Name: Design for Good
Uploaded: 2025-12-03
Duration: 16 min 37 s
Description: A progress report from one of the founders of the world’s largest network of designers delivering social, environmental products and programs that advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

A progress report from one of the founders of the world’s largest network of designers delivering social, environmental products and programs that advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Design for Good

Conferences

Design for Good was established in 2022. It's an extraordinary nonprofit alliance of leading designers and organizations dedicated to creating products and services that improve human life and address global challenges set out by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Here to give us a progress report. On design for good impact to date and the projects they've got in motion, their goals for the future, is co-founder and chair Ben Shepherd, and I want to give a special thanks to Ben because he's been a stalwart supporter of Brainstorm design over the years, helped us with lots of ideas and put us in touch with a great community of wonderful and talented designers. So Ben, take it away. Right, here we go team, back from the shortest ever coffee break, we're going to go straight into it. I'm going to take you back to 2015. In 2015, the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and their hope, their aspiration was that by 2030 we would largely have addressed those goals. Well, we're now 10 years later. We've only got 5 years left to go, and it feels like a relatively few time to ask ourselves the question, how are we doing? Spoiler alert, his answer is not very well. Let's have a look though at the exact data. So out of those 17 goals, 6 are in the most severe category of being going backwards. 11 are in the 2nd most severe category and at best stagnating. And none is marked as being on track. For those of you, I see a few of you have your camera phones out. If you want a particularly depressing photo, this is the one to take team. This is the one. If you want orange and red, this is, this is as good as it gets, and there is a reason why I'm bringing this up at a design conference. It would be fair to say we're designers, the design industry only makes up 1% of the total workforce. Surely this is a problem for government, for policies to solve, but if you look at the 231 KPIs that sit behind this, more than a third are directly impacted by the products, the buildings, the services that we in this room design. Indeed, I would argue that our impact as an industry is probably only second to that of government policy. So we have to ask ourselves the question, what can we do about it? What can we do? A group of organizations came together just as Clay mentioned a few years ago to ask exactly that question and to say with a sense of humility, can we try new ways of working, new approaches, new experiments to see whether particularly the corporate and private sectors can make a measurable and lasting impact on the sustainable development goals. And as of today, that alliance now comprises over 2000 designers, engineers, and researchers across 30 countries working on over 30 projects around the world. And the way that it works is that those designers give their time for free. They gave a minimum of 5 days per year. Most give far, far more than that. We put them into teams of 5 to 10. We partner them with charities, and they work together all the way from early concept through to execution and implementation to make sure that this actually leads to real world impact. Whilst it's still early days, we have found a set of guiding principles which is proving useful to make sure that the work we do is impactful. I'm going to share 5 of them with you. All of these will be in the category of what I would call diet and exercise. These are things that we know we should do, but often we don't, and each of these is something that we've seen from our own work has to be done if design companies and design agencies and design leaders are going to have real world impact. The first, perhaps slightly counterintuitively, is that we never start with design. We always start with the development organizations being the ones who set the briefs. We then allow the designers to refine and iterate the brief, but we never start with the designers. They're there to design with, not to design for, as we heard from Monica only yesterday. The second one is that we then build cross-functional and cross company teams. We even have teams with direct competitors like Nestle and General Mills and Pepsi working together for some of these particularly difficult systemic problems, you have to have these different companies working in the same team. The third one is on training. We invest a huge amount in training with the Royal College of Art. Everyone who goes through our program is given a formal academic qualification at the end of a year of working together, and the reason we put so much money and time into training. It's not only many of us weren't taught on how to design for vulnerable communities or ecosystems, but because when they then finish their projects, they go back into some of the largest companies on Earth, bringing those skills on how to design for sustainability into products and services that reach hundreds of millions of people. The 4th 1 is on law. Now I have to be careful here. I'm married to a lawyer, so I can't be too rude about lawyers, but on this particular topic, I do think that sometimes designers think of law and IP in particular as an afterthought. In the social impact space that does not work. You have to at the outset decide that the IP is going to be open source, worldwide, irrevocable, so that when you give it to a community they can actually use it and ideally make a profit. And then finally a zealous focus on implementation and measurement. Again, if I were to point the finger at us as the design industry, many of us in this room, myself included, have at some point in our careers led a hackathon or other activity which, whilst well intentioned, didn't lead to real world impact and therefore it's important that if we're going to do things we commit to measuring an execution, not just the fun bit at the beginning. Whilst it's still early days, we are starting to see early blossoms of impact coming from these approaches, and on the screen now you'll see examples of some of the impact numbers of the projects that we've been working on together. We don't have time to cover all of these today, but what we are going to do is cover 5 to give you a taste of the work we're doing and hopefully inspire your own social innovation efforts as well. The first one we're going to touch on is wealth. Now most of us in this room will take for granted access to clean water, but over half the world this year has faced some sort of water scarcity issue. And therefore we were lucky to partner with a charity called Biome in India to create the Million Wells app. It's now available on Android and iOS and it allows people in Bengaluru in India to access clean water and find where they can drink water which is safe for them and their families around where they live. It's a data source that didn't used to exist at all. There are now, since it launched a couple of months ago, already 1400 regular users using it to access safe water, and it's particularly exciting to see what biome the charity has planned for it. They're going to take this work, not only scale it to other cities, but also start using AI on the data set to work out how they can understand the water levels and give people the access that they need. We're going to jump