Social Impact Design (read time: 35 min)
What is design?
A note on newness
What is social impact design?
So you want to work in Social Impact Design?
As corny as it may sound, the common thread that unites most journeys into social impact design is “a feeling.” It could be a feeling of discontent about how your skills are being used, a feeling of intrigue when you hear someone mention “design” for the first time, or just a feeling that “there must be a way to describe what I care about.” People are drawn to social impact design from an incredible variety of backgrounds, but some of the most common are anthropology, cultural studies, behavioral sciences, communications, engineering, urban planning, and architecture. At their core, designers are problem solvers. They see a bump or frustration, and they are pulled to make this problem easier for the next person.Importantly, that problem-solving process relies on four key functions: empathy, collaboration, experimentation, and optimism.
Empathy: designers believe in deep research and listening to who the problem is impacting.
Collaboration: they build with, not for, these communities. The phrase “human-centered design” originates from this premise—that humans are centered in the problem-solving process.
Experimentation: design is about testing and failing and fixing and testing again. It relies on constant innovation and experimentation.
Optimism: to initiate a design process inherently requires the optimism to believe a problem can be solved or improved upon.
While there is immense diversity within the type of roles you can have working in social impact design, those four core themes will revolve around any aspect of your work. Have your friends told you that you’re a great listener or particularly emotionally intelligent? Are you good at simplifying complex topics into words or images people can understand? Do you naturally fix things that are broken and strive to understand what broke them? Are you a deep researcher who builds their opinions and ideas off of a thorough understanding of a topic? Do you consider yourself creative? Do you have that “feeling” about social impact design?
If any of those questions apply to you, or if you’re just exploring, this guide will take you through everything you need to know about working in social impact design. To inform our work, Second Day has spoken to experts in the field and gathered the best information out there for upcoming and recent graduates. First, the guide will take you through the different entry-level positions to look out for in this field. Then, we’ll provide tips on actually getting those jobs in social impact design. We’ll finish with our next three steps: actionable items you can take to make progress towards finding your first job in social impact design. Let’s get started!
This guide was written by Brigit Goebelbecker in partnership with the Second Day team.
Many thanks to experts in the field who supported this work:
Sara Cantor, Greater Good Studios, Co-Founder and Executive Director
Madison Loew, Code for America, Design Manager
Risha Parikh, Nava, Designer Researcher
Stephanie Wade, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Lead for Innovation and Design
What is Social Impact Design?
What is design?
Design, human-centered design (HCD), and design thinking can be considered synonymous for our purposes, and are collectively defined below as “design.”
Design is a process that can be applied to solving any problem. While the steps of a design process might vary based on the practitioner, the basic phases can be visualized below:
Before You Start: Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation, Acumen
These three steps, and the aforementioned components of empathy, collaboration, experimentation, and optimism are the core of what “design” is. Importantly, when many people think of design, they think of graphic or visual design. But the design field involves way more specialties and ways of thinking, some of which are listed below (many of which are not!):
Design Research: Understanding the underlying desires, needs, and challenges of users (eg. conducting interviews and focus groups)
Graphic Design: Creating images to convey a message (e.g., making a poster)
UI Design: “User Interface Design” creates the visual “look” of a product (e.g., is the color scheme on brand?)
UX Design: “User Experience Design” creates a clear, intuitive, pleasant process of how an individual interacts with a product (e.g., is it easy to find the menu button on the website?)
Service Design: UX design for in-person services (e.g., is it clear where to wait in line at the restaurant?)
