions and actions. From an engineering perspective, these are all discrete and difficult challenges.
One relevant test of computers’ ability to do this is the Turing Test. Devised by Alan Turing in 1950, it was intended to test progress in AI technology to see if computers could fool a human into thinking it was communicating with another human in text based communications. In 2014, in an annual Turing Test, Eugene Goostman, a chatbot pretending to be a 13 year old Ukrainian boy, convinced a third of the judges that it was a real human. (Since Eugene claimed he was a tween, with English his second language, he was able to slide by with some communication wrinkles.)
Yet, despite the progress that is being made, jobs that require high social intelligence, like public relations, acting, comedy writing seem unlikely to be replaced by automation in the near future.
Similarly, social intelligence is at the core of human centered design. Most designers would agree that great designers possess high social intelligence, and a great understanding of culture and humanity. Furthermore, as we are called on to design for richer cross-disciplinary contexts, we are almost constantly in a state of negotiation and persuasion.
Predictability
Predictable tasks are not just those that are repeated in some endless process loop. If your job is something that can be broken down into a flow chart, with a series of decisions and actions from start to finish, then your job is potentially highly susceptible to automation. As long as the nature of the decision-making and action in each step doesn’t involve complex perception and manipulation, creative intelligence, or social intelligence, automation is probably right around the corner.
Take for example an autonomous car navigating through city traffic, from one destination to another. On the surface, this would appear to be highly complex in terms of predictability. However, from a logic perspective, this problem is more solvable. There is a clear path-finding problem to solve (how to get there using detailed maps of roads), there are unambiguous rules of the road and there are easily measurable environmental obstacles to recognize, understand and react to. Only this last category — the perception and reaction to environmental obstacles — involves complex perception activities. At a complex intersection with multiple lanes, pedestrians, bike lanes, even random debris, traffic signals, things obscured by other vehicles — the perception challenge is quite formidable. To make matters more technically complex, the system must not just be “locating” the positions of these things but “predicting” the movement of these objects relative to the physics of the vehicle. Whilst this sounds and is daunting, the basic decision making and actions the car has to operate by are still very simple — try to avoid hitting anything whilst obeying the rules of the road, and getting the car from A-B.
Different design professions are rooted in different traditions and different degrees of adherence to elaborate creative processes and more systematic, predictable methods. On one hand, many design professions can be broken into a series of steps. On the other, it’s the content of each of the decision-making steps that determines the degree of susceptibility to automation. If we examine brainstorming, one step that we use in almost every design process, we can see the important role creative and social intelligence play and how they make predictability virtually impossible.
Competing with the machines: Can we win the battle?
Of the four criteria, social intelligence and creative Intelligence stand out as the most difficult areas for computer science researchers to make near term progress that would be good enough to displace significant numbers of jobs in the 5–15 year timeframe.
Entrepreneurs (and designers) in the AI field are busy right now hunting for parts of occupations or whole occupations that have relatively straightforward predictability scenarios. There are hundreds of examples of jobs that look highly susceptible to displacement from secretarial positions to tax preparation, insurance policy clerks, insurance underwriters, data entry clerks, loan officers, credit analysts, book keeping accounting, shipping and receiving clerks, office administrators and hundreds more. Over the next ten years we will increasingly feel the impact of this work as we witness somewhat unprecedented occupation displacement through increasing automation and robotics.
While there are attempts to automate certain perceptual and novelty aspects of creativity and design, for the next few decades, I think we can conclude that most design professions are probably reasonably safe from computerization. But before we exhale a collective sigh of relief, let’s be realistic — our professions are going to be deeply impacted by AI.
Over the course of history, great design has embraced and thrived in this wicked complexity and has helped create products and services that have contributed to solving some of these “wicked problems”—take for instance the invention and global spread of the polio vaccine. But as the world faces massive and widening disparities, we are challenged to go beyond designs that simply improve the lives of people who use them. We are called, instead, to make change for societies as a whole. To design for social change.
Recognizing the interplay of systems and humans
Wicked problems can easily swallow our collective ambition with their magnitude. Historically, they have been tackled through systems thinking approaches by policy makers, economists, and civic organizations. And this approach of laws, government initiatives, and global nonprofits has worked for some of the massive social changes in our recent past, such as equal voting rights or the near-eradication of polio. The outcome of this approach is a sweeping wide change, initiated from “above.” Effective for huge movements, the success of this approach often is undermined by slow adoption or cultural inappropriateness.