onto another topic now, which is menstruation. Another depressing fact to share with you on this particular afternoon is that there are still large parts of the world where young women are missing as much a month of their school every single year because of stigma they have whilst they're on their periods. We partnered with a charity called Best Foot Forward Fund in Tanzania. And together with them we decided not to take Western trading materials and push them on to Tanzania, but instead we developed with the local communities personas, messages that were culturally sensitive to them. We took them to schools across the country. We trained young men and young women together on period positivity. And over the course of the pilot we've already been able to reach over 10,000 students. There are another thousands and thousands planned for next year, and this is where the IP gets interesting as we were working with the Foot Forward fund as we were hearing from them about their experiences, we got a call from neighboring Uganda and a charity who said, Can we take those materials and take them to Uganda? And because of our IP position, the answer was an emphatic yes. They could take those materials and start to train up another 2000 young people in Uganda. Our hope is within by 2030, hundreds of thousands will be reached across large parts of Africa. This is an exciting one to do an update on for those of you who are veterans of the Fortune brainstorm design, you will remember this project. It's a Cairns Lis nominated project, and the reason it exists is that today 2 billion. People still lack access to basic hand washing, so we partnered with the Wash Foundation to create a product that was aimed at young children who maybe don't have the ability to wash their hands at home but who we could teach to wash their hands in schools. And what we created together with the Wash Foundation was a very simple product. This is a product in the form of a flip book with no written words, so it transcends language which teaches young children on how to wash their hands in a fun and engaging way, something again that many of us in this room take for granted because we weren't brought up in these environments. Well, we're in a brilliant position, but since we talked about the idea last time, it's become real. We've already taken it to 2500 children. There are many more planned, and this is where it gets even more exciting. I can feel it's electric, isn't it? I won't let me stand by the edge of the stage to make it more exciting. The impact numbers are coming in. The Wash Foundation did a study. They looked at the children who used to be in these schools, fewer than 2 out of 5 used to be washing their hands. They gave them the flip book. They came back 6 months later to see did it make a lasting change, and now 90% of the children were washing their hands with this one single intervention, extraordinary work. The boo team is ever busy. They're now coming up with an app so that they can teach teachers on how to teach on this topic as well. And for those of you in the room who represent sustainability or work with your organizations on contributions, this is exactly the type of area where funding is needed. Another quarter of a million dollars would allow us to reach 600,000 children over the next couple of years, and for that group it would reduce the child mortality risk by as much as 50%. So this is one of the privileges of being at Fortune. I get to speak to other multinationals, other corporates. If you're in a position to help the Wash Foundation, please, please give. They're an extraordinary organization, and you can directly measure the number of children's lives saved through your charitable contributions. Now before we touched on the topic of wells, and here's another one on wells and pumps, but with a slightly different twist. So as before this was aimed at end users, this by contrast is a charity called Water Starters, and they're trying to help engineers, maintenance people to create a new job which is to fix the pumps, particularly here in Kenya where there are issues with access to water. And what this extraordinary team has done is put together not only an app but also a supply chain, a way of accessing parts and tools so that people can train themselves to become pump engineers, maintenance leaders, and to fix the pumps and equipment across Kenya for a profit. It creates a wonderful source of income for them and it creates access to clean water for the communities that they're helping. I'll stay quiet for just a moment, just so you can see some of the screenshots of the type of work that they've been working on together. All of this has now been launched as of this summer. The work has already started. The pumps are being fixed. 50,000 people have access to water now in December 2025 who did not have access to water in the summer, and by 2030, the estimate is that as many as 1.5 million people will have gained access to water because of this scheme. We have time for one more example which I hope will fill you with a sense of what can be done. This is not on water. This is on the topic of education. Now for many of us, when we think about education, we think about reading, writing, or arithmetic. This is a different topic. This is on misinformation. 96% of adults, let alone children, fail to systemically and systematically point out fake information online. We've been able to partner with a charity in a university in Scotland to create a new set of training materials aimed at young adults and adolescents to train them on fake information, on bad actors and people who may be trying to influence their behavior. It's fun, it's engaging, it's competitive, and it's designed to make sure these young people build up a skill set that many of us in this room were never trained on. It's already being prototyped and tested with schools. The response has been extraordinary. We'll roll out to a larger pilot with 10,000 students over the next couple of years, and our hope again because of the IP is that millions of children will be able to benefit by taking that curriculum into their schools when the work is complete. We don't have time to talk about all of the other charities that we're working with, but I do want to acknowledge the extraordinary work they're doing. And for those of you in the room who are interested in the work, please do get in touch. There are two things that we can already offer you. The first one is that academy. For those of you who'd be interested in upskilling your own designers, we've decided to make much of the training that we do free and available for everyone. There are master classes that we've put out from the likes of Patty Moore, from Don Norman, from Maro Pacidi, who we heard from this morning, all available from your designers, and we hope you take the opportunity to take that world class curriculum and teach them about how to design the social impact. The second offer we have is that we are able now to expand our group from the originals as of September next year. We will finish next summer our work on quality education, and next September we will begin a 4 year focus on the dual goals of people and planet health. For those organizations who want to participate, please get in touch and we'll tell you how to do so. That beautifully to the second brings us to the end of our presentation. Every year we come back, every year we'll tell you what we've learned in design for good, but for the moment just allow me to say whether you joined Design for Good or whether you're working on your own social impact initiatives, a huge best of luck to you. We look forward to working together, and together we can design for good.