Failing Forward: When do we Risk Creating Harm when Our Intent is Rapid Learning?

Business and startup jargon, methods, and spaces such as R&D, prototyping, pretotyping, rapid experimentation, and innovation labs have grown in the social impact sector for more than the past decade.

As we interrogate practices of design that have permeated the social impact realm, how might we also interrogate practices that support rapid testing, and "shallow experimentation and prototyping on what are wicked problems — problems like climate change, early childhood education, affordable housing, and various public health issues."

The quoted text above and this topic have been inspired by and taken from the article, by Louise Adongo, Have You Thought About the Harm Your Social R&D Project Might Cause?

Adongo goes on to question, "What happens when we lose sight of people in favour of innovation? When, for example, we go into a community with intent to prototype a ‘promising’ brand-new program, try out brand-new ways of delivering that program, learn a lot of useful information — then leave? What if the program fails? For whom does it hold promise? What promises? And who bears the brunt and costs of the ‘safe’ failures which inevitably happen in experimentation and innovation?"

Our three fantastic speakers,

Louise Adongo, Executive Director of Inspiring Communities,

Mojdeh Cox, Community Builder, Advisor & Leader

Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook, PhD, Director, Centre for Indigenous Innovation & Technology; Co-Director at Participatory Canada

will dive into this topic and explore our current practices, the benefits and challenges of these practices, and what we might do differently.