That is where human-centered design (HCD) comes in. We have seen a recent focus on approaching the same challenges through the lens of the individual’s experience. HCD ensures that the solutions take into account the motivations, needs, and values of the impacted individuals. Recognizing its merit, large social change organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank have publicly championed HCD as a key contributor to improve the state of the world.
But social change requires as much system redesign and changes in individual behavior as it requires transformative change in cultural and societal norms. And that is where the interplay of the systems approach and the human-centered design approach comes in. Yet, while we have developed exhaustive frameworks for how each of the approaches works, we are nascent in our understanding of how they must complement each other to tackle wicked problems.
As designers, who desire to contribute to social change, we have to recognize this interplay between systems and humans. To put it simply, every time individuals act, they contribute to the running of the system, in which they exist with their neighbors. For instance, in this country, our democratic system of government is meaningless unless we are able to act in democratic ways that signal democracy: the freedom to vote, purchase, and speak as we choose.
A framework for designing social change
A key to designing social change is a deep understanding of how the design of experiences must drive individual actions, which, when performed by many individuals, drives wide-scale, societal change. For instance, when one family from a poor and rural environment takes the action to send their daughter to school, and a hundred families do the same, the outcome is often fewer child marriages, lower birthrate, increased access to credit, and many other factors that contribute to a more equitable society, or social change for the better.
To design effective experiences that achieve positive social change, we need design principles that integrate the systems and HCD approach:
Principle 1: Agency
Agency is a belief in one’s capacity to influence their own thoughts and behavior, no matter how small. It is the belief of a parent that they are able to make the decision of whether to send their daughter to school or not. As designers, we have to ask ourselves: Are we providing users, especially those who are underserved, or marginalized in society, a sense of agency that is appropriate within the context in which they live?
HCD tenets such as the need to start with empathy-building, and tools such as user needs assessments, provide a starting place to understand the individual, or the parents’ current situation of agency. Systems thinking tools like social network analysis help us describe the actors in the parents’ network, characterize their relationships, and understand whether interactions between key people stand in the way of providing agency.
Principle 2: Access
Designing for access means designing experiences that utilize the tools and services readily accessible within one’s day-to-day life. Access means making it easy for a user to do something, because few barriers stand in the way. Both HCD and systems thinking provide methods to understand what’s available and what opportunities exists to increase access. Similarly, systems thinking can uncover how issues of access are interrelated. We might uncover that in a typical month, parents can’t predict whether they will have enough to pay for school fees. What contributes to this financial instability includes a lack of access to credit, due to a lack of safe lending institutions, which don’t offer service to people in rural environments because they don’t have formal identifications, and therefore repayment tracking is hard to ensure.
Principle 3: Action
Lastly, no experience can achieve social change unless individuals can take action easily. Designing for action means understanding how humans behave and leveraging findings in behavioral economics and psychology, to steer the individual toward the desired behavior. Systems thinking tools like change matrices help designers narrow down the change we are trying to affect, while HCD tenets around prototyping allow us to ensure that once solutions are put into the marker, users can and will take action easily toward that change.
Principles at Work
Whether you are designing a campaign, a service, or a product, when applied successfully, these principles can result in a significant social change—just take a look at Black Lives Matter, HealthPartners, and MicroEnsure. Integrated into their solutions, intentionally or not, are the design principles of agency, access, and action.
Black Lives Matter Wicked problem: Racial prejudice Type of design: Campaign
Black Lives Matter, a national organization with chapters in cities across the U.S., seeks to “(re)build the Black liberation movement.” It began in 2012, as a reaction to George Zimmerman’s acquittal for killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and has become a strong voice in the struggle against institutionalized racism. In this context, we refer to it as a campaign that strives to impact social change.
