Pactful
Teens and teachers working together to build a better world
Pactful is a social good innovation tool and curriculum inspires students to actively engage in the design thinking process and develop an innovator’s mindset to create solutions aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
WebsiteteamSubstantial — Seattle, WA
DESIGN
Brit Zerbo, Lead Designer
Leslie Krivo-Kaufman, Designer
CLIENT ENGAGEMENT
Magda Isack, Engagement Manager
DEVELOPMENT
Aaron Jenson, Principal Developer
John Jensen, Lead Developer
Shaun Dern, Senior Developer
ServicesProduct Concept & Strategy
Branding & Brand Strategy
Research
UX / UI Webapp
Illustration
Year2019
The Challenge
Research shows your chances of becoming an innovator and inventor depends on several variables: where you live, your race, your gender, and your socioeconomic level. If you are not wealthy, white, rich, or a male who lives in one of the five major US cities where the majority of patents are developed, you are up to ten times less likely to become an inventor.
Pactful wanted to break down those walls by teaching teenagers how to become social good innovators by identifying a local or global problem that feels relevent to them use design thinking curriculum—Understand, Ideate, and Prototype—in order to help build a better world.
Our Focus
Create an experience that did not feel linear
Encouraging a path that allowes students to choose their own adventure
Create an experience that appealed to audiences younger and older
Target audience = students 13 - 18
Build the brand and name the product
Build a code base that a future team could take over and maintain
Platform flexible for content updates and curriculum maintainability
Help secure more funding by creating a prototype early to help sell in the larger vision
Innovation is shaping the human experience, and it’s the engine behind real solutions to world problems.
Unfortunately, not everyone gets a fair chance at becoming an innovator.
The Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Education, a non-profit at the University of San Diego approached Substantial looking to create a web-based application to help educators teach teenagers innovation skills, using design thinking. The platform would be framed in the context of the UN’s list of 17 global challenges (called Sustainable Development Goals)—like climate change, improving the quality of water, and affordable, clean energy. By presenting design thinking as a tangible, realistic practice, the app would help students go beyond the “this is too big for me” mindset.
In the span of only three months, we partnered to build the beta version of Pactful: an app that helps educators empower students to develop an innovator’s mindset for a better world.
In 2018, the term “Lost Einsteins” was coined by Stanford Professor Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity Project. In an analysis of more than one million inventors in the US, they found that if women and minorities from low-income families had the same exposure to innovation and invented at the same rate as white men from high-income families, we would have four times as many inventors in America today. And at the current rate, it will take another 118 years to reach gender parity.
In the current climate, patents aren’t rewarded equally—race, gender, and class barriers are expressed by disproportionate technological authorship. People tend to innovate upon the work of their peers—so when work is cloistered in bubbles (physical or perceptual), social barriers work to exclude. Not everyone has a fair chance at becoming an innovator.
Brand Exploration
Pactful came to Substantial for our support in bringing their dream into a digital reality. Being in the beginning stages of their start-up journey we were given the opportunity to establish their brand which would then stretch across to the Webapp UI.
After a week and half of brainstorming and testing ideas we pitched 4 different concepts with examples of how the brand would be applied.
Concept 1
Concept 2
Concept 3
Concept 4
The Pactful team was drawn towards concept 4 with feedback to explore different typography and to simplify the workmark.
We spent a couple more days defining what would become their final branding and help guide what the rest of the experience’s look and feel.
Concept 4 of Branding Exploration
Final design
Our Users
Pactful needed to effectively engage both teachers and students, with the educator’s experience top of mind.
Teachers
Teachers would use the platform to supplement their teaching material and guide the curriculum around innovation, easily managing feedback and documentation.
Students
Since this wouldn’t be a primary tool for educators, but rather one used mainly for a class intensive or one day per week, it needed to feel accessible. It was essential that the technology felt both compelling and intuitive for students and teachers—the app itself an innovation upon traditional learning, a product of design thinking.
The Client Team
The Jacobs Institute needed a sustainable platform that would be easy to manage post-engagement.
Experience Maps
I love to use the program MindNode to map out each user’s experience after facilitating design workshops and user / stakeholder interviews to help gain a broader perspective of what we need and want to build. This helps me understand each feature holistically and identifies the gaps within each of the flows (as seen below in red on the maps).
Once I map out as much as I could identify to create a more complete experience I then begin to strip away features and flows to identify what is reasonable to build for our MVP.
Student’s Experience
Student Experience Map — Identified features for robust experience
Student Experience Map — Distilled features for MVP
Teacher’s Experience
Teacher Experience Map — Identified features for robust experience
Teacher Experience Map — Distilled features for MVP
Our team sought an experience that would excite students—an app experience that might feel like taking a vacation from standard education. We answered with crisp, focused branding and UX treatment informed by the nature of design thinking. Pactful was branded simply, defined by a clean wordmark and swirling visual markers, signifying fluidity.
To engender design thinking, we created a system that would allow students to explore in any order of their choosing. This was solved through design aspects—like arrows signifying multiple pathways to solving problems and visual symbols of movement throughout the design process.
Design System
Design System
Colors
Typography
Icons & Illustrations
CTAs & Buttons
Forms
Solutions Overview Cards
Dashboard Cards
Error States
Final Designs & Components
Our team brought Pactful to educators and students very quickly—favoring effective design over volume of content or number of features.
The result was software that effectively presented the methodology behind design thinking, empowering students to think effectively through problems and solutions to real-world problems. On a practical and philosophical level, Pactful hopes to help recapture the “Lost Einsteins” of the world.
Pactful was named a Cool Tool finalist in the 2020 EdTech Awards, and met with critical success by educators.
Additionally, in Spring 2020, The Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Education launched the first-ever Jacobs Institute Changemaker Challenge. This worldwide event supported educators and teenagers in developing social good solutions aligned to the UN Global Goals. Challenge winners and finalists came through with innovations for green food bags, idle reminders, technology to protect shellfish from climate change and an app to foster gender equality, proving that given the right support, today’s youth can and will become the problem solvers of tomorrow.
