From design challenges to impact
Stby’s longtime partner What Design Can Do (WDCD), is an international organisation that seeks to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, fair and just society using the power of design. Since 2015, WDCD has created design challenges for the international creative community to tackle the world’s most pressing issues. Over the last decade, they have crafted a process that makes a difference in the lives of designers working towards climate and social impact.
The project aims to help people move their impact-driven projects forward, advocate for the power of design, and collaborate across disciplines
With support from ClickNL and academic insight from the Centre of Expertise Creative Innovation, WDCD and Stby are currently in the process of looking back at the last seven design challenges to identify the key learnings about how the WDCD design challenge process helps designers to make an impact. Ultimately, the aim of this project is to turn these insights into a product that the design community and professionals working in the climate/social justice sectors can learn from and use in their practices.
Turning a decade of work into insightful content
The main challenge of this project for Stby has been to excavate the knowledge within WDCD and distil this information into content that is relevant and actionable for others working in this space. This has included document review and analysis of the WDCD archive, interviews with the WDCD team and their network, interviews with professionals working in the creative and climate/social justice sectors and sense-checking workshops with the project team to ensure the insights are reflecting their process and learnings.
This project is now at the point where the core content has been created and is being transformed into a useful format for the community to benefit from.
Coming soon…
WDCD and Stby are working together to turn these insights into a product that anyone who wants to work across the design and climate/social impact spaces can use in their work. The project aims to help people move their impact-driven projects forward, advocate for the power of design, and collaborate across disciplines – all of which are skills that WDCD has learned and refined over the years.
Our teams are working together on the final production of this project over the summer of 2025 and aim to launch it in the fall.