Design Decisions Guide

Setting Expectations

01

An important first step in integrating design expertise into your work includes understanding the expectations that you and your audience have in doing so. This step will help you surface motivations driving your interest in design and raise potentially unexplored assumptions about what you hope to achieve. Articulating these expectations upfront will help to ensure that design is best set up to meet them. Design can play different roles in different types of investments, and designers can bring very varied skill sets to the work. The most suitable way for integrating design expertise into your investment will likely be influenced by your reasons for seeking out design in the first place. There are some barriers to effective interventions in global health that some design practices have been documented as useful for navigating. Below are some considerations to help you explore why you are seeking out design expertise.

Question
01

What is the need you are trying to address by integrating design into your work?

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Reframe the problem from a human-centered perspective

Sometimes I find that we jump to solutions without questioning the fundamentals... then complain about the poor uptake later.

Program officer

Minimize the risk of going too far with a solution that isn't truly responsive

I find that some ideas are piloted at too large a scale, incurring considerable costs, then we find out it doesn’t work, so we go back to the drawing board.

Program officer

Increase buy-in and participation

Sometimes I find that there is a lack of joined-up thinking between the analysis of problems, creation of solutions and implementation.

Program officer

Enable a seamless innovation process

Sometimes I find that we focus too much on averages and not enough on the margins.

Program officer

Enabling a focus on equity

Sometimes I find that beneficiaries are not part of the decision-making process to ensure the solution take-up later.

Program officer

Strengthen collaboration

Sometimes I find that different teams tend to work in silos and struggle to collaborate well together.

Program officer