This blog post was written for and posted on GOOD.

As a design and innovation consultancy built on the notion of putting people at the center of the design process, taking a human-centered approach to evaluation is critical for IDEO. We saw a great example of this when we spent time with IDE in Ethiopia, where Monitoring and Evaluation specialists spend time walking the fields with farmers and connect their personal stories to the data about them.

When evaluating the effectiveness of a program, quantitative data alone does not convey enough meaning, and typically leaves us with many questions. Numbers are, of course, necessary, but shouldn’t be relied on alone. Statistics should be complemented by deep stories of the impacts on an individual, family, or a community, and we should spend as much time thinking about how to effectively craft these stories as we do focusing on how to present the numbers.

Putting people at the center of evaluation means connecting with them on a personal level. We do this by spending time with people in the field—observing them at their homes or while doing their jobs. We build trust in the communities by working with local partners and even doing homestays in rural villages. As we get to know people, we gather richer and richer stories about their lives. And as we test prototypes of various innovations, we look to understand how it actually changes people’s lives.

When we worked with VisionSpring to design eye “camps” for children in rural India, we created a number of different procedures. We observed children as they went through the eye testing process, and talked with them about how to improve it. A few children started crying as soon as they sat down to get their eyes checked, because the pressure of the equipment on their faces was too great when the test was conducted by an adult. However, when they were given the opportunity to test the eyes of their classmates, the same children were confident and excited. The feedback they sought from children and teachers (including the personal stories about the children who got glasses and were now able to succeed in school) allowed VisionSpring to continue to conduct the eye camps, with better results.

So now we put these questions to you: How have you put people at the center of evaluation? How have you reconciled raw data with human stories? What strategies have you used to measure impact beyond quantitative analysis? Can you think of any realms—education, the prison system come to mind—where evaluation could stand to be less number-centric?

We just launched the 2nd Edition of the HCD Toolkit which was developed for non-profits and social enterprises worldwide. The HCD Toolkit and Field Guide lay out the IDEO process for design and innovation and help organizations better understand the needs of their customers and develop innovative products and services to meet those needs.

We'd love to hear stories about how people are using the HCD Toolkit so please let me know if you have any feedback.

If you prefer, you can also purchase the printed versions from Blurb.

I've not been such a good blogger recently, which I do apologize for. Instead, though, I've been on Twitter and linking to lots of great blog posts, job announcements, articles, and events. Please follow me there at jocelynw.

I'll continue to blog from time to time, but you can expect more on Twitter from now on.

Google and Grameen Foundation's App Lab are doing great work understanding user needs and designing SMS products for the Ugandan market. These videos on the design process and the services offered are great examples of user-centered design.

Skoll Foundation is looking for a summer intern. More information here.

Prison Entrepreneurship Program - website

Our client is a pioneering, Texas-based non-profit 501(c)(3)
organization, which works to unite executives and prison inmates
through entrepreneurial passion, education and mentoring. The program
engages the nation's top business and academic talent to
constructively redirect inmates' energies by equipping them with
values-based entrepreneurial training - enabling them to productively
re-enter society. The thesis behind this organization is that many
inmates are proven entrepreneurs, and that their entrepreneurial
endeavors landed them in prison. In three years since inception, the
program has a CAGR of over 150%, and has generated numerous
entrepreneurial success stories, having assisted participants in
starting over 50 businesses. The program has produced the nation's
leading results in the prison rehabilitation industry, including
dramatically reducing return-to-prison rates - participant
return-to-prison rates are less than 10%, compared to over 50% for the
national average. The program has recruited 1,000+ senior level
executives and venture capital/private equity professionals, who serve
as inmates' mentors and business plan judges. Additionally, the
program has established affiliations with 24 top-tier MBA programs,
including Harvard and Stanford, whose 450+ students serve as weekly
advisors for the inmates' business plans. The program's innovative
work has won several awards, and has received coverage on NBC Nightly
News and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street
Journal and Entrepreneur Magazine. Read More...

French Speaking Summer Internship
Contact Ray Victurine to apply rvicturine@wcs.org

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), a not for Profit organization based at the Bronx Zoo in New York city, is recruiting a short term business intern/consultant to help develop a business plan for the Virunga National Park. Virunga Park is Africa’s oldest and one of it’s most biodiverse parks, established in 1925, but to date it has never had a management plan. Read More...

I read a really interesting article recently about the rise in design as a desirable career path. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Businesswoman from City Journal does a really good job explaining that design has become much broader than just functionality and aesthetics of tangible objects and has developed as a way to solve problems.

There does seem to be a growing excitement to be a designer or work for a design firm and this article articulates that surge quite well.

Two Acumen fellows have recently posted short videos from Pakistan. Both have really hopeful messages about people and really remind us to see the good in things.

An interview with Jawad Aslam about his experiences with low-cost housing in Lahore.

Joel Montgomery's photo montage - Faces of Pakistan.

