The missing piece - how designers can transform economic development
Economic development is a critical discipline to secure the prosperity of communities. The importance of it is increasingly becoming more understood in Australia at local, state and federal government as well as with industry. The field is diverse, ranging from designing and implementing policies and programs focused on increasing local employment, investment and productivity growth through to providing business support and concierge services.
To maximise the impact of our economic development programing and activities, it’s critical to design them well upfront with the audience as the central focus. What we know through our work is that in order for economics and economic development to be innovative and for initiatives to stick, they need to have a high level of design. A lack of skill in design tends to be where these initiatives fail to either launch correctly or their value realised because they have not fully solved the problem.
At Sparrowly Group, we make design thinking a common thread through our work and we strongly value lateral thinking and diverse perspectives. I’m a living example of this, having a background in physics, transdisciplinary innovation and design. I have brought those skills to complement my professional experience in economics, evaluation and program design.
Last year, I participated in the Evaluation Lab delivered by the Design and Evaluation Special Interest Group (a part of the Australian Evaluation Society). I worked in a diverse team where one of my teammates worked at the Federal Government, and another worked in Germany for Doctors Without Borders. We had to collaborate and work through a design process to address a specific issue relating to our evaluation work, namely, evaluating intangible aspects of projects such as stakeholder relationships and collaboration.
What I most love about design is that the way of thinking and doing from the discipline is so transferable to almost any complex problems that we face. This is what got me thinking about economic development practitioners who are often responsible for unpacking complex problems in their local economies and designing solutions to address them.
What is design thinking?
I like Tim Brown’s definition. “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
How do you bring design thinking into economics and economic development?
A good place to start is the double diamond.
Double Diamond
The double diamond is a visual representation of the design process which I love. It’s broadly split into four parts:
Discover - The first divergent part of the first diamond, discovery is all about learning and researching as much as you can about your problem. Think about desktop research, interviews and even research related problems and fields. Don’t be scared to research as far and wide as you like, there’s no pressure to know everything or to clearly articulate your problem statement just yet. It’s all about…discovery.
Define - In the define phase, we want to start converging. This means narrowing down and getting absolutely clear on what our problem is. Drawing from our knowledge from the previous phase, we need to hone in on the specific problem we want to address. During this phase, we also want to uncover the deeper human needs behind some of our customer’s (users) specific pain points. For example, while on the surface someone may be upset that they can’t use a specific app or attend a certain event, it may be indicative of a deeper need to be connected to like-minded people. At the end of the phase, we want to be able to articulate our problem statement in one or two sentences and acknowledge our user’s pain points and deeper human needs.
Develop - In the develop phase, the fun of brainstorming begins. We need to switch back to divergent thinking and think of all the possible ways we could address the problem statement that we created in the define phase. This is where we need to suspend judgement and think of as many ideas as we can, including the crazy and whacky ideas. The crazy and the whacky ideas are so very important in this process as it’s often those ideas that lead to influencing or informing the solution that lands correctly!
Deliver - Switching back to convergent thinking, we now need to cull our crazy long lists of potential solutions. We can do this by evaluating how effective, feasible or viable each idea is. By the end of this process, we’ll be left with the best one or two ideas to test and prototype.
While this sounds straight forward, taking a design approach means leaving no stone unturned, ensuring a robust criteria is set to keep the focus and to avoid group think.
Each time I approach a problem to solve I keep these perspectives from Tom Peterson front of my mind. “The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.”
If you have an economic development problem you need to solve and need some help on how to get this started, reach out and let’s throw some ideas around to help you get started.