Multimedia Design: Designing graphics for a variety of moving media (e.g., video or animation)
Industrial Design: Creating the functional, material components of a product (e.g., deciding whether to use wood or metal)
Software/Web Design: Creating the digital backbone of a product (e.g., coding an app)
A note on newness
If you’re new to the design world, the first thing you need to know is that this field is still young. Design has its roots in engineering, but it specifically grew out of the tech boom in Silicon Valley—where organizations started to rethink how the traditional process of building hardware could be applied to applications, interfaces, and experience. Social impact design is an even fresher, new field!The newness of this field has a few key implications:
Senior leaders got to their jobs in one way, but that does not need to be the way you do it. Many of them were seeking/building opportunities in social impact design with zero help, zero structure, and zero guidance. Luckily, the world has evolved, and there are more resources to help you now than they had. So while advice from advanced professionals is critical, take it with a slight grain of salt. Their generation did a lot to define this space and make it (a bit!) more straightforward for you than it was for them.
There is a wild lack of standardization of everything from the definition of “design” itself to job titles and expected experience. We’ve helped simplify where we can, but you’ll need to get accustomed to using a variety of titles to describe one idea. As you become oriented to the field, taking the time to read a few dozen different job descriptions can be another way to orient yourself to the type of roles that exist.
With that last point in mind, we will begin by noting that the terminology used to describe “design” and “social impact design” can vary significantly. You will notice in some links and resources connected to this guide that vocabulary will vary significantly (from “human centered design” to “design thinking” to “design” and everything in between). Everyone is confused at first, and for good reason! But the more you read and practice design work, the core design process and its steps will become clear.
What is social impact design?
Social impact design, design for good, social design, civic tech, public interest tech, government service design, and impact design can be considered synonymous for our purposes, and are collectively defined below as “social impact design” or “SID.”
At its most simple, social impact design is mission-driven design. People in the biz may laugh, because human-centered design should, technically, always be mission-driven. However, much design work actually ends up centering business, government, or other abstract entities. At its essence, SID is human-centered design that is intentional about which humans it centers. In this way, social impact designers give control to the people they serve.
This might make sense to you in theory (or it might not!), so let’s talk specifics. Amongst other domains, SID can pertain to social, environmental, humanitarian, sustainable, and/or public-interest design. Some specific examples of SID products and processes can be found below:
Be My Eyes is a free app that connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call.
A website that that raises awareness about modern day slavery and provides resources for action.
Elevating the voices of older adults- California’s Master Plan for Aging
The SCAN Foundation (TSF) is a vocal champion of policies and programs that advance the needs of older adults throughout the state. After successfully getting California’s governor to commit to developing a Master Plan for Aging, TSF wanted to ensure that those impacted—older adults and their care teams—had a voice in the policy design process.
WonderSphere is a sealed, mobile chamber that empowers pediatric patients with the wonders of nature and science. With built-in gloves that enable hospitalized, immune-compromised children to plant, dig, water, and touch nature without danger of infection, it provides a bedside field trip that is hands-on, experiential, multi-sensory, and safe.
What types of jobs exist in social impact design?
The different types of social impact design organizations
There are two key types of organizations where you can work in SID:
DESIGN AGENCIES: Design agencies are essentially consulting firms who work for a variety of clients to solve their issues using the design process. Some social impact design agencies are very niche (designing logos for nonprofits in Denver) while others are more broad (designing products, services, and experiences for any mission-driven client). Some large consulting firms have their own design agencies in-house, and sometimes those agencies are explicitly focused on social impact work.
Examples
Social impact design agencies
SID teams within larger organizations
IDEO.org (one of the most well-known organizations in this space, but has a controversial reputation)
Considerations
For some, the inherent nature of being an external consultant can be challenging. By coming in as an outsider to assess a problem and design a solution, you rarely get to see if your product gets used, how it gets used, and if it works. At the same time, working for a design agency (like consulting) will expose you to many types of problems, populations, and organizations. Agencies can be fantastic places to learn what you love and what you hate about the field.
Importantly, not all design agencies are created equal, and social impact design agencies or teams are often under-resourced. Given that mission-driven organizations (and their clients) are not usually flush with cash, boutique SID firms have to do design a little differently. For example, the end product for a nonprofit client might be a power point, not a shiny, expensive tech solution. Nonetheless, being resource-constrained can inspire its own type of creativity. For example, if working with clients in remote villages, it’s possible the end users have really bad wifi. While this could make the research and design process extremely frustrating for some designers, others love the challenge and creative potential of this problem.
