Design that Matters (DtM), a 501c3 nonprofit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, creates new products that allow social enterprises in developing countries to offer improved services and scale more quickly. DtM has built a collaborative design process through which hundreds of volunteers in academia and industry donate their skills and expertise to the creation of breakthrough products for communities in need. Our goal is to deliver a better quality of service, and a better quality of life, to millions of beneficiaries through products designed for our clients.

 

What We Do

DtM has three primary "value-added" activities which make up the service we provide to our clients:

• Opportunity Identification: client prospecting, due diligence, contract development, prior art research, needs assessment, and development of a "design challenge portfolio."
• Design Innovation: a collaborative design process in which teams of students and professional volunteers build on each other's work in developing design concepts and product prototypes. Design iterations and prototypes are evaluated by local faculty and domain experts, and tested in the field with clients and community members.
• Product Implementation: DtM pursues the shortest path to product implementation. For clients who are themselves manufacturers, this would involve DtM handing off design drawings or a “works-like” prototype to the client for further development. For clients needing only a small volume of the finished product, implementation would involve DtM managing contract manufacture. For clients needing large product volumes, DtM would license the project intellectual property to a third party for manufacture.

 

DtM's Collaborative Design Process
DtM’s core competencies include design, engineering and ethnography. We have built a collaborative design process that translates the needs of social enterprise into breakthrough products and services, using new and creatively repurposed intellectual property (IP).

All of our design work and business analysis is performed by volunteers from academia and industry, using the infrastructure available at their host institutions. In this way, DtM is able to provide our clients with a design service at a fraction of the market cost. Our academic contributors include MIT, Stanford and the California Institute of Technology, and our corporate partners include IDEO, Fisher Price, SolidWorks and Optikos. 

DtM has structured our collaborative design process such that participants are motivated by self-interest as much as altruism. For academic partners, like MIT and Stanford, DtM “design challenges” serve as curriculum materials in existing university courses, engaging students in real-world problems, while helping faculty to meet recent university accreditation requirements for experiential-learning courses.

With corporate design partners, like IDEO and Optikos, DtM works with management to convert staff “whitespace” (paid, but un-billable hours) into collaboration opportunities for their best staff, boosting retention and building skills through exposure to what we call “minimum resource design.” 

DtM does not attempt to be an expert in every field of social enterprise; rather, the experts are our clients. DtM selects clients from social entrepreneur networks, such as Ashoka and the Draper Richards Fellows, for whom a new product or service represents an opportunity to overcome barriers to scale. We work closely with our clients, through a series of on-site interviews and observations, to develop an understanding of their needs and the context in which they work. Based on these insights, DtM designs new products to make our clients more effective in delivering critical services to communities in need. Our clients are recognized leaders in their field and credible representatives for their beneficiaries. They are also reliable distribution channels for the new products and services that result from our collaboration.