Getting up close to those you are serving
"How close are you willing to get to the people you are seeking to serve?" This provocative question was posed to me when I was leading a team to develop products for people struggling with trauma and post-traumatic stress. In most of my corporate roles, despite the best of intentions, the closest we ever got to our customers was by way of outsourced market research, patient testimonials, journey maps, and advice from advocacy groups and paid thought leaders. But all too often being at arm’s length from the customer can result in inadequate products and services, or worse, solutions that fail to address the problem.
Bearing Witness Design is a new type of empathy-driven Human-Centered Design that facilitates experiential empathy in order to develop highly impactful solutions. Especially ideal for purpose-driven teams and organizations, as well as socially minded innovation projects, Bearing Witness Design follows a unique customized format fit to each innovation project and organization. Led by expert facilitators, workshops are aimed at actualizing foundational principles and generating a mindset primed for design. These foundational principles are:
Mind of “Not-Knowing”. The most impactful innovations and most responsive solutions arise from a space free of preconceptions, judgments and biases. These include implicit ideas about who the “end user” is and what they need, and implied understandings of “problem” and “solution”.
Practice of Bearing Witness. Filter-free observation of the internal and external factors affecting the client community. This is best accomplished through an experiential “plunge” into the experience of the client.
Inspired Design. When the imagination of a design team meets the experience of a client’s lived life, impactful and responsive innovation results. Innovations and designs that arise from Not Knowing and Bearing Witness are usually simpler and more direct. They are less likely to miss “obvious” design flaws that often arise from bias, preconceived notions, and reactive planning.
So, how close are YOU willing to get to the people you are seeking to serve?