Pop!Tech - Design for Social Innovation

I'm reflecting on the first session from Poptech, and what promises to be the most intimate - a group panel discussion with William Drenttel, Sheila Kennedy, Kevin McSpadden, John Bielenberg, and Emily Pilloton, and an audience of fewer than thirty. The discussion wound its way around a loose theme of Designing for Social Innovation, but what stood out for me are the following main points:

1. There's a pent-up demand among "the youth" for meaningful and humanitarian work. Emily Pilloton explained that she started Project H because she was "starting to feel disenfranchised", while John Bielenberg described that "young people are anxious about the future... there's a seductiveness in youth about engaging in this type of work." That completely meshes with my experiences; I get an email once or twice a month from my four-hundred alumni that generally runs as follows:

"I totally love design. I love everything about my process, and the creativity, and the entire engagement. And I hate my job. I hate what I'm making, and I hate that I'm making it for a giant, faceless corporation. How can I do design, but not work for a giant company or a consultancy? How can I make a difference?"

I'm in the process of starting the Austin Center for Design as a way of addressing this; other initiatives, like Bielenberg's own Project M, have latched onto similar waves of youth energy. It makes concrete that business as usual – the house, the car, and the corporate ladder – is not attractive to future generations, and this is going to have an impact on top-tier talent resourcing for jobs at the major consultancies and corporations moving forward.

2. The brave new world of social innovation is about shifting behavior. This has always been the focus of interaction designers, and is now a goal of most professional designers when considering strategic facilitation in large organizations and holistic organizational change. All speakers on the panel, and a number of audience participants, referenced a shift away from aesthetics, although Sheila Kennedy described this shift in a unique way. She described that perhaps designers need to find a way to utilize a new aesthetic in order to drive alluring change. That new aesthetic might be presented as a trick: to convince people to change their behavior, by providing them something more visceral and in a traditional package that they understand.

I don't agree. I think it's important that we capture and leverage the passion and enthusiasm for massive behavioral change that is present in the United States for - as a panel attendee described - the first time since Vietnam. We can, in an honest, ethical, appropriate and most importantly, rigorous way, change the behavior of our country. Some people are already doing it; the five panelist certainly are. "Designer as behavioral catalyst" has the potential to be lucrative, but most importantly, this model and perspective will help us overcome issues of poverty, sustainability, education equality, and access to health care. The profit is incidental, and in fact, it might be irrelevant.

This is design out of the context and confines of business.

I hope the rest of the conference starts talking tactics.

Jon Kolko