Welcome to the Design Loft: your design school for health and social impact.
In our last issue, we focused on trends from the past year and forecasts for 2026 in design and health.
Today, we’re exploring what the brightest minds in design and social impact paid attention to in 2025 and what they’re anticipating for 2026.
As we close out 2025, let’s take the pulse on design and social impact.
The Year That Was (And Is to Come)
2025 marked a turning point for many things. AI was everywhere, and yet, after years of hype, we’re seeing a reality check. Social upheaval is more spread out, globalization is on the wane, and the climate — literal and figurative — for impact-oriented design is in a state of more profound flux than ever. Yet what we see when we look at the trends is a counterbalancing set of forces building to slow us down and to take a more principled approach to the work of designing (and evaluating) for impact.
The field isn’t moving toward shiny new methodologies—instead, 2026 demands more profound commitment to established principles: genuine partnership, systemic understanding, and the courage to share power. AI is playing a role, but it may not be the star.
According to FSG’s annual social impact forecast, IDEO.org’s latest thinking, and insights from Carnegie Mellon’s Transition Design Institute, the landscape is shifting in profound ways.
The AI Paradox: Promise Meets Reality
AI advanced rapidly in 2025, but so did the backlash. Just recently, we saw how the introduction of public-facing AI tools to capture private life could yield wide-scale opposition.
Venngage’s research found that 40% of designers worry about authenticity and human connection with AI-generated content, 36% worry about accuracy, and 27% about ethics. The public is actively rejecting dystopian AI ads and celebrating platforms like Pinterest that let them toggle AI content off. The recent pushback against AI-generated advertisements for McDonald’s and Coca-Cola reinforces this point.
Rather than wholesale rejection, experts predict a “balanced portfolio” approach for 2026. As Lippincott notes, just as we mix organic and processed foods, we’ll blend AI efficiency with human creativity.
What this means for you: AI moves from experiment to infrastructure, but humans stay in charge of story, ethics, and community. The winners in 2026 will use AI for speed while keeping people at the center of meaning-making.
Trust Has Gone Local
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed a crisis: 61% of people globally believe government serves narrow interests. National institutions are losing credibility fast.
The response? Place-based work is having its moment.
Courtney W. Robertson from the Collective Impact Forum is clear: “Without a doubt, take the local route…. With heightened distrust in national government and stronger trust in local government—a pattern we see globally—continuing to invest locally in the everyday people, institutions, and civic infrastructure necessary to drive meaningful change remains critical.”
The challenge for 2026: Building place-based work that achieves scale without sacrificing the trust and relationships that make it effective.
From Users to Co-Creators
The most significant philosophical shift? Moving from “user-centred” to “community-centred” design.
IDEO puts it this way: “Rather than just gathering user feedback on potential solutions, the people we design for will increasingly become part of design, implementation and evaluation.”
The 2026 Participatory Design Conference in Milan makes this explicit with its theme “Designing for Living Together,” framing participatory design as an agent of peace and dialogue. Critically, they note that “peace is not a product, but a process.” This could be an event that both reflects and shapes the trend we’re seeing in co-creation in design for social impact.
What changes:
From consultation to decision-making power
From research subjects to co-designers with authority
From extracting knowledge to sharing power
Dori Tunstall’s groundbreaking book “Decolonizing Design” challenges us to ask: what are you willing to give up so that marginalized communities can finally hold real positions of power? Tunstall, a former Dean of Design at OCADU, is providing guidance on what this new model can look like.
Systems Thinking Becomes Essential
Harvard Business Review published “Why You Need Systems Thinking Now” in September 2025, arguing that innovations often have hidden costs that require understanding interdependencies. It’s been a while since we’ve seen the term “systems thinking” profiled in a high-ranking publication like HBR; this signals a shift back from myopic attention to screens to the broader systems around us.
Carnegie Mellon’s Transition Design Institute is leading this shift, preparing its largest-ever doctoral cohort to tackle wicked problems through systems-level change. Their 5th International Conference in Mexico City (July 2026) focuses on “Weaving Regenerative Futures.”
The RSA’s influential report identifies the core problem: many social innovations experience a “systems immune response”—complex barriers render innovations unused. Their solution: “think like a system, act like an entrepreneur.”
For designers: You need to map ecosystems beyond the screen, identify feedback loops, and zoom in and out between micro-interactions and macro-level goals.
