Done as
Area of focus
Advisors
Master's thesis
Inclusive Design
Frugal Innovation
Foresight
Dr. Alia Weston
Dr. David Pereyra
Research question: How might social enterprises in Ontario integrate Inclusive Design with Frugal Innovation to maximize economic and social value?
The problem.
Goods are usually designed for people with little to no discernible difference in ability who also tend to have little to no discernible difference when it comes to their needs.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, it makes economic sense. “Mainstream” people, whether that be seen through the lens of ability, age, race, gender, or another identifier tend to benefit not just because of pure population size but also wealth. These populations have money to spend. Organizations, both large and small, capitalize on that. On the other hand, marginal populations often have less wealth, which is troublesome because if they can’t purchase much, then organizations hardly cater to these populations. When they do, it’s expensive, and the marginal populations are ultimately paying more for less.
And that continues. It’s a vicious cycle. These populations are stuck at zero. It is difficult to find your place in a world that is not designed for you. This is the 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle at play, which is arguably seen in many areas of everyday life. Eighty percent of software problems can be fixed by focusing on 20% of the bugs. In exercise, it’s said that 80% of progress comes from 20% of exercises. And in business, 80% of sales comes from 20% of clients. What then happens to the other 80% of people?
Introducing concepts.
Inclusive Design poses an answer. The discipline take all forms of human difference into account when innovating, whether that be ability, age, gender, race, or another identifier, but it’s also business and market-oriented, which contrasts its American and European cousins, Universal Design and Design-For-All. It aims to counter design exclusion, which is to say, designing for those who are not “mainstream” people. An exploding star is an appropriate analogy. The central cluster represents mainstream needs. The further away from the center, the more extreme and marginal people's needs become.
To design for these marginal needs would be expensive with no assurance that organizations would recoup their investment. And sure, there’s financial investment, which is to say “how do we make this cheaper so more people can buy it?” This is a valid concern. There is also social investment, which is to say “what can we offer that benefits people’s livelihoods?” Inclusive Design attempts to deliver on both fronts.
That’s why Frugal Innovation is also an attractive proposition. Frugal Innovation is the ability doing more with less. In Radjou and Prabhu’s 2014 book Frugal Innovation, they dedicate an entire paragraph to arguing that Inclusive Design could be used to help foster an organization’s Frugal culture. They note that the two concepts have at least one glaring similarity: an affinity for simplicity. I would add one more similarity that they did not make explicit: designing with and for the margins.
The social enterprise embodies the economic and social dichotomy. It is defined as “a business venture owned or operated by a non-profit organization that sells goods or provides services in the market for the purpose of creating a blended return on investment, both financial and social/environmental/cultural”. It uses market logic to serve some marginal need and/or population. A social enterprise can indeed manifest through any type of organization, whether it be for-profit, non-profit, or charity.
Methodology.
The research methodology was qualitative and within the interpretivist paradigm. I used two research methods: interviews and General Morphological Analysis combined with a foresight component. There was a need to understand the context in which participants and the subject matter existed, especially considering that I was not an expert in the subject matter. Hence, the research was exploratory rather than descriptive or explanatory.
I chose interviews for the purpose of understanding participants’ subjective experience and familiarity with the subject matter. I was gathering data about their thoughts, feelings, goals, and perceptions. I also chose interviews not just because it’s a common method used in certain areas of social life, like applying to a job, but because it’s been used in this MRP’s subject matter: Inclusive Design, Frugal Innovation, and social enterprises.
I also chose interviews as the first method because I planned on using the next method to build upon the data gathered in the interviews. The GMA workshop was to offer a more conclusive answer to the how question; how do these concepts work or not work together? GMA has been used in numerous, disparate fields. While there is no literature I found of its application to the subject matter at hand, I was intrigued by its all-encompassing nature, including its application to the soft sciences. True to the definition of morphology, the workshop was to examine how a Frugal and Inclusively Designed “Thing”, or Gestalt could be. Yet, I needed a topic for GMA, a vision for which GMA could highlight the process and “audit trail” of getting there. That’s why I added an experiential futures component by using The Thing From The Future game. The future Thing acted as a base in which participants inflected Frugal Innovation and Inclusive Design ideas and principles. I felt like the foresight component complemented the workshop because of its application to Inclusive Design and social enterprise, the former being catalyzed by foresight through art exhibitions in the 1980s.
