Designing Good

I have always enjoyed doing “good”. Growing up I helped at various organizations and groups in my town, feeding the hungry, visiting the lonely, mentoring children and many other things. I strongly believe that I want to do good the rest of my life, and do good with my career.

Recently I have been given the assignment to design any service I want to (more or less). It sounded like a dream assignment, whatever I wanted to do, whatever cause I cared about, I could spend six weeks developing a project around it. This assignment has been nearly impossible to start, and has caused me to ask myself many more questions about what I want to do with my life.

It always seemed so obvious, I want to do good. Good, it’s such a broad statement, how hard can it be to design good? When I began to think of a service to do good, I instantly realized, it is not easy, at all. Where do I start? What do I care about? What services really do good?

The first thing I realized was that designing good is a small field. There are only a handful of designers who are designing good, and even more than that, how do you know if it actually worked? It seems there is more information about projects that were meant to do good and failed than projects that actually worked. There is no way to measure success in the field of designing good, no way to know for sure if the people that were meant to be helped were actually helped in the long run.

All of my projects so far have started with a problem given by a teacher, which we than have to come up with a solution in a few days. It is a much, much different process to identify the problem ourselves. It requires a great deal of research and creative interpretation of that research before a meaningful problem can even be identified.

The issues I care about are world issues, issues with extreme poverty, no access to clean water, and extreme lack of healthcare, are huge issues that I would love to try to make better. But when I actually tried to address one of these issues I realized that I have absolutely nowhere to start. I know nothing about what is like to be in extreme poverty. I know nothing about not having access to clean water.

Even less extreme issues like high school students dropping out of high schools, I have no idea what that’s like. I could sit in my RISD studio at come up with as many fantastical ideas about how if you put better lighting in high schools, or come up with an after school program to encourage leadership, at the end of the day, it’s all worthless because I simply have no idea what it is truly like.

Recently this has been my biggest realization/issue. To even begin to solve a problem, you need to have a true understanding. Truly understand who you are designing for, what problems they identify as problems, and what they are going to be willing to accept into their lives. If you don’t start a project with an understanding, before you even identify a problem, you are going to most likely end up with a failed project.