What makes a design opportunity important?

As a co-design practitioner and member of a design strategy consulting team, I’m periodically invited to deliver training sessions for corporate social responsibility teams or charitable organizations. These sessions typically run from half a day to three days and focus on a simplified version of design thinking. The participants are usually either internal staff or program beneficiaries, and the goal is to introduce how designers navigate complex real-life challenges by combining analytical and creative thinking.

Over the years, I’ve designed and facilitated trainings on a wide range of topics—from improving safety for female ride-hailing passengers to co-creating future wearables for aging populations with university students. These training projects were a reliable source of income for my consulting team, often subsidizing our own self-initiated work.

But about three years ago, I decided to stop.

There were many reasons. The short duration of these sessions often made the outcomes feel superficial, but the core of my discomfort came from one recurring difficulty: helping participants navigate one particular step in the design process - the point of convergence that connects research insights and creative syntheses within each design iteration.

This moment marked the midpoint of the Double Diamond—commonly referred to as “problem definition,” or the second phase of IDEO’s Five Phases of Design Thinking. Regardless of terminology, it’s a crucial pivot: distilling messy, often contradictory evidence into a clear and compelling direction for design intervention—something the creative phase can meaningfully build on.

IDEO’s Five Phases of Deign Thinking. Source: Fountain Institute

I saw this as a "narrowing down" exercise of keeping some elements in focus while eliminating others. To make it feel more structured and teachable, I often asked participants to rank their ideas. For example, I’d borrow the “4Us” framework from copywriting—urgent, unique, useful, and ultra-specific—and have teams assign weights and sort accordingly. If I wanted to include personal perspectives, I’d introduce voting systems. These procedures always produced results—but often left the room feeling flat. And everything downstream felt bland.

I reflected on this with my team. In our real commissioned design projects, we never use rankings or voting. So we asked ourselves: what do we actually do? It often feels like this—somewhere in the chaos of sticky notes, photos, and barely legible sketches, a coherent thread quietly begins to emerge in each person’s mind. Like the illuminated patterns John Nash sees in the film A Beautiful Mind. Then, we share what we’re starting to notice, compare perspectives, refine the ideas together, and eventually arrive at an actionable direction.

We tried to reverse-engineer those “John Nash moments”—hoping to extract a method, a mental algorithm we could teach others. But each time we tried, our conversations circled back to personal experiences, gut feelings, and values. We couldn't extract neat formula. Maybe it’s a kind of complex reasoning that only comes with lived experience and practice.

But if we had the inability to make it a transferable skill in a short training, then it was disingenuous to disguise it with a bland ranking system. So I quietly stopped offering those compact trainings—and shelved the question for a while.

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Unexpectedly, I returned to this line of thought at the end of last year when I began reading The Auto-Ethnographic Turn in Design by Michael Kaethler and Louise Schouwenberg. Although academic in nature, the book urges designers to become more aware of a lens we all carry—but often ignore: the self. The authors advocate for designers to embrace the authenticity of their personal experiences and the audacity of their positionality, encouraging them to “dare to formulate personal ideals for the world.” One section of the book particularly struck me—it specifically argued against relying on popularity voting in studio decision-making. Rather than defaulting to consensus, the authors believe designers should be encouraged to fight for their ideas and let their sense of responsibility show through.

I thought back to my “John Nash moment.” Maybe what I had assumed was an unteachable skill—my ability to distill a design opportunity from messy complexity—wasn’t even a skill to begin with. There was never an algorithm. It was a particular social context invoking an instinct for me to fight for a future scenario that I wished to see in the world. And if that were true, could I invoke a similar experience in others?

An opportunity to explore this possibility came in February, when I was invited by a charitable organization to lead a three-day training workshop on design for social innovation. The participants were young people interested in nonprofit work in rural communities, none of whom had any formal background in design.

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Refreshed by the early spring breeze, over 30 participants gathered in Xinlong Village and organized themselves into six groups based on shared interests—from the social lives of the elderly to playspaces for children aged 0–3. Each group began by exploring a broad theme, then gradually narrowed in on a specific design opportunity.

To support this process, I broke the initial inquiry phase into four small, interconnected steps. We began with desktop research (AI tools were welcome for building background knowledge), followed by quick cycles of field research. Between each step, group discussions created space to reflect on emerging insights. The final step of this phase was to synthesize all the gathered evidence and converge on a clear design opportunity.

Rather than giving out a structured ranking system or instructing them to assign weights to different needs, I asked each group to imagine themselves as members of the community they were designing for—and to discuss what they would care about most if this were their own home.

As I expected, in the late afternoon when the groups almost reached this final step, nervous glances began to dart around the room. After some gentle prompting, a shared concern surfaced: “How do we know if what we care about is really the most important?”

I deeply resonated with the humility behind that question. In social innovation, we’re trained to be skeptical of our own biases and to prioritize the voices of the community. We're taught to downplay our personal opinions for as much as possible—perhaps the reason why we default to ranking matrices or voting systems that promise neutrality. But how does that caution square with my recent shift toward embracing subjectivity?

I paused to formulate a response. My mind flashed back to countless co-design workshops where I silently struggled with the same dilemma: should I step forward with a strong personal stance, or hide behind the safety of procedural neutrality? I recalled moments when, despite uncertainty, I still chose to speak up for what I believed in and it nudged the world in a tiny way. And I reminded myself: if there’s ever a low-stake space for bringing designer’s personal ideals into design, it’s here—in training.

Right then, I decided to take everyone on a momentary step away from the design tasks at hand because I felt it was a perfect moment to shared a story told by the Chinese philosopher Chen Jiaying, known for his translations of Heidegger’s Being and Time and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in the 1990s.

