Founder of GoodGym on how can good design turn kindness into a business

Ivo Gormley started GoodGym by running to deliver a newspaper to a housebound neighbour. Twelve years on, that habit has grown into a national movement of runners, walkers and cyclists who turn their exercise into practical support for their communities.

This work has earned him an OBE for services to social enterprise, the 2020 Cambridge Social Innovation Prize, and, most recently, made GoodGym the first-ever charity to win the Sky Zero Footprint Fund Grand Prix.

Ivo, Founder of GoodGym and teacher at our Executive Programme shared with Future London Academy Co-Founder Ekaterina Solomeina ten ideas any design leader should consider to make a more positive impact in the world.

Put back the friction Don Norman warned us about

So much of design has been about making things quicker and easier. Ivo references Don Norman, who teaches on Future London Academy's Executive Programme, and his view that digital services have been engineered to remove friction wherever possible.

Ivo's take is that friction is often where the good stuff happens. If you take that away, you lose the chance encounters that make an experience worth remembering in the first place.

Know your customer's purpose

Knowing your company's purpose is the easy part. The harder question is whether the thing you're building actually helps the person using it get closer to something they care about, rather than just reminding them the brand exists. 

Putting a slogan about community on a billboard isn't enough. Ask what your customer is actually trying to become, or feel, or do, and whether the product hands them any real part in that.

Let them contribute

You might enjoy the film, but you'll remember the climb, because you were there to make it happen.

He thinks most services are still designed around getting people to an outcome as efficiently as possible.   But the far more memorable experience is one where people feel their own contribution, however small, was acknowledged.

The best systems give people a genuine, acknowledged role to play, so they can build a sense of identity from what they give as well as what they receive.
"The best experiences you can have are interactive, they're participatory."

Ditch the leaderboard  

If you design for competition, for one person to win, someone else has to lose. When you design around contribution and what people can give rather than what they can beat, there's no ceiling on how many people get to feel good about it at once.

Next time a feature nudges toward ranking or comparison, it's worth asking whether the same energy could go toward recognising what someone's put in instead. A version where everyone involved comes out as a winner.

Design for unpredictable humans

It's tempting to design systems that assume people will behave predictably: follow the steps, stay in their lane, do the sensible thing every time. They won't. Give people any kind of trust and responsibility, and you'll get the occasional rule-break, mess or surprise you didn't plan for. 

That's not a design flaw, it's just the cost of building something that depends on real human involvement rather than a scripted flow. You don’t have to tighten the process until nothing unexpected can happen. Get the essential safeguards right, and then leave enough room for people to be people.