Design

By design, I mean not just the elements involved in designing impact creation or evaluation. Not just designing a project like in choosing when to start, who to start with, what eqipment you need. This is the practical side of design - designing events, designing activities, designing ... like planning.

But by design I also mean calling on knowledge from the field of design. Some have argued that "designerly" knowledge is different to managing, different to planning. Its not just making a list of things to do, not just trying to be efficient, effective, not just trying to use money and time carefully, avoiding wasted time and money. But design also means, stnading back, reflecting, looking at the people you intend to impact, not as targets, but as equals, as partners in the success or not of your project. In this partnership, we need participation, empathy, engagement, equality, committment, passion, creativity, and passion, just as much as we need efficiency or good money management.

This side of Design can be useful in many ways. It makes us focus on organic change, using failure as a postivie energy, a re-focus on learning and partnership. If a designerly approach is taken, I would argue that getting it wrong before we get it right is essential - designing for long term impact critically involves prototyping and engagement, cooperative design, explicit attention to "services" or service design, and to design thinking.

Words and phrases used in design these days include co-design, engagement, service design, participatory design, collaboration, empathy, cretivity, innovtion.

It is this side of design that I want to focus on in this blog, to add to the management we know well. I would argue that from a designerly perspective, linear control and measurement of impact is dangerously naive in many (not all) development arenas. In fact, the notion of a project itself - with its KPIs, short termism, bounded scope and engagement, may be as much of a problem as of a route to success.

Combining design with an appropriate dose of management, and an understanding of complex evolving practice and change, may be a better way to conceive of impact - both its creation and its evaluation. Many practices are involved, many active agents, who will change and adjust for social and poltical reasons throughout and after a "project". Mapping these practices, and involving a designerly perspective is no magic bullet, but it does expand on the limitations of linear management, efficiency and monocultural logic.

Many people are in play in impact and evaluation - to exclude them is to avoid discussing their impact.