The campaign has been successful in raising an issue and encouraging discourse on a topic that has long been taboo within American culture and media. From bringing nationwide attention to issues of police reform into the presidential spotlight with conversations with Hillary Clinton, the creation of more than 31 chapters across the entire U.S., and to widespread Twitter conversations between hundreds of thousands of followers, there is no doubt that the movement has become a flashpoint of American awareness. This success can be attributed not just to the obvious accessibility of the movement, which is fueled in large part by online participation, but also because of the agency and action integrated within BLM as a campaign.
By leveraging the ubiquitous smartphones we have in our pockets, BLM is a movement that galvanizes those protesting in person with an online community of those participating online. Participants have recorded incidents in real time and thrown their collective force behind stories that need to be seen, shaping national media attention. This online activity, in turn, reinforces and supports the traditional protest actions taking place around the country.
BLM avoids mere “clicktivism” by promoting the belief that taking control of the content and stories of injustice that are captured and shared can be a catalyst for change. The point of participating in BLM discourse online is not to simply add a hashtag or click “like,” but to change the narrative of the media, by becoming the media. BLM is not merely accessible online, but as a campaign promotes agency and action by providing both real and online protest spaces for participants to choose how to take action and to demonstrate their care and concern for black lives.
Other campaigns of today’s politically charged spotlight could benefit from greater awareness and traction if principles of agency, access, and action were applied. Imagine if working mothers and fathers, both low and mid-income, had the agency to demand paid family leave? Imagine if they could access stats and stories that demonstrate the injustice, and the impacts to our children, with the click of a button? What kind of action could we all take to make politicians unable to drown out our collective voice?
MicroEnsure Wicked problem: Massive financial risk Type of design: Product
MicroEnsure is a product that provides reasonably priced and easy-to-use insurance products to people in the economically developing world. There, 5 billion people live on about $5 a day, with incredible risk. People live close to the edge, where illness or accidents easily send them tumbling back into poverty.
In Kenya, for example, MicroEnsure works with local insurance companies, such the Pan Africa Life Insurance LTD and the mobile carrier Airtel, to provide free insurance products, including life insurance, coverage for accidents, and hospitalization. Benefits, such as reimbursements on hospital stays, can be increased based on how much airtime, or mobile minutes, individuals use. The design of MicroEnsure’s service gives its users a sense of agency by bundling the service with airtime, a product that is familiar and people have been confidently using for years. Bundling insurance with airtime perpetuates the belief that “if I’m able to buy airtime, I can probably get insurance too.”
By partnering with local insurance companies and the mobile carriers, MicroEnsure is able to provide free, minimal insurance even to those who have never had or considered it before. And by using the mobile phone kiosks as the access point for insurance services, such as claims payment, MicroEnsure has made insurance services accessible, fitting into the places and routines that its users already partake in. Lastly, MicroEnsure has made taking action easy. Even in disaster situations like hurricanes, insurance representatives go out to the affected areas and are available to take claims. This boon in customer service is especially relevant to underserved audiences: MicroEnsure recognized that figuring where and how to get insurance claims is a necessary product requirement for their customers, who often live with massive financial instability.
The success of MicroEnsure is evident in its numbers; 43 million registered customers in parts of Africa and Asia, with almost 20 million new customers in 2016 alone. But the individual stories of positive health impact are more impressive. When Hassan, a Nigerian business owner living on less than $4 dollars a day, injured his hand, his insurance was able to cut half the cost of his treatment.
HealthPartners Wicked problem: Childhood obesity Type of design: Service
Minnesota-based HealthPartners is a not-for-profit health care provider that serves approximately 1.5 million members. They have been intentionally addressing the issue of childhood obesity for more than 10 years. One of their programs, PowerUp Kids, is a six-week challenge that provides information to administrators in 26 schools to help them encourage over 10,000 students to make better decisions about their own health. The program has had over 90% participation.
The program is designed to provide agency for both administrators and students by allowing them to choose ideas of how to better their own health rather than prescribing a solution that may not be relevant or interesting for a particular school culture. Ideas that admins and students have come up with include: substituting ways to celebrate birthdays with fun activities instead of unhealthy treats, letting kids eat breakfast in the classroom at the start of the school day, and scheduling recess before lunch so kids can work up an appetite. Recognizing that school is the hub of life for many families, by rolling out this program in schools where children go everyday, HP has designed an experience that is accessible for children and their role models.
