Design Thinking for the Greater Good

by Jeanne Liedtka

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Connecting—and Disconnecting—the Pieces at United Cerebral Palsy

  THE CHALLENGE TO THE GREATER GOOD

  How do you facilitate bringing together those who have needs with those who can potentially meet those needs, and help these groups to work together to accomplish some greater good? Can you galvanize different stakeholders, who have differing needs and inputs but need each other’s resources, to work together to generate new solutions? And can you win the support of your organization’s key stakeholders to accommodate such a strategy?

  DESIGN THINKING’S CONTRIBUTION

  Innovation in the social sector often requires building connections across what, in business, we would call the supply chain. Design thinking can offer a methodology for initiating these connections and architecting the networks capable of both generating new ideas and translating them into reality. In this story, United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) explores expanding its mission beyond seeking donations and offering services, aiming to foster the connections needed to invent and incubate new products. Taking a design approach, they created Innovation Labs—traveling design thinking events that invited people with all kinds of disabilities, caregivers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and design students to improve the quality of life of those with disabilities. Then, unfortunately, the real world intervened.

  When we first heard the leaders of Life Labs at United Cerebral Palsy tell their story, we felt as though we were looking into a crystal ball and seeing what the charitable organization of the future would look like. UCP had always been a forward-thinking organization, pioneering innovations like the telethon that have become fund-raising staples. Throughout their almost seventy-year history, UCP’s mission has remained constant: advancing the independence of people with disabilities, enriching their lives, providing support to their families, and advocating for their inclusion in every facet of community life. But it was their bold new experiment to better accomplish this mission that caught our attention. It reversed the traditional paradigm and rethought the basic business model of the charitable organization itself; instead of asking for help to assist those they served, they wanted to offer help.

  Central to this strategy was their Life Labs operation. Originally conceived as a kind of development lab for assistive technology, Life Labs was intended to evolve into an entrepreneurial hub for the development of products and services to improve the lives of those with disabilities, using design thinking to get there. Marc Irlandez, Life Labs’s former director and technology leader, talked about the journey to that shift:

  Originally, Life Labs was meant to be a kind of R & D practice—but we quickly learned that we didn’t have the resources, we didn’t have the expertise or the manpower to do that type of work. But we had a lot of ideas. And so we went exploring—not only about what we could do but what people with disabilities were really hopeful for, what they were looking to do.

  A pivotal moment in this exploration came during a meeting with a new start-up called AbleGamers, a small nonprofit with a goal of making video gaming accessible to those with disabilities. That meeting sparked a revelation for Marc:

  We loved what they were doing but recognized that UCP was never going to fight that fight. Not only did we not have the expertise—that just wasn’t going to be on our agenda. But our missions intersected, and we wanted to be part of that kind of work. And, at that moment, I recognized that it was going to be laser-focused organizations like Able-Gamers that were going to be instrumental in accomplishing our mission, not us. We weren’t going to own and execute the agenda. Helping those fledging nonprofits, helping the guy in his garage create a piece of technology for his loved one—that’s where Life Labs could make the greater impact. This was not something that we were going to do alone.

  Life Labs’s contribution could be to spawn and nurture a network of entrepreneurs. Though technology would play a role, it would not be their role. As Marc described it, “The innovative thing that we wanted to do had nothing to do with the technology—it was the relationships that we would build that would allow us to make an impact out there.”

  When Josef Scarantino joined Marc’s team, his experience in the maker movement added another building block. Creating an accessible maker space for people with disabilities could have a big impact, they believed. Marc could trace his own interest in the maker movement back to his first week on the job at UCP. A documentary he watched that week featured a young man with a disability who was writing a book by using a tongue interface his father had created in their garage, with help from a local engineer. It was apparent to Marc that the device would not be of interest to big companies looking for large markets, yet not everyone had a loved one capable of creating such a product. “But it totally changed that boy’s life,” Marc noted. “Now he’s writing books.”

  Equipping people with tools—both literally and figuratively—and helping them to learn to create became a goal of Life Labs. Marc explained:

  It didn’t have to be a father. People with disabilities should themselves be able to have a 3-D printer or a soldering pen or whatever it takes to fabricate tools, because our community is the most reliant on technology. The able-bodied use all these gadgets as luxuries, but for people with disabilities they are a necessity, so they’re already hacking things. They change everything—because they have to. That’s a true maker movement, because you’re doing it out of passion and your own need.

  THE MAKER MOVEMENT

  The maker movement manifests design thinking’s iteration process, in which tinkerers devise, design, try, test, and retry to build something. What makes makers a movement is that social spaces designed to aid people in these efforts have popped up in cities around the world. In these spaces, makers can pay a nominal fee to use tools such as welding machines, 3-D printers, lathes, drill presses, table saws, and filmmaking equipment. These “hacker spaces” promote learning by doing, through networked, peer-led approaches.

