The brief rarely says: design something that strengthens society. It says: improve adoption, reduce friction, ship by Friday. So where does social good actually fit in?
Products need to work. Businesses need to survive. Teams have budgets and deadlines. These are not excuses. They are the actual conditions under which design happens. And the question of how to do meaningful work within those conditions is more interesting to me than the question of whether it is possible.
I think it is possible. But it usually requires changing the question, not just the intention.
The Farmer Problem
For a long time, a question came up regularly in conversations at SatSure: why do we not design directly for farmers? Satellite data can tell us a great deal about crop health, soil conditions, and weather risk. Farmers need better information, better advisory, better tools to make decisions about their land and their livelihood. The social good case was obvious.
The commercial reality was harder. Delivering that information directly to individual farmers, at a price point they could afford, was not financially viable. The numbers did not work.
So we had to ask a different question: who else benefits from farmers having better information?
The answer was the institutions that lend to them and insure them. Banks and insurance companies pay to evaluate farms and farmers before making lending or coverage decisions. If a farmer is managing their land well, they are a better financial risk. If satellite data can make that evaluation faster, more accurate, and more scalable, the institution benefits and the farmer, as a result, gets access to better credit, better insurance, and better terms.
We could not design for farmers directly. So we designed for the system that serves them. The social good was real. It just arrived through a different path than the one we had originally imagined.
What This Taught Me About Briefs
That experience changed how I think about the brief. The original framing was: design for farmers. The viable framing was: design for the decision-makers who determine what farmers can access. Same ultimate beneficiary. Very different design problem.
Good intentions do not automatically produce good outcomes. An intervention designed with strong social intent can still fail to create social value if the design does not fit the actual context in which it has to operate. The intention can sit at the top of the organisation. The outcome happens at ground level. And there can be a significant distance between the two.
This is where designers have a specific responsibility. Not to make every product a social-impact project. Not to reject commercial goals. But to keep asking what those goals are actually producing in the real world.
The Questions Worth Adding to the Brief
We already ask whether something is usable, efficient, adoptable, and scalable. Perhaps we can also ask: what are we enabling? What behaviour are we reinforcing? Who becomes more capable because of this system, and who becomes more dependent on it? What happens when the context around it changes? And are we building something that can learn and adapt, or something that becomes wrong the moment the world shifts?
Those are not social impact questions that sit outside the work. They are product questions. They just ask us to look a little further than the immediate transaction.
The farmer problem did not get solved by ignoring commercial reality. It got solved by finding a path through it that kept the original intent alive. That required understanding the system, not just the user. And it required being willing to let the brief expand until it described the actual problem, not just the convenient one.
Maybe that is a practical place to start. Not changing the work entirely. Just changing the questions we bring into it.
Dr. Idrees Chasi's Thinking City framework, with its focus on connected learning, community-first thinking, and designing systems that can adapt, is what gave this line of thinking a sharper frame for me. The ideas scale beyond cities. They apply to any product that eventually becomes part of someone's life.