Design is a powerful tool. That power makes it an attractive solution to solve tough problems.
Unfortunately, those same tools aren’t effective or meaningful without first doing the less-attractive but essential groundwork of clarifying a project’s strategic goals and effectively scoping the work.
In 2023, d.school members Thomas Both and Nadia Roumani embarked on a project to develop Scopey, an AI-generated tool to make that early groundwork more approachable and generative, and to support leaders and practitioners who are looking to use design to make greater impacts. Scopey helps guide users to figure out where design might be most useful by first creating a space for exploration for teams to gain a better understanding of their community’s needs and their project’s goals, then helping them scope the work to suit their needs.
In their ten years of running the Designing for Social Systems program and working with complex organizations facing pressing problems and multiple stakeholders—
particularly social sector leaders in philanthropy, nonprofits, and government agencies—Thomas and Nadia have met with hundreds of people who aim to have a positive impact on others’ lives. They have uncovered many recurring stumbling blocks:
• One team member has a vision for where the project should go, but the rest of the team is not yet aligned with that vision.
- A team is working on very different assumptions about user behaviors.
- Team members’ thinking differs significantly regarding their audiences and stakeholders.
- A team member, or some team members, already have a strong feeling about what the right solution is and they are pushing their team to conform to their idea.
- Teams have hopes for scaling a project globally but have not started by thinking about where they might practically begin or how different communities, regions, and countries might hold very different needs or react very differently to the proposed concepts.
This lack of clarity means that much of their time is spent helping teams better understand their project goals rather than actually addressing the problems they are trying to solve. Teams needed more support in the groundwork that leads to good design: generative conversations to explore, better understand, and articulate the community they’re working for or with; the needs they’re addressing; and their underlying goals.
Nadia and Thomas began to wonder, How might we guide teams to be able to more quickly and efficiently clarify and align around their strategic goals? How might our coaches guide teams to more quickly identify where design can be incorporated and leveraged for greater clarity and impact?
This led them to create Scopey, in partnership with developers at Enchatted, to help leaders and practitioners scope and refine how they approach human-centered design projects. Scopey helps you clarify your strategy and scope your design project.
Scopey is built from the existing d.school Scoping Guide. The bot walks teams through the same kinds of conversations that come up in our live workshops—built upon clarifying questions that help teams to name and narrow the work they are doing.
Scopey starts by asking five questions:
1. The Problem. What issue do you want to address? Who does itimpact and why?
2. The Change. What change do you want to create and for whom?
3. The Stakeholders. For which group of people are you designing?
4. The Place. Where are you focusing?
5. The Goal. What key questions are you trying to answer about human experiences, behaviors, motivations, or beliefs or what assumptions are you trying to test?
Scopey then engages the user in a generative conversation, asking clarifying questions as a way to help them get clarification on their goals. Scopey can then help the user determine which design tools will be best for them given their context, questions, and goals.
Unlike most AI tools, which are designed to offer answers, this tool is specifically designed to ask clarifying questions—both about the project and about the design work. What’s also different about Scopey is that it doesn’t capture and use the data it’s being fed—it’s built solely on the d.school’s own materials.
While in-person conversation will always be Thomas and Nadia’s preferred method of teaching and coaching, Scopey is invaluable as an on-demand resource that can be an excellent introduction to the kind of human-centered design work we teach at the d.school. The team is currently exploring ways to share the resource with a broader audience.
Credits
Thomas Both and Nadia Roumani
Art by Amélie Tour