What if you made something that transformed the health and wellbeing of those in your care, but never put it into the world? Would anyone be better for it?
That’s the question (answered!) by the third in our series of Design Foundations: deployment.
Welcome to The Design Loft #61, where, just like a stool, we need that third leg to keep ourselves level.
Deployment is the last of the three foundations of design and is often the most ignored. How often have you been involved in a project that sounds great, has even been workshopped and prototyped, and then is greeted by “we’ll take that under advisement” ?
As a designer, I’ve created programs of many types, with research, stakeholder involvement and codesign, and lots of testing and market research only to see it die on the vine. The reasons are many, including fear (what if it doesn’t work? or what if it does work?), lack of planning (i.e., resources for design, not deployment), or a mismatch between what we create and when it is to be used and implemented.
Many of these issues are ones that are commonly called knowledge to action issues. But deployment isn’t just about knowledge or evidence, it’s taking that and the ideas for how to use it and putting it into the contexts in which it was intended. It’s about taking action.
It’s about taking our work and making it public. It’s what Seth Godin calls Shipping.
Shipping Our Work
To ship our work is the act of courage of putting what we make into the world, and it’s comprised of the following activities:
Market. To market is to bring together intelligence about who you are selling to, what they will pay (in time, energy, money, attention, social capital) to acquire or use your product/service/policy, and how to ensure those audiences know about what you’re offering and how to access it. This is a lot, but it’s critical to ensuring that good ideas are put into practice. Among the biggest mistakes that designers make is that they assume great ideas, quality production, strong evidence and innovation sell themselves; it doesn’t.
Distribute. Another often overlooked feature of design is distribution. There are often times when you have the right product, a willing buyer, and few means to get it to them. Whether it’s digital delivery, physical transportation, or even localized within-organization distribution, there has to be pathways to ensure what it made reaches the people and settings where it can be used.
Implement & Activate. The last part of this production-to-distribution journey is in implementation. Just as product don’t sell themselves, so too do products acquired lead to use. A great patient recovery plan doesn’t help them if it’s not followed. Clinical practice guidelines aren’t useful if not integrated into systems. This is the implementation and activation of people and systems to ensure that they are put into practice as designed.
Assess. What happens when you do all of this? That’s what evaluation is all about. Evaluation is a structured approach to gathering evidence and feedback that’s used to determine what is being done (outputs), whether our design is working to achieve certain goals (outcomes), how (process and delivery insights), and to what end (impact). Assessment involves asking the question about the merit, significance, and worth of our efforts.
Practice Notes
Many readers working in the health sector will note the similarities of the deployment phase to many of the knowledge X practices (e.g., transfer, translation, integration, mobilization). If those models work in your context, use them.
Among the most critical skills required for deployment are relational and communicative. Among the reasons to consider participatory and co-design approaches to developing things is that it builds relationship capital with those involved in the design process. That process is more likely to yield the kind of attention, focus, and commitment needed to market, distribute, and implement a designed thing into a setting.
Having a good business model helps. The work of Osterwalder and colleagues on the Business Model Generation canvas is a simple, direct tool that can help you design one in a short period of time (it’s freely available). Note that concepts like selling, buying and business model don’t necessarily mean for-profit healthcare.
Even charities and non-profits have to create such models and thinking if they want to “buy” attention, donations, volunteer hours, committment, action, political will (and no, this isn’t about bribery). For example, when you’re doomscrolling, you’re paying for something with your attention. Your clinical manager might be paying for a choice of action; and you, as a designer, are trying to give them a better, more preferred option.
Another critical skill is systems thinking in action. Creating systems is as much about taking the individual responsibility out of the hands of people and putting into the system to make it easier to integrate what we make into practice, rather than relying on a series of individual-level decisions made by people who have limited sightlines on the topic or interest, no matter how experienced or well-meaning.
For those working in design contexts, I’d highly recommend the recent book by Scott Berkun and Bryan Zug, Why Design is Hard, for examples of the behavioural and social factors that go into selling, persuading, and pushing designs into the world.
Great designers ship, but make sure to design the conditions to make it so.
Need help or a place to start for your organization for design or a business model canvas, let’s talk (click below).
We’ll be exploring all of these in future posts. Thanks for reading and hanging out with me in The Design Loft.
References:
Lipton, B., Bailie, J., Dickinson, H., Hewitt, B., Cooper, E., Kavanagh, A., Aitken, Z., & Shields, M. (2025). Codesign is the zeitgeist of our time, but what do we mean by this? A scoping review of the concept of codesign in collaborative research with young people. Health research policy and systems, 23(1), 54. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-025-01328-6
Straus, S. E., Tetroe, J., & Graham, I. (2009). Defining knowledge translation. CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l'Association medicale canadienne, 181(3-4), 165–168. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.081229
Wutzke, S., Roberts, N., Willis, C., Best, A., Wilson, A., & Trochim, W. (2017). Setting strategy for system change: using concept mapping to prioritise national action for chronic disease prevention. Health research policy and systems, 15(1), 69. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-017-0231-7