Interview with Robert Fabricant

Robert Fabricant is the Vice President of Creative for frog design where he leads frog's efforts to expand the impact of design into new markets and industries. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert is lead partner in Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the power of mobile technology to combat the world's worst HIV and AIDS epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Robert is an adjunct professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts where he teaches a foundation course in Interaction Design. In 2009, he joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York and is a faculty member of the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellowship Program. His work has been featured in a wide variety of publications, including I.D. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired and he is a guest blogger for Fast Company.

When was the first time you used your professional skills to help a nonprofit?

My first job out of college was in the nonprofit sector doing community organizing for a legal nonprofit in New York City. Since then, it has always been in my mind to find a way to bring my creative endeavors in line with a social mission - not make it a separate, elective activity. I wanted to demonstrate that the two were intimately and strategically connected. This experience taught me the need to engage directly with communities and work on the ground with local partners. Not to imagine solutions from afar. To learn directly from the communities and people that I was trying to organize. My experience in design has only confirmed that belief.

My early work in the public sector also introduced me to the challenges social impact organizations face in trying to deliver on their immediate programs, leaving little time for strategic planning and innovation. I will never forget trying to find the time to write grant proposals to reframe our strategy for funders while trying to stay on top of the day-to-day needs of the volunteer groups that I was organizing. This experience helped me to understand how to make design relevant to nonprofits. It also gave me the patience to work with frog management to put the pieces together for our social impact initiatives.

What is one example of a pro bono project you have personally worked on?

Our pro bono work is defined by social impact, not nonprofits. We work with a range of organizations and entrepreneurs to help them evolve and scale their programs. Most recently, we have been working with an entrepreneur in Kenya named Nigel Waller who has developed a new technology, MXShare that has the potential for tremendous social impact by broadening access to mobile services for people who can't afford a handset. It is an interesting initiative because it has real business potential (opening up the market further for mobile carriers in emerging markets) and social potential (as these customers can access their account and services from any handset, making it much easier to communicate with family and friends or employers). MXShare also provides new layers of privacy that may allow people to interact differently with health services and even address the significant gender imbalance in mobile access that is pervasive at the base of the pyramid.

This collaboration provided a unique, incredible opportunity for our team to learn about new forms of behavior emerging around shared phone use and explore issues of identity and privacy that extend way beyond mobile services. We agreed to work with Nigel and MoVirtu to see if we could help him make this service more appealing and easier to use.

Our team spent a week doing design research in Kibera, the largest urban slum in Nairobi. During that time we tested out various ways to organize and present information in this new service. We also looked beyond the mobile service itself to explore the types of support tools and messaging that would help users understand the benefits of MXShare and manage their account. For a relatively small investment of our team, we gained first-hand experience that is of great interest to our clients and broadens our perspective regarding the potential impact of the mobile technologies that we design each day.

How does your team at Frog engage in pro bono service?

There are two levels of engagement that generally apply. The first level, in which I tend to be the most active, is an alignment phase. This phase is all about defining the right collaboration model, understanding the culture and values of our partner and making sure that there is a good match of resources, objectives, skills and expectations. This is the part that most people don’t see, but it can take weeks, months or even years to lay the groundwork before a team can directly engage. It is always a mistake to enter into these relationships unless that trust has been built and tested.

Along the way we may test out some low impact ways to engage with the partner, such as running ideation workshops; helping them plan research or other activities; providing some basic design recommendations. These activities can be a great way to build trust between an organization and our team before we collaborate in the field. To be honest, frog team members will often extend this type of support into their personal time, out of their passion and commitment to the mission of the partner organization.

Out of these more casual interactions we are looking to identify meaningful, high impact opportunities to partner more deeply over a longer period. Despite the hype surrounding ‘Design Thinking,’ meaningful impact is not created in a single workshop or session. It requires a meaningful partnership and commitment over time. These early collaborations are the best way to ensure that there is a meaningful commitment on both sides. 

How would you describe the state of pro bono in the field of design?

There is a huge amount of interest within the design community right now for meaningful collaborations that have broad social impact. This is creating many, many opportunities at the grassroots level, but designers are still learning about how to make these partnerships truly effective and sustainable.

Designers tend to overestimate the value of cool ideas and underestimate the time and effort to really reach and impact a community. My biggest concern is that we are too quick to celebrate our efforts before they have had a meaningful impact and that this will erode trust with our partners. My biggest wish is that foundations will get more involved and provide the seed funding to subsidize the collaborations. While Rockefeller and others have shown some interest, we are generally left to our own devices to make these partnerships work.

What have you seen to be the top needs of nonprofits when it comes to design support?

We tend to work with a specific class of nonprofits – social entrepreneurs. One of the things that I have learned quickly about this community is that they are extremely creative, lateral thinkers. We often use very specific methods with our corporate clients to get them to think in more innovative and unexpected ways. This is hardly necessary with social entrepreneurs. What we do find pretty consistently is that entrepreneurs have very little time to synthesize what they are learning as they build out their program. They have many ideas that they would like to try and test, and little bandwidth to pursue them so they fall by the wayside.

Social entrepreneurs generally lack a larger framework for integrating the different pieces of their initiative. We find that it is pretty productive to apply the frameworks that we use with our clients (ecosystem maps, customer journey maps, service design blueprints, product roadmaps) to their initiatives. We can help entrepreneurs construct a more holistic view of their program and see how the pieces fit together, particularly as they consider the larger ecosystem involving the marketing and distribution of different products and services. 

These tools invariably help our partners get a clearer picture of what they DON’T know about the communities and partners they are working with. We can then advise and/or participate in the follow-up research to better understand the needs of constituents and identify ways to serve them better. In particular, there is usually room to improve the way that they engage with communities. We can help them develop more creative strategies to motivate behavior change through non-traditional mechanisms like mobile devices. While the social entrepreneurship community has embraced the idea of treating their audience as customers, they often lack the creative skills to inspire and provoke a meaningful response. This can be a fun place for us to play.

How will design professionals be doing pro bono work in 2020?

I think that we have a lot to learn. Designers are not good at maintaining their focus over a long period of time. This is one of the reasons that we are not often good social entrepreneurs ourselves, despite a high degree of creativity and empathy. Designers like to participate in creative reinvention and not the long tail of prolonged engagement.

I am hoping, by 2020, that we will have learned this lesson. That we will not celebrate ideas before they have achieved any meaningful impact. That designers and design firms will adopt areas of focus that they are truly passionate about and stick with them. That we will use our creative energies to keep our community motivated and engaged, and not just chase the ‘next mission.’ That we will harness a broader community of ideas and nontraditional participants, like the open source software community, to contribute to meaningful change. And that we will have established a relevant knowledge base so that we can finally start learning from each other and not reinventing sustainability every year.

With this maturity I am hoping new funding sources will emerge. And that large institutions like Gates and Ashoka will see design as a powerful and essential ingredient to accelerate the impact of their investments. Frankly, I hope we can get there a lot sooner than 2020.