Christopher Simmons invited me to write something for his upcoming book on good design called, well… The Good Design Book. My short essay is based on work we did inspired by a conversation I had with NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger:

Seek.

Innovation doesn’t pop out at the end of a PowerPoint presentation.

Innovation is personal. It happens at the extreme margins of enterprise, where no one knows what the exact problems are because the maps are blank. Send a designer out there and they’ll come back with something nobody’s ever seen - or a prototype that fulfills a need you didn’t even know existed.

You never really know what’s out there. That’s what’s the problem with hiring problem solvers - a definition for designers as crippling as it is outdated. The great problems, the ones really worth solving, aren’t already on the agenda. Innovation is personal: if we are open, curious, and empathetic, the great problems find us.

The water problem found me in 2007, although I didn’t know it at the time. John Bielenberg had invited me to go down to Greensboro, Alabama, with his remarkable program Project M. Project M is like a self-guided Outward Bound course for socially conscious designers. A team of young designers parachute into a poor or challenged area and then are left to discover a problem that they can solve in 30 days. Nobody tells them what to do. Or even what the problem is. They live with local families, look around, talk to people, and find something they can put their hand to that will do some good.

They become problem seekers.

In Hale County we discovered that one family in four had no access to safe water. Some of them were going to the local Texaco station with buckets because the water they had pumped from their back yards for generations had become full of foul waste from the county’s biggest employers. A thousand families couldn’t get clean city water because they couldn’t afford the $425 hook-up for a water meter. Getting these people meters was what the designers decided to do. They created communications and a website to bring national attention – and money for meters – to Hale County. They’ve connected over 100 families so far. That’s not a bad month’s work for a brand new design team.

After my experience in Alabama, I started seeing water crises everywhere. Half of China’s cities have water shortages and 700 million people drink contaminated water daily. The World Bank calculates that 30 million people will have to relocate by 2020. 30 million “water refugees.” In Mexico’s Tehuacán Valley, where humans first domesticated corn, there is no longer enough water to grow corn. In rural Africa, one woman in five spends two hours a day fetching water on foot from wells miles away. There are Hale Counties all over the world.

In 2008, NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger and I shared some of these water stories at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Four months in orbit aboard space station Mir, looking down at Earth’s shrinking river systems made Jerry a water hawk, too. Although water wasn’t at the top of the agenda in Davos, it quickly emerged as the axis that connects many of the other problems that were. By itself, the lack of safe water unleashes all four horsemen of the apocalypse: death, famine, pestilence, and war. In fact, the U.N. predicted outright conflict over water in the next five years.

So Jerry and I, with the support of the driven journalists’ organization Circle of Blue, invited a group of global thought leaders to explore this issue in a quickly organized work session at Davos. They already knew the global to-do list was pretty full. We needed to come up with our own resources to put more effort into fighting these water crises. Design students are one of Earth’s abundant resources, so we set out to engage them. Working in partnership with INDEX: Design to Improve Life and AIGA, we invited 10,000 of them from around the world to participate in The Aspen Design Challenge: Designing Water’s Future.

These students would be our dandelion seeds. More than 700 students from 28 countries sought and provided 225 water solutions that did not exist before. The best of them were then shaped for venture capital and presented at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Efforts like Project M and The Aspen Challenge are creating an architecture of participation outside of traditional silos. Today, an increasing number of influential networks of designers are emerging with a desire to make a tangible difference in people’s lives. As a discipline, design is transcending the traditional “service” roles of the institutions that employ us. Designers work at human scale. For a designer, the obligation to make life better with workable, tangible solutions is immediate, personal, and direct. And while institutions are very good at making lots more of something that already exists, they are not as good at inventing the new.

Fortunately, rapid prototyping systems have transformed the designer’s role. Now we can move out of the Concept Business and into the Real-World Solutions Business faster than we had ever imagined.

Within a single generation of designers, the cost of creating innovative solutions for small groups of people has become almost trivial. Now every designer can be a factory where the future is made.

What we can see, we can solve.

And we’ll all see a lot more far beyond our office walls.