Design Labs – A Scalable, Mixed-Methods Approach to Global Challenges

Women’s health has always been an afterthought in a system designed without them in mind. From clinical trials that exclude female bodies to health campaigns that ignore social stigma, the needs of women—especially those in under-resourced settings—are too often sidelined, misunderstood, or erased entirely. This systemic neglect isn’t accidental; it’s the predictable outcome of a model of scientific innovation that favors generalized, top-down solutions over people-centered design. The result is interventions that rarely reflect the complexity of real communities, especially in the places where they’re needed most.¹

The problem is growing worse: decisions are still based on limited, decontextualized data, and design remains unresponsive—now compounded by a worsening resource crisis. Global investment in solutions for challenges like climate change² and women’s health³ is declining, while the regions most affected often lack the data needed to inform better policies⁴. Much of the existing data is purely quantitative, offering limited insight into how people actually experience these problems. As global health funding declines, we risk not only losing critical services but also the opportunity to generate the insights needed to create more effective and responsive solutions. This presents a fundamental design challenge: how can we build future-ready interventions without fully understanding present-day needs?

The Gender Equality Design Labs: A New Model

The Gender Equality Design Labs offer a response to this challenge. Funded by the Gates Foundation’s Gender Equality Data & Insights Division, the Design Labs is a unique partnership that enables inclusive community engagement via a qualitative research platform that’s AI enabled and supported by “sticky” outputs. By engaging directly with panels of women in priority geographies, the Design Labs establishes a feedback loop that makes lived experience central to innovation.

This work is supported by an AI-enabled platform where qualitative insights are translated into dynamic, multimedia tools that are accessible and actionable. The pilot focused on attitudes toward vaginal insertable products, with future research priorities to be shaped by donors, governments, and private sector partners.

The Design Labs are already helping to shape more informed product value propositions—revealing how bleeding influences women’s decision-making, identifying which geographies and communities require targeted interventions, and uncovering the product attributes women prioritize when choosing family planning or HIV/STI prevention methods. At a time of shrinking aid budgets and increasing public health risk, the Design Labs offer funders, government, and innovators a scalable and inclusive model for design and decision-making—one that centers community voices and turns understanding into action.

Design Labs Approach: Faster, Deeper, More Actionable

Our approach builds on the strengths of traditional methods such as design research, market research, and qualitative social science, while addressing their limitations:

• Design research helps us understand how people interact with systems but often lacks objectivity and population-level relevance.
• Market research provides strategic insight but typically centers on existing products, not unmet or emerging needs.
• Qualitative social science offers rich depth, yet is often slow, costly, and hard to scale.

The Design Labs approach combines the best of these approaches into a human-centered, mixed-methods model designed for both speed and depth. It evolves through iterative engagement with panels of women, capturing both the “what” and the “why” of behavior, while considering broader social dynamics.

The approach is built around the following key features that enable deep, scalable, and contextually relevant insight generation:

• Unique partnerships: Centrally coordinated global network of locally embedded partners to rapidly execute research.
• Inclusivity: Focus is on lived experiences and direct input from communities, global reach from underserved to well served.
• Community engagement: From foundational research and concept testing to longitudinal listening and impact evaluation.
• Qualitative research platform: A streamlined way to collect, organize and analyze quant and qual data and transform that data into actionable insights.
• AI enabled: Supports more effective and efficient queries and analyses without compromising quality.
• “Sticky” outputs: Multimedia outputs and deliverables accessible to collaborators and decision-makers.

Insights are shared through a dynamic database that supports multimedia storytelling and mixed-methods analysis, helping decision-makers understand not just what the data says, but the human experience behind it.

Inclusive, Community-Centered by Design

When possible, our participant panels are recruited using population-level segmentation models. In the case of the pilot, we used the Pathways vulnerability segmentation, an actionable framework that integrates qualitative and quantitative data to identify population segments and the social, cultural, and environmental vulnerabilities that shape their health outcomes, to ensure we capture a wide range of perspectives. We engage communities over the long term, from a couple of months to multiple years, to build trust and ensure participants feel seen, respected, and heard. This foundation of trust yields richer insights and greater willingness to engage on sensitive topics that are often excluded from mainstream research.

This inclusive, rigorous structure ensures local realities inform global decisions.

AI-Enabled, Qualitative Research Platform

What distinguishes this platform from typical qualitative and design approaches is its combination of enhanced transparency, stakeholder accessibility, and integrated technology. Unlike traditional methods that rely primarily on researchers’ interpretation, the Design Labs provides stakeholders with direct access to raw data alongside synthesized insights and outputs, fostering greater trust and collaboration throughout the research process.

Our interactive platform is built to support complex, mixed-methods research in a centralized, user-friendly space. It allows users to:

• Trace insights from hypotheses to quotes to recommendations.
• Search and filter tagged data for quick access to relevant findings.
• Interact with an AI-powered chatbot for natural-language Q&A, turning raw data into tailored, strategic insights.

The platform anchors all research activity, supporting community immersions, focus groups, and interviews, and serves as a living archive of stories, insights, and outcomes. It helps teams move fluidly from data to action, reinforcing transparency and accountability in the innovation process.

