Kathryn Krummeck, Gray Garmon and Munir Ahmad
How might we leverage a system of tools to help development professionals customise and operationalise ethical, impact-oriented human-centred design work?
The Accelerate Impact team, working closely with an Aga Khan Foundation initiative called Local Impact, has partnered with USAID to develop a robust and user-friendly innovation toolkit consisting of a set of human-centred design (HCD) guidebooks and additional tools to support teams to move through the HCD process.
This interactive session spans the pre-work of scoping and resourcing the project—to the engagement of the community in identifying problems and creating solutions—all the way to planning for implementation and scale, pitching the idea to potential partners and funders and assessing the impact of the solutions over time. The resulting resources are a systematic and cohesive set of tools and a process for customising those tools to suit the needs of a particular project. We hope this encourages more social sector folks to leverage HCD to engage the community in ethical ways while developing feasible, viable and desirable (innovative) solutions. As we prepare to launch these resources—free and open source to the global social impact community (and beyond!)—we humbly ask for this community’s engagement and critical feedback to help us to refine these tools and make them the most rigorous, thoughtful and user-friendly as they can be.
KEYWORDS: human-centred design, design thinking, social impact, innovation, capacity building, design education, tools, toolkit, participatory design, community-based design