The SID teams within larger organizations are likely to have more resources (money, staff, technology) compared to the boutique firms. Working on these teams likely provides access to professional development and training benefits that boutique firms simply cannot afford. At the same time, working on the “mission-driven” side of a larger company has its own downsides—where impact-driven work is sometimes seen as a “nice to have” rather than a core business function. As a result, these teams might get lower pay or other resources cut during tight times because they are less “mission-critical” than the “business side” of the house. It also isn’t always possible to do as much mission-driven work as you might hope to do.
IN HOUSE: Some mission-driven organizations have their own design teams internally. Organizations with in-house design roles are inherently organizations that expect frequent innovation. Design is a process of innovation, so if an organization doesn’t expect to need to change often, it is unlikely to have an in-house design team. Mission-driven organizations that emphasize frequent innovation are the exception and not the rule, and (as we know) money is tight in this space. As a result, these roles are much harder to come by. Governments, on the other hand, are starting to expand how many in-house design roles are available.
Examples
Considerations: Working on a SID team in-house allows you to see the design process through. You get to know a specific problem incredibly well, design a solution to that problem, then assess how that solution works. Some may be drawn to the depth of this experience, while others might worry about getting “bored” or “over” working on one issue. Importantly, working on an in-house design team usually demands more years of experience than working for an agency, given the host organization is less likely to have the design-specific staff to train you. These organizations often prefer to hire from design agencies, knowing those individuals have been trained and tested in design expertise already.
The different roles of social impact design
Remember the list of ~10 types of design above? Given the significant variety of design specializations available, there are (unsurprisingly) countless variations on the types of roles available in the design profession. For the sake of simplicity, we have narrowed down those roles into two categories:
DESIGN RESEARCH: Design Researchers (or “Researchers”), as described above, thoroughly investigate user experience through a variety of methods. While it is critical for Design Researchers to understand the entire design process, they are specialists in interacting with the people who use a product or service. Design Researchers employ methodologies like focus groups, interviews, surveys, field studies, journey mapping, and much more in order to interrogate and clarify the needs and preferences of users.
TECHNICAL DESIGNER: Technical Designers (or “Designers”) encompass nearly every other specialization listed earlier. Technical Designers are those who are specialists in building the product or service. Like researchers, designers also need to have a fundamental understanding of the entire design process. However, designers are much more in the weeds of building the “thing” -- whether a chair, website, experience, or app.
Which one is for me? One of the simplest ways to assess the two umbrellas is “Do you get energy from people?” Research might be for you! “Do you prefer alone time to go deep on a product or visual concept?” Technical design might be for you!
Social impact design by the numbers (pay and hours)
Working in social impact design can be a great opportunity to do good by doing well financially. As we have stressed throughout this guide, there is significant variation in types of roles and specializations. Correspondingly, there is significant variation in salaries based on specialty, location, etc. Some general themes to note:
Benefits and flexibility tend to be quite good in the design world. Given the general “tech” culture, many experts spoke to a theme of flexible schedules and generous benefits. SID studios tend to have strong benefits that reflect the social mission of their organization.
For many, salaries rise significantly after graduate school. See "Graduate School" later in this guide
UX design is often among the highest-paying roles in the design industry
General entry-level roles can range significantly based on geography and industry. One Chicago example paid $50-60k for entry-level roles, while one New York example paid $100K.
The average salary of an entry level designer across all industries in June of 2021 was $53,000
Working for a boutique design agency that is explicitly focused on social impact will likely pay less than working for a larger agency that has a SID team. Similarly, working on an in-house SID team at a nonprofit or government will likely pay less than working for a large agency on a SID team.
How to get a job in social impact design
Getting your foot in the door
The easiest way to launch your career in social impact design is to work for an agency that will train you in the fundamental skills of the design process. While it is possible to get entry-level jobs at SID agencies directly after college, many impact-driven agencies cannot afford to provide the robust training available to new employees at larger corporations. As a result, many SID agencies look to hire talent who have already honed their chops at corporate firms.