Evaluation Gets Real (and Messy)
The wholesale dismantling of USAID and the evaluation work it supported gutted large swaths of the international development and aid community work worldwide. With this went one of the biggest bodies of evaluation practice. Add to that the reductions in health and human service evaluation work, and the gift that the United States gave the world through leadership has been taken away from us all, citizens of the world and Americans alike.
Still, work goes on, and the other word (besides cuts) for 2025 was: impact.
Impact measurement is transforming rapidly:
Mandatory reporting: The UK Procurement Act 2023 and EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive are making social impact disclosure required, not optional (GIST Impact)
New methodologies: Developmental Evaluation and Adaptive Evaluation are gaining traction for complex, uncertain environments where traditional methods fall short (Better Evaluation)
Community ownership: Evaluation must shift “from participant inclusion to ownership in evaluation decision making” (Better Evaluation, 2025)
Benevity’s data shows nearly two-thirds of companies significantly shifted their corporate purpose strategies in 2025. For 2026, Lakshmi Iyer at FSG predicts CSR leaders will become “enterprise leaders who must experiment, prove value, and translate purpose into business relevance.”
What matters:
Embed evaluation from the start, not bolt it on at the end
Mix numbers with stories—qualitative insights are just as crucial
Measure before, during, and after to enable real-time learning
As Just Enterprise advises: “Consistent quarterly data beats a glossy but one-off survey every three years.”
Authenticity Over Polish
Here’s a trend you’ve probably seen in your social feeds: as AI gets better at creating perfect visuals, people are craving messy humanity.
Adobe’s research found 64% of designers consciously seek “human” visual elements to balance digital fatigue. Kittl’s 2026 trends report documents the rise of grainy blur, distorted portraits, and organic imperfection.
Jordan Tennenbaum from Talkdesk captures it: “Be creative, be fun, focus on people, and avoid sharing boring, cookie-cutter, robotic marketing content.”
The aforementioned backlash against AI advertisements and “actors” reflects the deep dislike people have for these new tools.
Want something that reflects impact, messiness, and forward-thinking (as well as some wry humour?) Chris Lysy’s Fresh Spectrum cartoons and visual communication work do this as well as anyone.
The insight: People see themselves in real experience, not AI perfection. Your evaluation reports, your design presentations, your community engagement—they all need more humanity, less polish.
Looking Ahead to 2026
If 2025 was about trying everything, 2026 is about deciding what you’re willing to stand for and systematize.
Key themes for design practice:
Depth over breadth: Stop chasing trends; commit to principles
Test less, learn more: Give experiments room to breathe—at least four weeks
Human in the loop: AI for speed and rote work, people for meaning and creative skill building.
Community ownership: Real co-design, not consultation theatre
Systemic patience: Meaningful change takes time
Key themes for evaluation:
Embedded learning over external judgment
Complexity-appropriate methods for innovation and uncertainty
Mixed methods as standard—numbers AND stories
Equity in evidence—whose knowledge counts?
Real-time feedback that enables adaptation
Most of these could be insights from any year in recent memory, but the lessons still hold.
What This Means for Your Work
For health professionals working in complex systems, these trends offer clear direction:
Frame complexity as an opportunity. Your lived experience navigating healthcare’s unpredictability is exactly what design thinking for social impact needs.
Embrace embedded evaluation. Stop treating measurement as the thing you do at the end. Data becomes design material when it’s woven throughout.
Champion community voice. Your patients, your communities—they’re not just research participants. They’re co-designers requiring real decision-making power.
Think in systems. Healthcare is a complex adaptive system. Treating it like a machine that needs better parts misses the point entirely — so design for interconnected living systems, not linear health factories.
Model authenticity. In an AI-saturated world, your commitment to practical, accessible, human-centred content isn’t a limitation—it’s your competitive advantage.
What Are You Seeing?
What trends are you noticing in your work? What’s exciting you about 2026? And how are you enhancing your skills to shape healthier, more equitable futures?
The field isn’t waiting for new silver-bullet methodologies. It’s asking for more profound commitment to partnership, systemic understanding, adaptive learning, and the courage to share power.
That’s precisely the work we’re doing together at The Design Loft. Thanks for being a part of the community in 2025. Let’s create something remarkable in 2026. Happy New Year.
— Cameron
Sources: This article synthesizes insights from FSG, IDEO.org, Carnegie Mellon’s Transition Design Institute, Adobe, Venngage, Lippincott, Better Evaluation, GIST Impact, Benevity, Harvard Business Review, the RSA, and the 2026 Participatory Design Conference. Complete reports and articles linked throughout.
Images: Ales Krivec via Unsplash , used under license.
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