The principle of action is also well-integrated into the design of the service, as the program integrates behaviors into activities that students are already participating in such as recess, or celebration, providing administrators and students easy ways to take action.
Both MicroEnsure and HealthPartners’s PowerUP Kids demonstrate how we can apply the three principles in ways that are relevant for the culture in which their customer lives. Imagine if health providers here in the U.S. thought about designing for agency, access, and action for those that are underserved—single mothers, low-income, new immigrants, seniors, and more. How would typical health services such as vaccinations and cold and flu visits be set up for better access with longer hours or free transport? How would we encourage a sense of agency by making getting medical treatment as familiar as going grocery shopping? What opportunities exist to create more micro actions to care for one’s health? The possibilities open up when thinking about design with this framework.
The role of technology
As designers and other experts with unique lenses on the world join forces to tackle the wicked problems we face, it’s easiest to default to creating apps expecting that technology adoption can save the world, an idea sometimes referred to as Silicon Valley solutionism. To avoid solutionism, and truly work toward social change, we need to recognize the complexity of ourselves as individuals, and how our actions together create culture and society. The interplay of systems and human-centered thinking offers the right tools to understand the context and issues from both a societal and user perspective, allowing us to identify outcomes we are striving to change. The principles of agency, access, and action offer a new framework to design for the complexity of these wicked problems, for the inequities between the under- and well-served and the cultural context in which they live. It is only with a new mind-set that we can truly design for social change.
Design for meaning: Rethinking design’s ideation prompts
Twitter has become a cesspool of abuse and harassment. Facebook has become a pushy aggregator of algorithm-driven advertising and fake news. Yet recent redesign efforts by both companies have managed to avoid the elephants in the room. For example, Twitter recently released a redesign that consisted of having “refined our typography” and shiny round profile icons. The redesign was met with scorn for not having addressed the harassment, misogyny, and racism that are now synonymous with the platform.
Along a similar vein, there are Facebook’s “how might we” statements for their recent news feed redesign. Many designers are familiar with “how might we” statements as a way of driving ideation and helping us imagine new possibilities. Facebook’s news feed “how might we’s” consisted of statements such as “how might we make the news feed more engaging and immersive?”
As designers, we are missing the big picture. We focus on details such as microinteractions, typography and icons, without thinking about the outcome we are trying to achieve — just look at the iPhone X. This focus on craft alone not only negates our potential impact, it tarnishes our reputation as agents of change. We need to think beyond the direct engagement with the products we design, and focus on the consequences of our work.
So what’s a designer to do? Before we ask ‘how might we’, we need to get to ‘why’.
Is to…. So that
We need to allow ourselves and our colleagues to think about outcomes: What do you want your design to do after it’s out of your hands? The statement that I’ve now started using to get to that rationale and impact is what we call at Artefact “…Is to… So that”.
It goes something like this:
The purpose of [the design work that I am doing] is to [the design goal that you are trying to achieve] so that [the outcome that you want happens] …so that [the impact you want to make more broadly].
When we translate the Facebook prompts into this structure, it is suddenly harder to remain blind to the outcome (or lack thereof) of your work:
When we translate the Facebook prompts into this structure, it is suddenly harder to remain blind to the outcome (or lack thereof) of your work:
The purpose of [redesigning the Facebook news feed] is to [make it more immersive and engaging] so that [people spend more time on the platform] so that [Facebook can collect more data on its users and make more advertising money.]
Is that the impact you want as a designer? For people to see more ads?
Now let’s step back and think about outcomes first.
Outcome: Reduction of fake news and unreliable news sources on Facebook. Outcome: People don’t feel like they are wasting time on Facebook. Outcome: People find interactions on Facebook to be meaningful.
Now our “Is to… so that” statement will look somewhat different:
The purpose of [redesigning the Facebook news feed] is to [prioritize distinction of news feed content] so that [people can avoid unreliable news sources, and distinguish more personal content] so that [communities and society are well and factually informed].
What’s interesting, is that allowing the distinction between news feed content was actually one of the Facebook news feed team’s “how might we” statements: “How might we improve News Feed to be easier to read and distinguish key areas of content?” The problem is that their way of addressing this question was to “make the News Feed stories easier to read by improving visual hierarchy, increasing type size and color contrast.”
