Depth Over Breadth:
Designing for Impact Locally,
and for the Long Haul
Emily Pilloton
Project H Design | [e-mail]
place you seek to design with
and for), empathic investment
(a personal and emotional stake
in collective prosperity), and
pervasiveness (the opposite of
scattershot—involvement that
has impact at multiple scales).
May + June 2010

I have never been one to sit still and focus on one thing. In fact, most designers are fairly ineffective when it comes to singular tasks—we seem to be both blessed and cursed with a unique form of attention deficit disorder in which we thrive under diverse and constant stimuli. And yet, after two years of tackling design projects for measurable social impact, the one piece of advice I would give to other designers who seek to apply their creative skills toward activism and community engagement is to sit still and focus on one thing.

I mean this not in a cubicle context (“sit at your desk and return emails”), but rather as it pertains to approaching huge, high-stakes design for social-impact projects and enterprises. To sit still and focus on one thing means to commit to a place, to live and work there, and to apply your skills (your “one thing”) to that community’s benefit.

In the past few years, we
designers have acknowledged
the imperatives of sustainability
and design for the greater good,
and responded by launching
initiatives that are often rife
with widespread cheerleading
rather than deep, meaning-
ful work. When we do take
on social-impact projects, our
involvement with a community
or client often extends only as
long as the project does. Even
for those organizations whose
entire mission is to provide
design services to the over-
looked, those services tend to be
executed in a sort of scattershot
acupuncture, where small proj-
ects happen in as many places
as possible without a pervasive
presence or commitment to one
particular area or community.

Proximity

One of the fundamental prerequisites for designing for social impact is a human-centered process. In short, you can’t design solutions for people who need them unless you fundamentally understand the problems, ask questions, and listen for answers beyond those of surveys or consumer-research reports. To take it one step further, you can’t design effective solutions for people unless you make your clients or end users part of the design process— co-creating systems that will work for and be owned by them. To do either of these things, you simply have to be there, present in a place, and part of the community.

Somewhat paradoxically, however, the majority of social-impact projects are focused on demographics in the developing world (and rightfully so, given that the most socio-economically disadvantaged citizens often reside in developing coun-