Sticky, Multimedia Outputs

Engaging a broad range of stakeholders with qualitative and design research outputs often proves challenging. Traditional methods of sharing insights—typically through slide decks and other standard deliverables—frequently fall short of capturing attention or inspiring action beyond a limited audience. This approach misses valuable opportunities to influence and engage a wider group, reducing the potential impact of the research findings.

Our outputs are designed to resonate. Rather than static reports, we produce multimedia outputs that bring insights to life and surface them in near real-time, when they’re still timely and actionable for strategic decision-making. A few examples of these outputs include:

• Audio essays that distill core findings into engaging, digestible formats.
• Visual storyboards that connect immersion footage, platform insights, and user narratives.
• Ground-level documentation including photos, messages, and recordings that offer authentic context.

These tools help partners—whether in government, the private sector, or civil society—quickly understand complex issues and connect emotionally with the people behind the data.

Lessons from the Pilot

The pilot phase of the Gender Equality Design Labs demonstrated the model’s value. By grounding research in real communities and using technology to highlight lived experience, the Labs surfaced insights that are both emotionally resonant and strategically relevant.

A few key lessons emerged:

1. Multidisciplinary Collaboration is Non-Negotiable

The success of the pilot hinged on close collaboration between designers, technologists, researchers, global health experts, and local community leads. This blend of expertise allowed us to move seamlessly from deep listening to structured insight generation, from data tagging to strategic synthesis. The pilot underscored the need to invest not just in tools, but in teams—with the fluency to navigate between rigor and sensitivity, speed and depth, innovation and accountability.

2. Trust Drives Better Data

Participants responded with honesty and nuance because they felt seen, respected, and safe. Trust was built through sustained engagement with community partners, ethical protocols grounded in local realities, and a commitment to treating participants as co-creators rather than subjects. This foundation of trust yielded richer insights and greater willingness to engage on sensitive topics—like perceptions of vaginal health—that are often excluded from mainstream research.

3. Infrastructure Matters

We learned that speed and depth are only possible with strong foundational systems. Our ability to move from recruitment to insight in under four months depended on pre-established infrastructure: stratified sampling frameworks, locally vetted protocols, pre-trained research panels, and an interactive platform. These systems now offer a springboard for future studies—cutting startup time and enabling rapid, responsive research in new contexts.

4. Outputs Must Meet the Moment

Traditional reports are too slow and too static for today’s decision-making environment. The Labs’ multimedia outputs—audio essays, visual storyboards, searchable data narratives—allowed insights to be absorbed quickly, shared widely, and acted on with confidence. By aligning content formats with how people actually consume information, we made it easier for partners to turn evidence into action.

5. The Model is Ready to Scale—But Not Copy and Paste

While the model is scalable, it is not one-size-fits-all. Future success will require adapting the Labs to different issues, geographies, and stakeholder needs. This includes retooling segmentation strategies, reconfiguring local partnerships, and continuously evolving our technology stack. The pilot showed that flexibility is as important as fidelity—what matters is not replicating every feature, but preserving the core principles of community-centered design, methodological rigor, and insight-driven action.

Looking Ahead

The pilot has demonstrated a more responsive approach to global health research—one that values lived experience, accepts complexity, and shortens the gap between data and action. But methods alone aren’t enough. Real change requires broader support: funders, governments, and innovators committed to maintaining and scaling the infrastructure needed for timely, community-informed insights and to challenging outdated research models.

Want to Learn More?

The Design Labs model is adaptable across sectors—from global health to education, climate resilience, and beyond. Whether you’re asking:

• How can we tailor hybrid educational tools for low-resource settings?
• How can we better understand the lived experience behind persistent behavior gaps?
• How can we deepen community engagement in our design and research efforts?

…or exploring your own questions, the Design Labs can help.

Now is the time to rethink how we approach global challenges. The Gender Equality Design Labs show that by centering lived experience and applying innovative, scalable methods, we can develop interventions that are effective, efficient and equitable. We encourage funders, policymakers, researchers and innovators to invest in community-driven insights, reconsider traditional models, and support ongoing collaboration. By doing so, we can turn data into meaningful action and create solutions that truly reflect the needs of the people they are meant to serve.

¹Mounier-Jack, S., Mayhew, S. H., & Mays, N. (2017). Integrated care: Learning between high-income, and low- and middle-income country health systems. Health Policy and Planning, 32(Suppl_4), iv6–iv12.
²EU Reporter. (2025, January 30). Investment in climate change mitigation 0.55% of GDP.
Associated Press. (2025, May 29). $14 billion in clean energy projects have been canceled in the US this year, analysis says.
³HealthManagement.org. (2024). Women’s Health Investment: A Promising Opportunity, But Challenges Remain.
McKinsey Health Institute & World Economic Forum. (2024, January). Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap: How to Improve Lives and Economies for All.
⁴Zhao, L., Cao, B., Borghi, E., Chatterji, S., Garcia-Saiso, S., Rashidian, A., Doctor, H. V., D’Agostino, M., Karamagi, H. C., Novillo-Ortiz, D., Landry, M., Hosseinpoor, A. R., Noor, A., Riley, L., Cox, A., Gao, J., Litavecz, S., & Asma, S. (2022). Data gaps towards health development goals, 47 low- and middle-income countries. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 100(1), 40–49.