Foresight.
The Thing from the Future was designed by Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson. Stuart Candy was a professor in the SFI program. The game acted as an introduction to foresight; to get people thinking like futurists. The game is very simple. There are 4 types of cards:
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The first is the Arc: this outlines when and what type of future the object exists in. In this case, it’s a future of growth 30 years from now in 2048. Grow can be interpreted in any way: population growth, economic growth, environmental growth.
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The second is the Terrain: this further specifies the context - in what domain might this future object be found?
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The third is the Object: Quite simply, this is the thing from the future.
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The last card is the Mood card: This tells us how either people should feel about this object.
I had workshop participants go through exact exercise almost as an icebreaker and for people to start talking to each other. It also served as the topic for GMA, which I will explain in a bit.
General Morphological Analysis.
These objects were then put through the General Morphological Analysis (GMA). This image here is an example of of how it looks and functions. You make a grid system for a particular topic - in our case it was the Thing from the Future, in this case it’s writing a story. You then choose certain parameters that the topic must abide by. So we see the setting, main character, bad guy, and big event. Then you come up with ideas for each individual parameter as you can see here. Then you pick and choose which combinations work best. The great thing about this exercise is that the nature of GMA allows you to create multiple scenarios fairly quickly. I wanted to have a vision, provided by foresight, that answered the what, and the GMA was to answer the how.
Findings.
Funding
Funding was paramount to success. Many participants felt like Canada had a complex funding and regulatory system for disability, full of different silos that hardly communicate with each other. It’s difficult to navigate and even more so for newcomers or immigrants to Canada who may not have the patience, perseverance, or wherewithal to do so. Regarding caregivers securing funding for care, it seemed like the funds were stretched too thin that the government would guilt caregivers into giving up some funding so it could go to other families. When it came to funding innovation, the difficulty in securing funding was attributed to the government’s need to see a economic ROI. These organizations had to actively find new customer segments to find a broader applicability for their innovation in an attempt to secure more funding.
Social Impact
Many participants were pursuing economic and social goals. They were even developing an economic/social evaluation framework to better understand how it’d be a viable option for their organizations. Yet, many participants felt like these goals were often in competition with each other. Similarly, workshop groups came up with Things that had a social impact aspect to it, particularly, aspects of sustainability. There seemed to be an understanding of the rise of social business; that profit is no longer the sole end, but rather doing good, as well. This, of course, is the definition of a social enterprise. Yet, the definition was not uniform across participants, which is in line with the literature. Some were even reluctant to call their organizations a social enterprise given the ambiguity surrounding the definition of such and its general nascence. A barrier to organizations embracing social impact, especially regarding people with disabilities, is the stigma about these marginal groups. Participants felt like this stigma should be addressed if organizations wanted to prioritize social impact.
While businesses are becoming more socially-minded, perhaps trying to capitalize on a Corporate Social Opportunity, it was clear that the economic vs. social dichotomy was still not completely cohesive. Hence why participants were developing an evaluation framework. But even that was still in its infancy. It would have been difficult to assess its utility. They did not say what the development process entailed.
Disability
The value of designing for disability, and more generally, anyone with marginal needs, cannot be understated. Much like the curb cut effect, participants thought that designing for disability was to design for everyone. This relates back to funding again because some participants were actively searching for new customer segments as a way to “subsidize” or justify the innovation’s main user: children with little to no ability to communicate their needs due to a variety of disabilities. Thus, participants expressed lead user sentiments, which is also seen in the literature.
All icons are from the Noun Project under a Creative Commons license. The rightful authors of each respective symbols are as follows:
Funding: OCHA Visual Information Unit, US
Social Impact: Stephen Borengasser
Disability: Hare Krishna