Chen once recounted a conversation with friends in wildlife conservation, who were often challenged with a question similar to the one troubling our room: “Is it really important to save black bears when there are children suffering?” To explore this, Chen proposed a thought experiment using the same logic of ranking causes: Is keeping children in school more important than protecting endangered animals? Is treating AIDS more urgent than either? What about helping people in war zones?

Drawing from Heidegger, Chen suggested that we don’t choose our commitments through rational comparison. We become entangled with certain issues through chance encounters—when something we happen to experience calls to us and stirs a deep sense of care. It is not objective calculation, but personal resonance, that draws us into the work we devote ourselves to.

Chen shared this story in a short article titled Is it important to save black bears? He concluded a section of the article with:

We could lay out everything in the world and rank them by importance. In such a list, helping AIDS patients might seem more urgent than saving endangered animals, and saving animals more important than drinking in restaurants. But which theorist should we turn to for this “value ranking” game? Fine—let the grand theorists of the world rank things for us. Should everyone focus on saving AIDS patients before turning to black bears? Solve homelessness first, and only then build opera houses? In a society where everyone lives according to one fixed hierarchy of values, where everyone rushes to address only what’s considered “most important,” leaving no one to help the black bears while children still lack schooling—what a disheartening world that would be.

With these thoughts lingering in the room, I once again invited the participants to make sense of the knowledge they had gathered around their topic through a subjective lens. This time I provided the following verbal prompts (based on their topic of focus):

1. Which specific data, observation, person, or story do you find hardest to ignore?

2. What do you know now gives you the strongest sense of injustice?

3. Based on your own experience and resources, which aspects of these challenges are you personally ready to engage with?

When it came time to share across groups, I asked each group to present their insights “backwards", start from what moved them emotionally, and use the relevant knowledge as support. And during this session, I noticed a few major changes compared to my previous training experiences. First, instead of walking through a linear report of steps—“we researched this, then we asked that…”—groups spoke from what they cared about, often starting with statements like “we felt deeply troubled by…”. Second, rather than trying to prove they had followed the process correctly, participants were driven by the evidence that had disrupted their assumptions and shifted their motivations. Perhaps it was the true emotions that filled the room, the rest of the participants were genuinely engaged.

In the evening on the same day, I was browsing through social media, and came across a post by one of the trainees, who shared her moment of deciding on a direction for intervention: she thought of her mom's growing needs for social support as she aged.

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About four months had passed between the time I first read The Auto-Ethnographic Turn in Design and the moment I openly acknowledged the role of designers’ subjectivity during this training. In retrospect, the training prompted me to voice an internal struggle I had long been wrestling with in silence.

In The Auto-Ethnographic Turn in Design, the authors introduce two archetypes: the “star designer,” who centers on self-aggrandizement, and the “absent designer,” who treats design as a purely technical activity—a neutral tool for solving problems. The latter, some scholars argue, by erasing the idiosyncrasies of the designer, creates an illusion of certainty, which can be especially appealing in commercial contexts (Akama et al, 2019). However, this so-called neutrality, they warn, risks normalizing and perpetuating designers’ hidden biases (Akama et al, 2025; Schouwenberg & Kaethler, 2021). Or, as one author more bluntly puts it: Designing for others enables us to void the stench of our own shit (Schouwenberg & Kaethler, 2021).

In the context of social innovation, we may be motivated by more humble and well-intentioned reasons for making our individualities “absent,” but the consequences are not necessarily different. We learn early on that our work should never be about self-aggrandizement. We also wary of the potential imbalance of power between ourselves and the communities we work with. So we tell ourselves “it’s not for us, it’s for them” to feel like we’re placing more value on the perspectives of others. But haven’t we also constructed these “others” in the process of defining who we design for? And by positioning ourselves as outsiders to “them”, do we inadvertently exempt ourselves from long term engagement and the responsibility of the damage we may leave behind? To explore these questions honestly, I believe designers working in social innovation must first recognize how their own feelings, values, and positions might manifest—consciously or not—through their engagement with the community.

So I asked myself: why did Chen Jiaying’s story feel so meaningful in that moment during the training? After all, it wasn’t about design. It was about how a person is thrown into a deep, personal relationship with an issue—one that compels them to act, to shape reality in line with their imagined futures, even when resources are scarce and others don’t yet share the same sense of urgency. But then again, isn’t that precisely what genuinely intentioned design is about?

From this experience, I learned that staying authentic means not separating ourselves from the "what" and the "who" we choose to engage with. In the stage of design where we must choose one opportunity among many, we might be encouraged to speak out from the position of a person who shares the consequences of the changes to be made and not hide that person behind an algorithm. If we wish for something popular, we’ll have broader support. If our wish is more eclectic, then we’re contributing to a more diverse future world.

I created these abstract drawings to capture two ways patterns emerge in the mind: one by observing externally and fitting elements into a predefined framework, and the other by engaging from within, allowing intuition to shape a coherent theme. Perhaps both approaches are arbitrary in their own ways, but the intuitive process carries more intrinsic motivation.

References

Akama, Yoko, Sarah Pink, and Shanti Sumartojo. 2019. Uncertainty and Possibility: New Approaches to Future Making in Design Anthropology. Reprinted. London New York, NY Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic.

Akama, Yoko, Tristan Schultz, and Ricardo Rosa. 2025. “In the Pursuit of Decolonising Dominant Service Design -Three Reflexive Stories.” In Handbook of Service Design: Plural Perspectives and a Critical Contemporary Agenda. Bloomsbury Academic.

陈嘉映. 价值的理由 [The Reason for Value]. 上海: 上海文艺出版社, 2021.

Schouwenberg, Louise, and Michael Kaethler, eds. 2021. The Auto-Ethnographic Turn in Design. Amsterdam: Valiz.

What makes a design opportunity important?

linda@makeapoint.cn