However, the easiest way is not the only way. SID is both a creative and a new field, so coming from an “untraditional” background is common and, at times, encouraged. What is most important is that you can tell a clear story of why your background has prepared you to excel in design. To do so, you need to have a strong portfolio which reflects your skills, experience, and creativity (see “Your portfolio”).
Importantly, how you get your foot in the door depends on what background you are coming from. If you studied design in school and are graduating with a robust portfolio, it will be much easier for you to snag the entry-level roles at SID agencies. If you are newer to design, there are numerous other ways you can build out your portfolio and familiarize yourself with the industry.
To excel you need to clearly show you are a T-shaped designer. This means that you have a broad skill set across the design process, but you have deep expertise in one or two areas.
UNIVERSALLY, YOU NEED TO SHOW AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE DESIGN PROCESS:
No matter what specialty you focus on, you need to prove you understand the entire flow of a design process from beginning to end. In order to build these skills, consider exploring these resources:
Acumen+IDEO course 一 this free course comes recommended from almost everyone we spoke to. In nine weeks, you will “master human-centered design to solve real world challenges.” This course will help you familiarize yourself with the steps of a design process and begin to think about which specialty is most appealing to you.
Service Design Jams 一 these 48-hour events bring together designers, students, academics, business people, unemployed people, and many more to develop and prototype new services, products, or initiatives inspired by a shared theme. These are excellent opportunities to meet people in the design space, practice your design skills, and quickly create a portfolio piece.
Designing Your Life 一 this book explains how to apply the design process to your life and career. It provides excellent context about how to see the design process in every facet of life, which we at Second Day have used to help guide our community through the career discernment process (designers or not!).
AS A TECHNICAL DESIGNER, YOU NEED TO SHOW YOU CAN DO "THE THING."
Some technical design fields are harder to “break into” than others. For example, product and industrial design are more challenging to teach yourself一you often need significant hands-on experience in a workshop to understand how to build, assess materials, and implement design. Service design, on the hand, is more accepting of multiple different backgrounds and disciplines. Consider the following resources to get started:
General Assembly UX Design Course一 through part-time or full-time options, learn the ins and outs of UX Design. These courses can be expensive, though they do offer scholarships. Many individuals will get their employer to fund this sort of bootcamp through a “professional development” benefit, as UX design can be applied to a wide range of professions.
CalArts Graphic Design Specialization一 if you don’t have formal training, one of the easiest specialties to teach yourself online is graphic design. Learning graphic design will help you understand the design process, and it will get your foot in the door to grow and expand to other specialties in the future. This course is free, and led by a faculty member at CalArts.
Service Design Network一 if you are considering service design as a specialty, the Service Design Network (SDN) is an excellent resource to learn more about the field. This network makes it easy for you to connect with design professionals, even including a list of people who are willing to get coffee (with email details and all!). Use this network to assess if service design is for you, and gain a deeper understanding of how your existing background can be framed for design jobs.
AS A DESIGN RESEARCHER, YOU NEED TO SHOW A DEEP CONNECTION TO A COMMUNITY.
While some Design Researchers studied design in college, others come from backgrounds in anthropology, acting, American studies, cultural studies, behavioral studies, art history, and more. The unifying thread across those who succeed in this space is that they can communicate their ability to connect with a community. To do good research, your users need to trust and open up to you. Consider the following resources to hone those skills:
Volunteer Work: Experts broadly encouraged newcomers to Design Research to get their hands dirty in both design and social justice. Your local Code For America Chapter or other local nonprofits might have volunteer opportunities. But even if you don't see specific volunteer opportunities listed, you can look around your community and consider how human centered design can be applied to the problems you see. Does your school’s chapter of UNICEF need help raising money for their volunteer work? Volunteer to conduct interviews with students about what messaging compels them to donate, and then create flyers that reflect this messaging. There are countless opportunities to use the fundamental techniques of interviews, focus groups, etc., to gain valuable insight that will help social justice causes in your community -- go out and find them!
