Design
www.nesta.org.uk/project/design/
We support Nesta’s missions and our partners to design, build and test solutions that meet people’s needs and have a positive social impact.
Our expert designers, software developers, and product/test-and-learn specialists develop, test, and improve digital products, public services and policies for social good.
Our design expertise supports our mission goals in two main ways. Firstly, by guiding colleagues and partners through a strategic process of understanding a problem or issue from multiple perspectives and levels. This ensures we have identified the needs, behaviours and context of people affected by our work in order to improve the chances that interventions deliver the desired impact and avoid harm.
Secondly, we help reduce risk by designing, developing and testing ideas and solutions in an iterative way. We repeat this process many times until we have solutions that meet people’s needs and lead to the desired social impact in a feasible and sustainable way.
The fields of design and technology are broad, ranging from the creation of tangible products through to developing services and shaping policies.
The work of our design and technology practitioners reflects this breadth, with a focus on working in and guiding multidisciplinary teams to develop and improve public services and policies. Such as working with local authorities to test a coordinated approach to transition neighbourhoods to clean heat, shaping policy options for food and drink ads, or building a digital service to boost parenting capabilities.
Our design, software development and product approaches come together to understand problems and define opportunities then develop products, services, policy, and ventures that support Nesta to deliver social impact. We do this by working in the following ways:
We help create the conditions and facilitate diverse teams (involving partners and people with lived experience) through a systematic process to address complex challenges.
We use a mix of creative, strategic and facilitative skills to help teams make sense of - and visualise - complex situations, often working across and connecting up multiple levels of a system.
We guide colleagues and partners to understand an entire situation from multiple perspectives and levels, ensuring the needs of the people we serve are balanced with the needs of stakeholders, the desired impact and operating constraints.
We develop prototypes to carry out iterative test and learn to simply and quickly learn the next most important thing to help us make progress and navigate uncertainty.
We use creative and technical skills (including software development) across a range of mediums to make abstract concepts tangible and iteratively test and build solutions.
If you’d like to find out more, share learning, or explore opportunities for collaboration, please get in touch by emailing [email protected].
