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Through our international fellowship, we implement a process of embedded design. The embedded design process focuses on building relationships and fostering local ownership of solutions. Often these solutions take the form of enterprises—delivering positive social, environmental, and health impacts while generating income for community members.

Fellows are an integral part of our partnerships with Indian non-profit organizations, using skills where they are needed, wanted, and crucial to the solution. They provide on-the-ground, full time support during their ten month fellowship. As our fellows work with partner organizations to develop community-driven ideas, organizations build their capacity to implement solutions, embedding the design process in their activities.

The specific methods we use vary by scope, but all of our projects follow a similar pattern outlined below:

Over time, each project goes through the following process:

• Immersion
  DI Fellows are trained to enter the community and identify design opportunities with the partner organization. They conduct background research, understand the context of the project, and develop a project scope this is feasible, functional, and, most importantly, beneficial for the community.
• Transformation
  DI Fellows work with the organization through the design process, applying methods such as brainstorming, user research, visualization, and prototyping. This process is supported by DI staff and members of the consultant network, who provide components such as engineering, marketing, user research, or strategic planning. To read more about the consultant network, click here.
• Implementation
  A design isn’t finished until someone is using it: which is why we stay with our partners through implementation, living and working in the same community. Once a solution is ready for implementation, our diverse team of fellows, partners, staff, and consultants from our network work closely together to ensure a sustainably funded and distributed product or service. This often entails connecting to small enterprise partners.
• Fortification
  The project work is fortified through the ongoing processes of measuring impact and organizational capacity-building, empowering new leaders, and institutionalizing the design process as a problem-solving method. Embedding the design process within organizational structure improves the efficacy of services provided and is one of the central goals of the Design Impact process.