  Meanwhile, a UCP colleague attending the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas, heard a talk given by people from a London-based nonprofit group called Enabled by Design that was doing novel things. Back at home, the Life Labs team reached out to them to learn more about an event they had organized, Enabled by Design-athon. It struck a chord, and the Life Labs team took the kernel of that approach and adapted it to their own mission. Their three-day event brought diverse teams of engineers, designers, people with disabilities, and caregivers together to invent and prototype new products and services. After the first year, UCP elected to change the name of their version to Innovation Lab, reflecting their hope that it would become a real-world laboratory for experimentation and collaboration. Josef told us:

  We’ve always liked the hackathon idea of putting things into a pressure cooker and seeing what happens, but what attracted us to the Design-athon versus a hackathon was that people with disabilities were actually involved. Rather than bringing preformed teams together to see what they can do for people, the users are involved.

  The Innovation Lab captured the essence of the maker movement and used a design thinking methodology that relied heavily on the Stanford design school model, which they called Innovative Thinking, to structure the process. But then UCP went a step further—it made the creation process social. This social dimension itself met an important need of people with disabilities: “The social aspect is the number one thing that the disability community wants,” Marc explained. “Forget about policy or support programs or whatever. The social side is what people with disabilities want the most. We take all these things for granted.”

  Like the event that inspired it, UCP’s Innovation Lab would ask people to come together to solve problems with strangers. The first Innovation Lab took place in Washington, DC, in the fall of 2013. It involved a lot of bootstrapping.

  The methodology used in the Innovation Lab, created in partnership with Marymount University and based on the Stanford University Institute of Design (d.school
) model.

  Finding Partners

  One element critical to the success of the Innovation Labs was attracting the right kind of partners. Life Labs already had a set of corporate relationships, and they started there. The timing was fortuitous, as Marc explained:

  We had already lined up partners for Life Labs, and had been working with them, trying to find common ground, figure out where their interests lay, and how we could get them involved or get involved in what they were doing.

  Sponsors responded enthusiastically to the Innovation Lab premise. “Now you’re giving me something that I can really throw our weight behind!” is how Josef recalls their response.

  Marc was clear that the effort was new territory for them all and was going to require courage: “All the parties had to be very brave with what we were doing.” Google, in particular, stepped forward immediately, as Josef described:

  Google started to get involved by doing a lot of in-kind support. It can take a long time to get actual funding from Google, because they want to ensure there is sufficient impact on the community. And so they wanted to show their support, but they were looking for ways to show that in-kind support through event coordination of venue, catering, things that really do eat up a lot of resources. And that’s where they came through. The key is really finding partners who have an intersection with your mission. I think that the mistake a lot of nonprofits make is to immediately go ask for funding when there are so many other opportunities for partnerships.

  Marc elaborated:

  If you write a check, tons of people don’t know about it. This was more successful for Google because their engineers were totally jazzed about what we were doing. They’re an engineer-driven organization—getting their engineers in that mindset is an important thing for them. How do we design for communities that aren’t really represented in engineering communities or in design communities?

  Google’s sponsorship brought credibility to the event—both with participants and with internal leadership.

  Curating the teams was another critical piece of setting up the success of the Innovation Lab, with the same emphasis on diversity that we have seen in so many of our other stories. Josef described why:

  At the Innovation Lab, it’s about the process. It’s not really about creating this widget—it’s about the process of getting people together and working across different areas. When we curate the teams, based on those who have registered, we try to bring together a mixture of designers and engineers but also caregivers and people with disabilities. We try to be as diverse as we can.

  They found the ideal team size to be six to eight people, with at least one member representing the disability community—a caregiver or a person with a disability. This created a challenge around how to market the event to people who were new to design. UCP reached out to its network of caregivers, both to promote the event and to let them know that they, too, had great value, even if they weren’t an engineer or designer. Marc observed:

  Everyone comes with one or more missing components: I’m not a designer, or I’m not an engineer. I don’t have a disability background. I don’t have a disability. No one is all of them, but that’s the whole point—so you’re missing a part; that’s perfect!

  The UCP team also found another enthusiastic partner in universities. Always on the lookout for ways to incorporate experiential learning, to move out of the classroom and give students the experience of creation in real life, they found the Innovation Lab opportunity compelling. Eight universities were represented in the first Innovation Lab, from as far away as Michigan, Syracuse, and Boston.

  The Innovation Lab Event

  The Innovation Lab was designed to be a three-day event, commencing with an evening kickoff on day one, followed by two full days of workshops.

