Designing Impact

Faced with an ever-increasing pace and complexity, organizations are in dire need for new types of approaches for creating solutions - and this is what we'd like to share! Designing Impact is a multidisciplinary research initiative at Aalto University Design Factory, tackling these issues with research-based insights. We’ve interviewed hundreds of designers, entrepreneurs, managers and leaders to date, and continue several active research streams. We examine both design as done by designers and R&D staff, as well as design thinking - the ways of working typical for design that can be applied by anyone in organizations, whether in management, sales or other contexts. Design, for us, represents an exploratory approach, focused on understanding multi-stakeholder value, finding the right questions to ask, and identifying fruitful perspectives (“frames”) to create innovative solutions. However, successfully integrating these approaches to organizations is very much work-in-progress, and we’re on the lookout to find out what works and what not!