Research: Design Research is a specific skill set and process, but it builds on research methods that can be found across academia. Consider working with a professor or graduate student on supporting any of their research that interfaces with people. Transcribe their interviews, work in the psychology lab, or help coordinate and recruit study participants. The skills you will build in communication, listening, and analysis across research disciplines will invariably advance your career in Design Research.
OTHER POINTS TO CONSIDER
Fellowships, while highly competitive, are an excellent way to build your network, get your foot in the door, learn fundamental skills, and launch your career.
Walk the walk一if you’re applying for design opportunities, make sure your personal brand looks like a designer. Even if you are applying for research roles, make sure your resume and cover letter are visually appealing.
Consider purchasing a template if you’re not ready to make your own
Networking一since so much of SID is new, most established professionals came through a windy, challenging career path to get to where they are. As a result, many of them are very happy to talk with you about their journey. Networking and “getting your hands dirty” are hugely important in this space, so getting out there and meeting people doing the work is more than nice to have. In order to learn what design specialization is for you, practice your design skills, and learn who’s who in the design space, consider the following resources:
Service Design Network (see above)
Meetups! (yes, people still do these! And they’re huge in the design world)
Apprenticeships一if you are very new to design, apprenticeships can be an excellent way to learn, train, and earn money. While paid significantly less than full-time employees, apprenticeship programs invest heavily in training participants in the basics of design and the intricacies of the company offering the program. They usually involve helping with day-to-day responsibilities and small tasks while shadowing the more senior designers to learn.
Your portfolio
To apply for jobs in SID, you need to build a portfolio. A portfolio is a tool to showcase your experience, skills, accomplishments, and personal approach to design. While portfolios may have once been made up of physical papers, a modern portfolio is, essentially, a personal website.
Creating a portfolio takes work, and it is a bit of a chicken and egg situation. You are expected to showcase design projects in your portfolio...before you are expected to have actually had a job in design. However, the process of crafting your portfolio is an excellent opportunity to hone your skills, assess your personal narrative, and clarify precisely what roles make sense for you.
There are many, excellent resources about how to build your portfolio available online, and a key step in the portfolio-building process is to spend some time perusing the best of what the internet has to offer. Some of our favorites below:
Robin Mastomarino - interactive designer
Adeline Diamond - design strategy
Nad Chishtie - digital product designer
Alex “Dram” Piven - UX/UI, developer, multimedia designer
Jules Lee - design research
While building your portfolio, make sure to follow the steps below:
Reflect, build, and know your personal brand. To create a cohesive user experience in your portfolio, you need to have a clear personal brand. And to have a clear personal brand, you need to have spent time thinking through your skills, your experiences, and your goals. Remember, everyone comes into this field from vastly different backgrounds. Showing you can craft your own narrative will show you can build narratives for clients.
Develop your personal brand into an actual brand. Create a logo, color scheme, font, tagline that are distinctly yours, recognizable, and aligned with your personal narrative.
Invest in the portfolio. Your website is not just a platform to showcase your work一it is your work. Design a solid user flow, home page, blogs, custom 404 pages一as much as you can to show your professional understanding of a great website. Of course, a web designer will be expected to have a much more technologically sophisticated website than a design researcher.
Donate your skills to build your brand. In order to fill out your portfolio (and practice/hone your design skills), find problems and make projects out of them. As addressed several times in this guide, identifying potential design projects in your community gives you the opportunity to showcase your initiative and to document your skills.
Show the entirety of the design process, wherever possible. The strongest portfolio pieces are ones you have seen from beginning to end. While it is ok to add projects that focus on one phase of the design process (especially if that focus is your preferred specialty), prioritize projects where you can follow an idea from the beginning to the end.
Teach something new. You need to think about the reader, the user, while creating your portfolio. Experts told us they want your portfolio to clearly tell them一why does this design matter? What are the design implications of what you learned on a project?
