Joel Stein is a Design Ecologist, Community Planner and Urban Researcher studying at Parsons The New School for Design
Designers looking to use their skills for public impact are finding themselves working in a time of both urgency and necessity; there is no lack of work that needs to be done. Operating in an increasingly complex world, designers are re-articulating the role that design can play in making positive contributions.

The issues faced in our communities and the world are at once both publicly shared and privately acute, including but not limited to deteriorating and wasteful food systems, declining water resources, climate change, poverty, a lack of affordable housing, and inequality that is scaling new heights. These social realities are always manifested and reflected in the physical environment, which has traditionally been the point of focus for designers. The future of impact design will involve an ability to work forensically, by mapping the systems and processes that produce the built environment and physical products, and then articulating points of design action, whether it be designing new sewage systems, building supply chains to distribute new medical products, or green building projects that force new policy changes.

The shared nature of these public issues requires sustained and collaborative actions, and designers are learning to use design within a range of different contexts in interdisciplinary ways. Out of necessity, the future of this field will mean designers learn to be more sophisticated working as intermediaries on complex projects, finding inspiration directly from the communities and people that they serve.

Perhaps most importantly, designers are quickly rethinking their roles as “professionals,” and taking inspiration from Teddy Cruz’s idea of “citizenship as a creative act,” are learning to set up frameworks of action that enable the co-design and co-production of new systems, services and structures. By doing this, it will become essential to be comfortable with working in the mess, the social complexity underlying the places in which people live.

Two emergent trends provide causes for optimism in the world of impact design: the focus on scale and the flexible range of mediums employed by designers. By thinking in terms of delivering impact at scale, practitioners are learning to be creative in terms of organizational forms, politics, funding sources, project management, evaluation, and impact. This is enabling a comfort with developing and maintaining open-ended programs of intervention, that enable a range of solutions and projects in both the short-term and long-term.

As we see designers expressing, prototyping and implementing their work on a range of public issues, the role of culture, politics and infrastructure in the daily lives of people will continue to be emphasized, foregrounding the inherent humanity of this work. As impact design evolves, there is both the hope and the necessity of the evolution from the isolated efforts of talented individuals and organizations, to developing an ecosystem facilitated by learning networks that can better support the emerging practitioners, organizations, investors, and, ultimately, people.

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