The IDEO team spent two days last week with Naandi Foundation designing appropriate water vessels for use at the community treatment plants. The current vessels are 20 liter plastic containers which are well-designed for men to carry on bicycles or motorcycles or for stacking in the back of a delivery truck. Unfortunately, these containers are generally too heavy for women to carry and are not designed to be held on the hip or the head, which are the preferred modes for women.

During our time with Naandi Foundation, we spent time with the team to try to understand the concerns with the existing vessels (designed like gasoline cans). After a quick brainstorm, we designed several concepts which we brought to the field for user feedback. While the sketches were certainly a useful way to explain concepts, it wasn’t until we returned to the office and began to prototype 3D concepts that we fully understood what we were working with.

One of the first things we did when we began prototyping was to fill a 12 liter and 20 liter container with water to get a better sense of the weight. The IDEO, Acumen, and Naandi team members then tried lifting and carrying each of the containers - laughing as the water sloshed onto our clothes and onto the floor. By feeling the weight of the vessels filled with water, we were able to design more appropriate solutions to carry water and by building 3D prototypes and observing them in use, we were able to make modifications to the design to make them more user-friendly and comfortable. The next step is to design slightly higher resolution prototypes and seek more diverse and extensive customer feedback on them.

Read more about the Ripple Effect project.

I am currently in India for the Ripple Effect project. Tiffany, Adam, and I spent the last three days with WaterHealth in Hyderabad and Krishna district, developing a communications strategy for them to increase their customer base. We went in to the engagement thinking we were going to design 2-D marketing materials (posters, banners, handouts) and ended up presenting six 3-D concepts.

Our time with WHI and our day in the field showed us that India is overwhelmed by advertising, even in the rural areas. Posters and banners are generally ignored and are not seen as trusted sources of information. People are curious to get into the details of a product – how does it work? why is it better for me than the competitor’s product? We learned that providing people with information about the water treatment process and the differences between the WaterHealth water and the well water was extremely important. Whereas exaggerated scare campaigns were ineffective and caused people to mistrust the information they received, information, facts, and proof were valued and appreciated.

We realized that developing experiences for WHI to engage with the community was much more effective than pushing information in a static format out to them. We looked at engaging the delivery people and trusted sources (teachers, doctors, religious and political leaders) to share information with people and presented other events-based approaches to engaging with potential consumers.

The Ripple Effect project (done in conjunction with Acumen Fund) is centered around market-based approaches to water storage and delivery and the workshop this week was no different. While many of the organizations that participated in the workshop are social enterprises and do charge for their services, several of those who attended have traditionally relied on a more charitable model. Going into the workshop and during the first day, this divide made us a bit nervous. Would the insights and concepts apply to the more traditional NGOs? Would they dismiss the market-based approaches as capitalistic and unpure?

To our pleasant surprise, we actually saw that a number of these organizations actually began to explore the possibility of moving towards market based approaches for water delivery and storage by the end of the workshop. Over the three days, they looked around the room and began to understand how their counterparts had figured out ways to charge for their services and develop more sustainable models. They saw that people are willing to pay for the convenience and reliability of water and that with new technologies, payment could be easily facilitated.

We saw that in the pitches on Day 3, several organizations that had never attempted to collect payment for services were interested in prototyping payment mechanisms. Two organizations recognized that while they would not seek to maximize profits, they could design opportunities for entrepreneurs to deliver water and thus could both increase access to drinking water and provide livelihood opportunities.

By the end of the workshop, my opinions on market-based approaches as sustainable and scalable solutions was reinforced and I’m excited to see how the prototypes work for these organizations and how they might affect their organizational philosophy and their other offerings.

To read more about the project, check out the blog
Username: ripple
Password: effect

Last stop on the trip to India was Pune, a city of 3 million which lies 3 hours to the east of Bombay. Pune is sometimes called the design capital of India. We went to attend the India Design Festival, co-hosted by the National Institute of Design (NID) and the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII). Sandy and I delivered a workshop designed for small and medium enterprises about design for B2B companies in an economic downturn. I also spoke on a panel about the Growth of Design and how to manage innovation in a recession.

The conference pulled together a nice mix of speakers from India, Europe, and the U.S., a variety of disciplines including communication design, industrial design, business design, systems design, and architecture. The event was not as well-attended as I had hoped – at any given time, there were about 150 people in attendance. As is frequently the case at these types of events, the students were the most inspiring with their thought-provoking questions and their complex understanding about the role of design and how it might look in the future.

A few things that I heard at the conference that really stood out to me.

Sustainability was a clear theme. There was lots of talk about both green design and considerations about materiality and shipping costs. Based on what we hear about India’s willingness to play its part in terms of global warming, it was heartening to hear the design industry talk about the importance of the environment.

Base of the pyramid markets are an exciting place to work. A number of panelists spoke about the opportunities in BOP markets and the role design can play in making products and services that are affordable and appropriate. Indian designers user the term “inclusive design” and this commitment to designing for rural communities and using design to benefit people’s lives is certainly part of their history.