And this is why first identifying the outcomes through asking “Is to… so that” is so critical: it gives you the lens through which you can better define your ideation. If your desired outcome is to help people avoid or understand unreliable news sources, your ideation will look much different from simple “color contrast.” The end result may still involve typography and color, but these decisions will be in the function of the larger outcome. The tools we have at our disposal may not change, but our impact will.
Design is such a self-important profession. Our egos have been stoked by the fact that we operate at the elusive intersection of creativity and pragmatism. We have become the translators between technology and human need and emotion. What we have to remember is that designers bear moral responsibility for their design decisions, even when they have negative consequences.
We can either continue to focus on only the craft of design, exemplified by lovely design execution and an emphasis on engagement, or we can evolve. The purpose of [not just focusing on craft and engagement] is to [empower designers] so that[we can solve complex interconnected problems that need to be solved].
Smart cities cycle: Building bike culture with behavioral economics
May was Bike to Work Month at Artefact, and together we pedaled nearly 500 miles commuting to and from the office. Bike to Work Month is always exciting because so many people at Artefact are passionate about cycling: Sheryl brought her beloved Dutch bike when she moved from Amsterdam, and Holger even builds his own bikes. In May, I took a trip to Amsterdam and Copenhagen to experience the cycling culture and infrastructure in both cities firsthand (as well as eat a million stroopwafels, mission accomplished).
Somehow during all of my time in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, I did not get a single photo of me actually riding a bicycle. I did, however, get this photo hugging a cat in a bicycle rental shop. (His name was Chris, he was wonderful.) Just take my word for it, I rode a bike a lot.
Our passion for bikes goes beyond the personal. For cities looking to solve community issues with smart solutions, it’s hard to imagine a single product that comes as close to being a silver bullet for smart cities than bicycles. The benefits are clear: investments in cycling reduce car congestion and improve public health, thanks to the increase in exercise and decrease in air pollution and automobile accidents. Cycle-centric cities are not only safer, but they make cities more accessible for people from all economic levels and connect communities rather than divide with highways.
We know that choosing to prioritize cyclists the way we prioritize cars and pedestrians can fundamentally shape a city for the better. In the 1960s, Copenhagen made proactive choices to design roadways and communities to encourage safe cycling, and today the city reaps the rewards of putting cyclists first. Fifty percent of all Copenhagen residents commute by bicycle, and the city has been deemed the World’s Most Bike-Friendly City and the World’s Most Livable City— and the connection between the two is no coincidence.
A famous example of cycling infrastructure, the Cykelslangen (“Bike Snake”) Bridge in Copenhagen. Photo credit: Danish Architecture Center.
Becoming a world class cycling city like Copenhagen requires extensive urban planning and investment in significant cycling infrastructure. But as many cities look to smart solutions to improve their communities, there are achievable and incremental actions cities can take today to build a cycling culture that will support a smart city ecosystem.
Behavioral economics for bicycles
At Artefact, we often deploy “behavioral nudges” in our design work— subtle suggestions that direct people toward taking positive or preferred actions. Building a network of bike lanes takes time, but cities can apply behavioral economics to their existing infrastructure today in order to nudge citizens towards cycling.
Cities all over the world are implementing low-tech, low-investment behavioral nudges to increase ridership. Many start with creating space for cyclists in small ways, such as adding secure bike parking at key destinations like grocery stores and ensuring that buses, trains and other transit options have designated space for cyclists to stash their bikes. In Copenhagen, I experienced another behavioral nudge: the bike footrest. The city installed simple, inexpensive railings at intersections so that cyclists have a place to lean while waiting for the light to change. Taken together, all of these are smart behavioral nudges and minor adjustments that encourage more riders and good cycling behaviors.
Behavioral nudges can also be baked into bike share programs to increase their success rates. The city of Hangzhou, China made the first hour of bike share rental free to attract users. On my trip, I preferred using a specific bike share because it used Bluetooth-enabled locks that made grabbing a bike as simple as clicking a button on my phone. Also, as we have learned from my photo, incorporating a cat named Chris into your bike rental shop is an excellent behavioral nudge for encouraging me, specifically, to ride a bike in your city.