  The first Innovation Lab, held in Washington, DC, began with a series of “lightning” talks. Only five minutes long and aimed at giving a short introduction to a topic of interest, like universal design, they gave attendees a chance to get to know each other. One former board member reviewed the business case for designing for people with disabilities, emphasizing that it needn’t be about charity and could be about building a business. “People loved that message,” Marc noted.

  “People with disabilities don’t want to be treated as a charity,” Josef explained. “They want to be treated just like everyone else.”

  An important role of the Innovation Lab was to increase awareness and engage others in advocating for people with disabilities. Marc noted:

  Their voices are just not heard. They don’t need the type of help where you start pushing someone in a wheelchair—but people don’t know that. What we need is for you to fight for more ramps, for the policy around it.

  A typical Innovation Lab schedule.

  On day two, dedicated team facilitators, as well as a set of mentors who would float from team to team, arrived thirty minutes early for a pep talk and instructions. The facilitator’s job was to keep the team on track, and each got a detailed printout of the schedule for the two days.

  The session kicked off with a speaker from the Small Business Administration talking about federal funding opportunities for start-ups. Then an executive from a sponsor, Sprint Relay, who was herself deaf, gave an inspiring talk about her personal story. Another talk was given by representatives from a local prototyping company that focused on 3-D printing, working with start-ups to create their products. They talked about 3-D printing for people with disabilities and 3-D printing of prosthetics, and they brought along a few machines and engineers to be available to the design teams during the workshop.

  The Innovation Lab session then unfolded in three stages typical of design thinking processes: Explore, Ideas, and Make. The exploration portion was handled differently than in traditional design thinking approaches, in which ethnographic research would be done in advance. The Explore stage began, instead, with empathy exercises in which team members imagined the experience of those with disabilities. Team members who themselves had disabilities or who cared for people with disabilities were present to help everyone understand the challenges they faced. Teams then jumped into selecting the focus for their next two days of work together, knowing that, during the final day’s competition with the other teams, they would be judged on the usability, accessibility, and desirability of the designs they produced.

  Soon, the teams gave the first in a series of rapid reports to the group at large—this one on the names the teams had selected. Then, teams shared where they were headed. They had the opportunity to pivot after hearing other teams’ quick pitches, which sometimes gave them different ideas. They then transitioned into the Ideas stage, using paper and cardboard to do rough prototyping. With about an hour left until the end of the day, they gave another rapid report. Teams then worked at their own pace as they pulled together their pitches.

  By the start of day three, teams were expected to be in the third stage. The Make stage focused on taking rough prototypes to the next level of development and constructing stories around them. People showed up early on day three, ready to jump in, as they foresaw the end of the day closing in on them. By noon, they needed to have their pitch polished and their presentations ready. Marc observed:

  On day two, people are scared that they are going to be in front of people sharing something on day three—they just can’t imagine being ready. But when they come in that morning, they’re sure that they’re going to have something. They’re just working to get it done, which is a totally different dynamic.

  An empathy exercise used in the Innovation Lab.

  STORYBOARDING

  Storyboarding is a staple of the film industry, as well as a useful tool in design thinking. A storyboard lays out a sequence of events visually, capturing a stakeholder’s journey in pictures, almost like a cartoon strip. They are particularly handy to illustrate concepts that aren’t tangible, like processes, and can serve as a great springboard for co-creation.

  T
he teams worked feverishly, preparing the prototypes of their concepts. These prototypes took different forms, including storyboards, videos, and photo mock-ups of products in use. The objective was not just to show the product but also to tell the story of how it would meet the needs of people with disabilities in unique ways.

  One team created a messenger-style bag, modified for ease of use, using a storyboard to walk their audience through how it could make life easier for those with disabilities. Though the idea hardly seemed revolutionary, it represented exactly the kind of innovation that Life Labs hoped to achieve, taking a standard bag and modifying it to add features like magnetic closures and an accompanying wristband to be worn by the user to make opening, closing, and retrieving objects from the bag easier. These seemingly modest alterations, easily doable by home hackers, had the potential to make life far easier for a person with disabilities.

  Storyboard showing the features of a bag modified for ease of use, re-created from a more detailed Innovation Lab storyboard.

  Judging started at 3:00 p.m. with judges given a chance to ask one or two questions. An announcement that prizes would be awarded created an element of surprise, providing an energy boost. In addition to the modified bag, the prototypes presented were diverse. Another team created a “companion app” that could help people with disabilities navigate the public transportation system. A third created a wheelchair that could climb stairs. The idea “Stars at War,” a software program that translated colloquialisms for people with autism, won the competition. The session ended by 4:00 p.m., with the teams deciding what they wanted to do with their prototypes. UCP did not want to own the ideas. One team at the DC event elected to open source their design.