Fundamentals

Sustainable/impact design is rooted in the belief that design is an important tool for making a social or environmental change. Design refers to everything from engineering, industrial and digital design, and architecture to the creation of systems and experiences. Impact Design can be a process, profession, or outcome.

A career in sustainable/impact design could include joining an established firm, bringing a design lens to a traditional social organization, founding your own, and more.

Product Design : Safe light

In a class on Designing for Extreme Affordability, a computer science and biology student envisioned and prototyped an off-grid solar lamp and today 50 million people have used it.

Built Design: Floating homes for urban overpopulation

The Makako slum in Lagos, Nigeria (one of the most populated countries) is full and spilling into the river. A Nigerian architect is pioneering floating buildings to solve the issues of flooding and land occupation.

Experience Design : Affordable education in Peru

An interdisciplinary team designed a school system from the ground up for Peru’s underserved youth in a country that ranks 65th in education. The school features quality education, strategic financials, and beautiful spaces.

Systems Design : Circular economy

Several organizations and foundations are looking at global plastic packaging flows as a full lifecycle– from product design to recycling business models.

Many established design companies are adding studios focused on impact – including IDEO.org and the Autodesk Foundation.

Traditional impact machines, from the public, corporate, and NGO sectors, are creating design practices – including Dalberg Design Impact and UNICEF Innovation.

Many new nonprofits have launched in the last decade providing impact design consulting – like Catapult and CauseLabs – or focusing on a design as their key theory of change – like DRev and Design that Matters.

Because the field is so new and so deeply interdisciplinary, there area number of different pathways. At its core, impact design requires

• Strength in making things
• Empathy
• An understanding of research and testing methods
• Communication and storytelling abilities

While any one type of degree is rarely required to break into this space, there are new formal education programs for sustainable/impact design that provide insight into useful and desirable skills.

Even beyond the impact world, design is accelerating in business and education:

• 10% of Fortune 500 companies have a designer in the C-Suite
• 100% of the top US business schools teach design
• 100% of the top US business schools have student-led design clubs