Validating desirability

A great benefit of understanding social value is that you will be better positioned to undertake a human-centred design approach. Human-centred design focuses on desirability before anything else. To focus on desirability and people’s needs, you need to understand who you are designing for. This group of people becomes your audience. This audience are the ones that are affected by your innovative opportunity. This means it is crucial that you understand their problem, and know if your opportunity will address this problem and is one worth solving. Will they actually care if this opportunity is addressed? Asking this question is important as it can help you understand if your innovative opportunity will have a customer. This is because if the audience wants the problem to be solved, you know they will more than likely pay money for it. Therefore, your audience will become your customer.

This process is known as validating desirability. Many new ideas and startups fail because they launch and can’t find anyone to buy their invention. If they’d validated the desirability beforehand, they would have been able to adapt or pivot and create something that their audience desired.