What to demonstrate in your portfolio
Experts stressed there is no one-size-fits all skill set that you need to have to enter the SID space. They list the general skills and experiences they look for below, but they emphasized that anyone can come in and break the rules. Design is about showing your skills, and if you are able to demonstrate that you are talented, hard working, and creative, you can often find your way around the general framework.
UNIVERSAL SKILLS:
You have at least one year of academic or professional experience in human centered design, and deeply understand its process.
If looking to work with an agency in any capacity, it helps to demonstrate you can work with diverse clients.
Show you have worked with different types of people. Maybe you did research on indigenous rights in the Pacific Northwest while also working at Chipotle. Lean into how you have successfully been on teams with people who are different from you. This will demonstrate your ability to design for a variety of populations and clients.
Show you have customer service experience. Much of working at an agency is making sure you are pleasing your client. You need to be clear, friendly, communicative, and productive. Show off that you’ve built these skills while working in retail or at a coffee shop, or if you have interned at any sort of consulting agency in the past.
You share the values of your future employer. Unlike general designers, social impact designers have made sacrifices to work for social justice. If you are going to join their team, you need to communicate why you care about mission-driven work (and their specific mission, if they have one). Designers have been trained to understand human behavior, so be sure to carefully think through how to authentically communicate your commitment. They will be able to see through a phony quickly!
Personal Experience. As evidenced in “Designing Your Life,” design can be seen everywhere around you. When applying for these roles, think through how design has touched your life. Has your community been listened to when governments or organizations are designing products and services? If so, how has that showed you the power of design? If not, how has that fueled you to bring in the voices of your community?
Synthesis. Show you can simplify a complicated concept into something clear and actionable. This could be represented by writing a thesis or research paper that pulled from 10+ sources, or from surveying your classmates to create a new logo for your club.
Voracious Curiosity. Asking questions is a fundamental part of the design process. To succeed in design, you need to be genuinely curious about a problem, your clients, your users, etc. You need to ask questions in a way that shows you deeply care about the answer, as this curiosity will demonstrate an eagerness to learn.
Emotional Intelligence. Succeeding in design requires a strong intuition about human behavior and emotion. While much can be studied and practiced, it is important to demonstrate emotional intelligence and empathy in the way you conduct your interview and application process.
TECHNICAL DESIGN SKILLS:
Experience practicing your technical skills. This could be experience interning at a design agency, making graphics for your school newspaper, or taking online bootcamp courses. If you studied design in school, your coursework can count here, too.
Really excellent technical skills. You need to be able to show you can build things if you are a technical designer. If you are an industrial designer, you need to show you have constructed products with complex materials. If you are a web designer, you need to have built a website. While the “thing” you create varies based on specialty, you need to demonstrate in your portfolio that you have built the thing (rather than your potential to build the thing).
Ability to integrate feedback. Once you have built the thing, you need to show that your designs change based on feedback from users. Even if your product is incredibly made, if it does not respond to the user needs surfaced by the design researchers, it is useless to your future employer. You need to show how you have built, tweaked, and tweaked again based on feedback.
DESIGN RESEARCH SKILLS:
Working in a community-facing capacity. This can include social work, community engagement, client services, advocacy work, etc. And importantly, this does not need to have been a paid experience. If you volunteered for Crisis Text Line or worked in Mutual Aid during the pandemic, this sort of experience can get you far. Show evidence that you have used empathy to build relationships.
Experience with field research. As described above, design research builds on a variety of research methods employed in other fields. Show you have done research that interfaces with people, ideally out in the world rather than in a lab.
Graduate school
There are several excellent graduate programs for SID, and many people we spoke to went through those programs. Importantly, they all stressed that a graduate school degree is by no means required, but it can be useful for folks who are pivoting into SID from other backgrounds. Some points to keep in mind:
If you have no background in design, grad school will enable you to build your portfolio, lingo and networks. It is an excellent option for people looking to pivot.