Systems design is hot. India has quickly moved beyond product design and is talking about designing systems and platforms. Students are interested in tacking complex design challenges related to poverty, sustainability, and complicated business systems. They recognize the importance of integrating business design into the work they do and see design, not only as a way of making things more functional or beautiful, but as a way of solving problems. They use “design thinking” frequently and use is correctly.

Designers are optimistic, or believe that they should be. During the conference, there was lots of talk about the recession and how to encourage innovation during an economic downturn. The clear message that everyone gave was that we must continue to innovate in a downturn if we want to grow. As designers, we see infinite possibilities in the world, and the same is true today. We must innovate in a strategic way, but we cannot stop designing.

Overall, I was impressed with the caliber of people I met and the thinking that’s happening within the Indian design industry. I look forward to participating in these conversations and see it all develop.

After Hyderabad, Sandy and I flew to Bhopal, in central India, where we were picked up and driven 3 1/2 hours to Kesla, where Pradan has a large campus. We were introduced to Pradan several months ago, and met them in person in Delhi during our last visit to India. Pradan has a long history of rural development in India and is a great example of an organization that has scaled. It was a pioneer in microfinance and Self Help Groups and has a focus on empowerment and livelihoods for the true base of the pyramid.

Pradan has an extraordinarily strong organizational culture. At the village level, they hire recent university or graduate school graduates as “Executives” who train local Community Resource People to advise and train families in the village. Pradan employees are called Pradanites and it’s clear that it is not unlikely for people to stay with the organization for their entire careers.

One thing I found very interesting about Pradan was their strong believe in their theory of change. In development, having a theory of change is critical. Organizations and individuals have a belief about where the biggest return on investment will come. For Nike Foundation, it’s empowerment of adolescent girls, for PATH, it’s investing in low-cost health technologies. For Kickstart and IDE, it’s about raising income levels for smallholder farmers. And, for Pradan, it’s about building self-esteem for poor rural women.

With Pradan, this empowerment happens with the formation of self help groups (SHGs) which teach the women how to work together, how to discuss and solve problems, and how to manage finances. Pradan is a patient organization and recognizes that change takes time. After several years in an SHG, women and their husbands begin to receive training on livelihood opportunities based on their interests and skills. Some will learn how to grow specialty mushrooms, others will raise silkworms. Once women are empowered, have a higher and steady income, and have access to credit and savings, they can then focus on issues related to healthcare and education for their families. They are also coached by Pradan about how to speak out to government officials and policymakers and how to use the government to make positive changes in their communities.

Pradan’s philosophy, approach, and methodology are tested and sensible. They are a deeply empathic organization and truly understand their clients. They continuously iterate their programs and over time have transferred more and more of their role to the local communities. And while they take a long-term view on development, they are one of the few organizations I’ve seen that is truly working themselves out of a job through their scale and effectiveness in the communities where they’re working.

I returned to Hyderabad for 5 days with my colleague, Sandy, to conduct the second of two workshops with VisionSpring. The design challenge we were working with VisionSpring to tackle was how to provide comprehensive eye care to children and their families. On this project, our role is not to do the design, but to coach the VIsionSpring team through the Human Centered Design process.

We spend a day listening to the stories the VisionSpring team heard during their interviews and observations and synthesizing them to get to the insights, opportunities, and principles for design. We then moved on to brainstorming and prototyping solutions and brought the prototypes out to the field on day 3 to test them with children and teachers.

With two insights, “kids are afraid to reveal their imperfections” and “kids often do not know how to identify when they have a problem” and two principles for design “build on social relationships and connectivity” and “make kids feel good about themselves”, one concept we came up with and prototyped was eye screenings done by kids. In the field, we tested our intuition that kids would enjoy screening each other’s eyes, especially if we designed the process to be fun, kid-centered, and inclusive.

Prototyping is such a valuable activity because it forces you to challenge your assumptions. We thought kids might respond better to an eye chart designed for them – one with animals or movie stars. In fact, they preferred the standard tumbling Es because it was less open to interpretation and by playing eye doctor with each other, they were able to pretend to be adults. The kids took the screening process very seriously (in contrast to when we prototyped animal eye charts and the kids all giggled and told each other the answers) and even started pretending to be a doctor by delivering the results to the other children. With a bit of coaching, kids said “You passed the exam. Remember to eat your vegetables to keep your eyes healthy.”

I remember that my favorite game as a kid was to play school, house, or doctor and pretend to be grown-up. It’s no surprise that this was fun to the kids in Mahbubnagar, India. But we started off thinking that kids would want to be surrounded by kid things and were able to get to a simple, yet extremely effective method for engaging children in their eye care through the design process. Most exciting was that by the end of the workshop, the VisionSpring team began to see children as ambassadors for eye care and as the ones who could encourage their parents to take the family to the community eye camp and buy glasses when needed.