MYP Design Impact of a Solution on the Client and Audience Notes

Impact Is What Happens After You Hand It Over

1. The impact of a solution is the difference it makes once it is being used, which is a different question from whether it met the specification.
2. A product can pass every test and change nothing, because nobody picks it up.
3. Impact needs time to appear, so even one week of real use tells you more than a ten minute demonstration.
4. Criterion D asks about impact on the client and the audience, which means naming actual people rather than writing "society".
5. Evidence for impact comes from the same places as everything else: observation, feedback and counts of how often it gets used.

Impact on the Client: Did the Original Problem Move?

1. Go back to the problem you identified in criterion A and ask what has actually changed for the person who had it.
2. Measure it where you can, so the art room now stores 40 brushes off the bench, or club sign up takes 2 minutes instead of 10.
3. Ask the client directly whether they are using it, how often, and what they now do differently.
4. Be ready for the answer that it is sitting in a cupboard, since non use is the single most important impact finding there is.
5. Costs land on the client too, because a bench top planter needs watering and an app needs somebody to update the fixtures list.

The Wider Audience Feels It Differently

1. The target audience is everyone the solution is meant to reach, and it is almost always larger than the client.
2. Impact varies across that audience, so a reading app may help confident readers first and leave weaker readers further behind.
3. Treat accessibility as impact: can a left handed student use the handle, can a colour blind user tell the red status dot from the green one.
4. Scale changes things, since a noticeboard that works for one class becomes unreadable once four classes are posting on it.
5. Ask a few people from different parts of the audience instead of assuming the client speaks for all of them.

People You Never Designed For

1. Solutions leak into the lives of people who were never in the brief, and criterion D gives you credit for noticing them.
2. Ask who else is in the room: the cleaner who has to move it, the teacher who stores it, the sibling who shares the desk.
3. Some of these effects are negative, such as a speaker that helps one user and distracts a whole library.
4. Making something affects the people who make it, which matters if your design would be produced in quantity somewhere else.
5. Name these groups precisely, since "Year 7 students who cannot reach the top shelf" shows more thinking than "other users".

Social and Environmental Consequences

1. Environmental impact starts with materials: where they came from, how much you wasted, and whether they can be recycled.
2. Count what you can, such as 0.4 square metres of 3 mm plywood used with one A3 offcut left over.
3. Think about the end of its life, because a product glued from three different plastics cannot be separated for recycling.
4. Digital solutions have a footprint too, since images saved at 4 MB instead of 200 KB cost data, battery and money for every user.
5. Social consequences include fairness, so a solution that needs a smartphone quietly excludes anyone in the audience without one.
6. Culture matters as well, because colours, symbols and wording can carry meanings in another community that you did not intend.

Writing the Impact Section

1. Write it in short paragraphs by group: the client, the audience, others affected, then the environment.
2. Attach evidence to every claim, even if it is one quotation or one count of how often the thing was used.
3. Say what you do not know, for example that you could only watch one week of use in one classroom.
4. Keep the claims the size of the project, because a school storage box does not change a school's culture.
5. An honest account of who your solution reached is what closes criterion D, and it feeds the next turn of the design cycle.