Build support with behavioral economics
For any city, moving toward a more cycle-friendly future requires extensive community support and coalition building. We can use the concept of behavioral nudges not just to attract cyclists, but bring businesses and stakeholders along for the ride as well.
The story of the Hackney parklet is an excellent example of incentivizing the support of cycling for the broader community. The London Borough of Hackney commissioned the creation of small, movable mini-park that created a temporary sanctuary for cyclists and could be moved to outside different businesses. With protected seating and parking for bikes, the parklet was an attraction that helped bring more in more sales for participating businesses, rewarding them for promoting cycling.
For cities with a growing cycling culture, an unfortunate friction can crop up between car commuters and cycling commuters. With behavioral economics, we can make cycling a part of city commuting and encourage the car-and-transit populations to incorporate cycling into their routine. The city of York, England made small upgrades to existing infrastructure to increase cycling among commuters. With the “Park and Pedal” program, York created space at their existing park-and-ride facilities for bicycles, which shortened long bike commutes, allowed people to securely store their bikes overnight, and promoted biking within the city center.
The Hackney parklet, a quick-build installation that attracts business by creating space for pedestrians and cyclists. Photo credit Get Britain Cycling.
Rapid prototyping for bike infrastructure
We’ve talked about using behavioral nudges to encourage cycling, but there’s another way cities can experiment with bike infrastructure using a design method: rapid prototyping. Several cities, including Seattle, have had tremendous success with quick-build, rapidly iterated tweaks to existing streets to determine what works best for cyclists in their cities. The organization People for Bikes lays out how cities have used community input to prototype spaces for cyclists with simple paint jobs and temporary objects, then used the experimental spaces to inform more permanent cycling investments.
An example of an intersection in Chicago where cycling advocates reclaimed underutilized infrastructure to quickly experiment with bike-friendly design. Photo credit: People for Bikes.
Bikes: the ultimate tool for smart cities
The benefits of bicycles pay even more dividends for smart cities in the era of connected devices and data-based decision making. Future devices for bikes and cyclists include smart lights that prevent possible accidents, pedal-powered filters that clean air pollution, and cycle-based sensors that report traffic conditions. At Artefact, we developed a prototype called BrakePack, a smart backpack for the urban cyclist that helps reduce traffic incidents. There’s an entire new subsection of technology taking off that cities can dial into in order to improve quality of life for cyclists, drivers, and pedestrians.
As cycling continues to increase in popularity, cities should plan to include cycling technology as part of their strategy to become more smart and connected. By analyzing information gathered by cyclists and bike technology the way we do cars, cities can make more informed urban planning decisions, design effective infrastructure, and prioritize needed upgrades. In the age of IoT and artificial intelligence, the simple bicycle may be one of the most powerful and transformative tools for any smart city.
It turns out Gandhi did not really say this, but nevertheless we subscribe to the idea that being the voice for change is as important as leading by example. That is why we are proud to join Pledge Parental Leave, the coalition of creative firms who are making a public commitment to improve parental leave benefits and redefine the standard for the industry.
Large organizations like Netflix, Facebook and Spotify have already revamped their policies in an effort to support the well-being of the much sought-after talent. Cities too have taken the initiative – Seattle just announced plans to double paid leave for city employees; New York and San Francisco have similar benefits. But in the absence of a government-mandated policy in the US, people are often forced to make a choice between career and family.
Initiated by global digital product studio ustwo, the Pledge Parental Leave initiative brings together like-minded companies who pledge to support four minimum standards for parental leave:
3 months fully paid leave for the primary caregiver
3 months uninterrupted medical insurance
6 months job security
A commitment to making the policy openly available online
In the words of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who earlier in the year signed a city wide progressive policy, “Too many parents face an impossible choice: Their new child, or their paycheck. Our administration is proud to lead by example by providing fully paid parental leave to City employees. Yet the United States still lags behind the rest of the world in offering this vital, basic benefit. That’s why leadership from businesses like those in the Pledge Parental Leave coalition is vital – and we need others to quickly follow suit.”
Attracting and retaining talent is what drives Artefact success as an agency, but it is the people who make Artefact a best place to work. Joining the coalition helps us with both growing our talent and supporting our people. We hope and encourage other companies to follow suit.