At the same time, it is a lot of money! Some programs are three years long, so it is a serious investment in yourself. (Some folks we interviewed are still paying off their student loans 10 years later).
So before jumping to graduate school, think about what you need to advance your career:
If you need to learn technical design skills, there are many ways to do so, like bootcamps, hackathons, and certificate programs, which are way cheaper and more time-effective.
If you are completely new to HCD, it will give you the credibility and portfolio opportunities to immediately enter the field.
Some programs in design strategy enable their graduates to get leadership roles earlier on. So if you already have technical design skills but are lacking experience in SID or research, a design strategy program can catch you up on those skills and propel your career. (One person we interviewed saw their salary double after graduation!)
Exit opportunities
As you move up the ranks on a SID team, the roles of Design Research and Technical Design start to blend together. At a more senior level, common roles are defined as “Design Strategist” or “Project Lead”.
Most importantly, these roles begin to blend together the different emphases of the Design Researcher and the Technical Designer. A Project Lead, for example, generally begins by scoping the project. They hear the needs of the client and the problem they need to solve, and the Project Leader then designs a proposal that gets at their questions while respecting their budget. The lead plans the research process: determining who the team needs to learn from, what the inclusion criteria are, and mapping out the user groups. They lead recruiting, track down participants to interview, determine what research can be observed, and figure out what can be researched through second hand sources. Importantly, senior roles are very relational. Much of the work is connecting with the client, the users, and your team to assess the progress and efficacy of your solution. The Lead or Strategist oversees the high-level mission and objectives of a project, and directs the Researchers and Designers to work together towards that goal.
Importantly, design is often issue agnostic. You can be a designer working on food waste and the next month work on criminal justice. This means that as you rise through the ranks of your design career, you can have the opportunity to explore numerous different causes.
You can also pivot from one design specialty to another, if necessary. Some specialties, like graphic or UX design, are excellent foundational skill sets that can position you well to pivot to another specialty if you would like. Other specialties, like product or industrial design, require such mechanical training that it can be very challenging to pivot into this space later in your career.
Where to find jobs
We’ve compiled some of the most highly-recommended resources from our experts, and are always looking for more!
Design Gigs for Good一 a free community-driven resource to help more people use the tools of design to create positive social change. They provide a free job board full of opportunities at the intersection of design and social impact. You can also join their public, international community for people using design to change the world.
Tech Jobs for Good一 more focused on technical design roles, helps organizations working on social and environmental issues hire tech talent looking for purposeful work.
Coding it Forward一 a nonprofit for and by young people creating new opportunities and pathways into social impact and civic technology. Pursue their website to find fellowship opportunities, a job board, and an excellent newsletter of upcoming opportunities.
OTHER PLACES TO BUILD COMMUNITY AND LEARN
Open IDEO一 This open platform from international design and consulting firm, IDEO, seeks to solve challenges for the collective social good. This global community of over 50,000 people work together to solve tough problems, and you can join them.
AIGA’s Design for Good一 As the largest professional association of designers in the world, AIGA is committed to advancing the value and impact of design, both locally and globally. Their Design for Good umbrella includes the following strategic initiatives:
Design for Democracy
Diversity and Inclusion
Women Lead
Design for Communities
Twitter一 The design community is on Twitter! Following design leaders will help you get up to speed on “what’s up” in the design world. At the same time, many organizations post job opportunities to Twitter, so keep an eye on those profiles for both wisdom and employment! Some places to start:
Books
Next three steps
Determine what type of design you are interested in. Are you more inclined to be a Design Researcher or a Technical Designer? Is there a specific specialty that is calling out to you?
Connect with 3 people who do the design you want to do. Use the Service Design Network, Meetups, or the events listed above to reach out to people you admire in the space and pick their brain about why they love what they do.
Start building your portfolio. This is serious work! Get started pulling together your projects, finding new projects, and building your brand as early as possible, so it is up and ready to go by the time you are ready to apply for jobs.
Last updated: July 2021