In 2022, designers from ten of the world’s largest organizations have united for a charitable cause. Their alliance, Design for Good, has been brainstorming ideas on how to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and working with organizations on the ground to ensure they work in practice.
“Every time you design something, you’re making an active choice about the future you want to build,” says Ben Sheppard, founder of Design For Good and former head of global design research at McKinsey. Fortune.
The Design For Good alliance includes global companies such as Microsoft, General Mills, LIXIL, Airbus and DBS among its members.
Even though designers represent less than 1% of working professionals, they “need to stand up and take responsibility,” he says, given the potential they have to create change.
The first cohort of designers for Design For Good completed their work in 2024; Today, their projects are beginning to be implemented in real-world conditions and potentially show whether design can actually solve global problems.
Design for Good operates on a two-year timeline, tackling one SDG at a time. The first cohort, which began in 2022 and ended last year, focused on improving sanitation and access to clean water.
The alliance is now in the middle of its second cohort, which began in 2024 and targets access to quality education.
Yet the results of Design For Good’s first round of designs continue to grow today.
Sheppard cited WaterStarters, an app born from the 2022 cohort, as an example. The app is designed for technicians and franchisee managers who oversee rural water resources in Kenya, allowing them to track and perform maintenance tasks. It is downloadable for free from the Google Play Store.
According to its Play Store listing, the creators of WaterStarters created the app to enable local communities to protect their water resources and “ensure a consistent and reliable water supply” to improve “health, hygiene and economic opportunities.”
To date, Sheppard says the app has helped more than 50,000 people in Kenya access clean water. By the end of 2030, this number could reach 1.5 million.
In another initiative, Design For Good designers helped create Uhuru Care Cards, an educational tool on menstrual health, in partnership with charity, Her Best Foot Forward.
“In Africa, girls are stigmatized as impure and are not expected to go to school when they are on their period, causing them to miss up to a month of school each year,” says Sheppard.
Design for Good reached out to a local artist to create culturally relevant material. “[We wanted to] working together on something that isn’t the West pushing its images, that is culturally sensitive, and that uses characters that are meaningful to girls in our community,” Sheppard says.
The cards have been presented to more than 10,000 students in 12 schools in Tanzania and have gained traction in neighboring Uganda, where they have been rolled out to four schools.
Before Design for Good decides which SDG to target, it consults the UN to understand which goal the world is furthest behind on. It then studies the key performance indicators set by the UN and determines which ones can benefit from additional design, research and engineering input.
“There are a few [goals] which are much better suited to government policy, and others which are much better suited to direct action,” says Sheppard.
Finally, Design for Good evaluates the capabilities of their alliance members. “Many of them will be publishing their own sustainability reports, their own areas of interest and expertise – and we want to bring the best of their abilities to the UN’s goals,” he explains.
Once an SDG is chosen, the alliance appoints an expert as an advisor. They called on Gilbert Houngbo, then president of UN-Water, for the first cohort, and Valtencir M. Mendes, head of education at UNESCO, for the second.
“We are trying to have someone who is able to guide [the designers] and make sure we make the best use of the knowledge available,” says Sheppard.
Looking forward, the third iteration of Design for Good will be its first “dual cycle,” where the SDGs aimed at achieving human and planetary health will be addressed in tandem. It will start in September 2026 and end in 2030.
“You can’t have a dying planet with healthy humans,” Sheppard explains when asked why the two SDGs were chosen. “Much research shows that people’s health and the environment around them are inextricably linked. »
Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference returns on December 2nd to MGM Macau! Join speakers such as Phil Gilbert, Managing Partner of Gilbert Workshop, Ben Sheppard, Founder of Design for Good, Mike Peng, CEO of IDEO, and Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer at Samsung, for a day of in-depth discussions on this year’s theme: “Future Tense: Prototyping Tomorrow.” Register here!
