People often ask me where I get the confidence—and even the audacity—to take on, launch, and lead large-scale, global “design for good” initiatives aimed at making the world a better place. It was one project that started it all: the Covid-19 Design Challenge.
It was the approach to that project—and the impact it had—that was transformative. It gave me not just the confidence, but also the blueprint for every initiative that followed—including the use of IBM’s powerful Enterprise Design Thinking framework. Each initiative began with a deeply held personal commitment, grew through the formation of the right partnerships, and came to life by inspiring and leading large groups of passionate professionals who volunteered their time and talent to make a difference.
PERSONAL COMMITMENT
I’ve always believed that the skills of designers and researchers shouldn’t be used solely to boost the bottom line of companies—what I refer to as feeding your wallet. I believe we also have a moral responsibility to apply those same skills in the service of humanity and the planet—to feed the soul. And those designers and researchers need to use the powerful framework of design thinking to have maximum impact. I had for several years been helping to transform IBM with our version—Enterprise Design Thinking—and many other organizations, as well as teaching the framework as an Industry Professor. I’d also used it to address small scale “design for good” projects with hackathons and university design challenges. So I knew that our form of design thinking worked.
DESIGN FOR AMERICA KEYNOTE
I shared these views in my closing keynote at the Design for America Conference in Chicago in the fall of 2019, where I issued a call to action: for designers and researchers to feed their souls by applying their skills to the world’s most urgent challenges. Just four months later, the world was plunged into the COVID-19 pandemic—and I saw that as our moment. The time had come to turn words into action.
COVID-19 DESIGN CHALLENGE
LIKE-MINDED PARTNERS
As the world began to reel from the emerging pandemic, I connected with Srini Srinivasan, then President of the World Design Organization, who was already thinking along similar lines. I also reached out to Rebecca Breuer, then Executive Director of Design for America who had experience with design-for-good initiatives but nothing on this scale. Fortunately, both were all in. The momentum has begun.
LIKE-MINDED VOLUNTEERS
I rallied the design community at IBM, and more than 100 incredible colleagues stepped up. Srini and Rebecca brought in another 125 volunteers from their networks. Together, we co-led a powerful initiative, powered by IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking Coaches and supported by equally dedicated professionals from around the world. It became a masterclass in rapid, creative, collaborative problem-solving on a global scale.
DOING THE WORK
In just three weeks, we delivered. We launched social media campaigns, created tools, and activated community-driven solutions that had immediate, meaningful, real-world impact.
A HUGE THANK YOU
I want to express my deepest gratitude and a huge thank you to each and every member of our Covid-19 Design Challenge team! Your belief in the vision—and your willingness to act—proved what’s possible when design and research are harnessed not just for commerce, but for compassion and positive global impact.
If you’re not aware of the initiative, please take a moment to explore the remarkable people behind the effort, and see examples of the solutions they brought to life on our Covid-19 Design Challenge website. You an also read personal stories from the participants for whom the experience was a personal and professional life changing one, as it was for me.
confidence to do other audacious things
IBM SPARK DESIGN FESTIVAL
One of participants in the Covid-19 Design Challenge—Felix Portnoy—was so moved by the spirit of collaboration and purpose that he proposed a bold idea: a design festival to celebrate and build on that momentum inside IBM. With my guidance and support, the IBM Spark Design Festival was born—and quickly became an annual global event, bringing together IBM’s 3,000-strong design community around creativity, inspiration, and impact.
FUTURE OF DESIGN EDUCATION
As I spent time working with design schools and design faculty within universities, it became clear to me that design education needed to significantly change—to better prepare graduates for today’s workplace, but also to equip them take responsibility for having positive impact on the world.
That idea crystallized during a weekend in San Diego when I spoke with design visionary Don Norman, who shared my concerns and had already done some thinking and writing on the subject. I asked Don if he’d like to join forces to take on this challenge. He replied, without hesitation: “Let’s do it.” That’s how the Future of Design Education initiative was born.
Three weeks later, over a dinner in Toronto, Don and I selected the people we wanted to have on our Steering Committee, half from academia and half from practice. We spent most of a year structuring the initiative, identifying the challenges to be addressed, and clarifying what we wanted it to achieve together with the members of the steering committee.
It was the successful experience with the Covid-19 Design Challenge that led us to issue a call for volunteers that 697 people responded to. We used the responses from the applications to form working groups and while we didn’t use the full playbook, we did use the whole group of volunteers to provide input and feedback.
All that work resulted in the creation of curricular guidance for design education which was published in a special issue of the She Ji, TheJournal of Design, Economics, and Innovation.
HABITS FOR A BETTER WORLD
I was contacted by a Garret Chan, an executive at Tealeaves, a fascinating, high-end, sustainability-focused tea company based in Vancouver, Canada. Like me, Garret and his organization had collaborated with both the United Nations and Design for America. He proposed we do something together on a project focused on biodiversity loss, and exploring further development a design toolkit that his team had created.
We had several calls, but the direction hadn’t quite crystallized. During one of those calls, I offered to travel to Vancouver to meet in person. That’s when one of the team members on the call spoke up and said, “Karel, I’m actually based in Toronto.”
That person was Carly Williams, a phenomenal filmmaker and producer known for crafting beautiful, informative, and deeply impactful documentaries for Tealeaves and beyond.
Carly and I met for lunch, then continued the conversation in my office all afternoon. We quickly realized we were kindred spirits—aligned on a shared deep desire to address the world’s most pressing challenges: climate change, human and animal suffering, illness, food insecurity, and more with our combined skills of design, research, and filmmaking. We started by co-leading a small-scale Biodiversity Toolkit workshop at OCAD University as part of the DesignTO Conference, while quietly laying the groundwork for something far more ambitious.
Following the same playbook I had used for previous initiatives, I posted a call for volunteers on LinkedIn. The response was overwhelming: 60,000 impressions, 600 reactions, and 450 applications. From that, we formed a core team of 300 volunteers, and Habits for a Better World was born.
Since then, the team has conducted multiple research studies, generated and storyboarded inspiring solutions, and we are now entering the production phase—bringing these ideas to life to spark meaningful, global behavior change.
See more about the project and our progress on our website.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Each of these projects was made possible because of one extraordinary experience: the Covid-19 Design Challenge. That initiative didn’t just prove that large-scale, volunteer-driven impact was possible—it became the blueprint for how design, research, and now filmmaking can be harnessed to help build a better world guided by properly executed design thinking.
It showed what’s possible when committed individuals come together with intention, skills, and impact.
So once again—to everyone who contributed to that first bold step: a huge thank you! You helped light the path for everything that followed.