Cecilia Brenner: Moving beyond design theater to measurable impact

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Nov 18, 2025

Cecilia Brenner, Managing Director of Design for Good and former leader at Philips, discusses her journey from corporate innovation to impactful nonprofit design. She shares how 1,600 designers can engage with the UN Sustainable Development Goals while retaining their jobs. Cecilia highlights the importance of measuring real impact, focusing projects on specific goals, and practicing life-centered design that includes all life forms. Her insights provide a practical framework for designers seeking meaningful work and community engagement.

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ANECDOTE

From Philips To Design For Good

Cecilia Brenner joined Design for Good after 17 years at Philips because she loved making health innovations and wanted to scale her sense of purpose.
She first engaged with Design for Good through Philips on an SDG 6 project and later became the charity's managing director to design the world better daily.

INSIGHT

Focus One SDG At A Time

Design for Good picks one UN SDG every two years to focus resources and achieve quicker, measurable impact.
This concentrated approach avoids spreading effort thin across many issues and enables on-the-ground results within the cycle.

ADVICE

Begin With Clear Local Briefs

Start every design team with a clear brief and measurable goals from a local NGO or charity.
Require commitment from the implementing organization to ensure ideas become implemented solutions on the ground.

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We’ve talked to many design leaders who have burned out after a decade or more of corporate work. But after 17 years at Philips designing health innovations, Cecilia Brenner wasn’t burnt out…she loved it. And she wanted to find a way to scale her sense of purpose, so she joined Design for Good as Managing Director, and found a way to work with hundreds of designers who want meaningful impact without leaving their day jobs.

This is a preview of a premium episode, find the full episode on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/cecilia-brenner

Design for Good mobilizes what Cecilia calls a “radical global action collective”—1,600 designers from companies like Philips, Lloyds Bank, and others—to tackle UN Sustainable Development Goals through focused, two-year cycles. Their first cycle addressed clean water and sanitation. Now they’re working on quality education. And here’s the twist: everything they create is open source.

In our conversation, Cecilia explains how Design for Good measures real impact (not estimated future impact), why they chose to focus on one SDG at a time instead of spreading resources thin, and what it means to design for “all life,” not just human life. If you’ve ever wondered how to find more meaning in your design work—or questioned whether purpose-driven projects actually move the needle—this episode offers a surprisingly practical model.

Bio

Cecilia Brenner is the Managing Director of Design for Good, a global alliance dedicated to creating lasting, measurable impact for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since joining in May 2024, Cecilia has successfully led the charity in mobilising hundreds of creatives to design in close collaboration with NGOs and affected communities worldwide.

With over 25 years of international experience in design and leadership, Cecilia is a catalyst for inclusion, innovation, and impact. She previously served as an Experience Design Director & Business Partner at Philips, where she spent 17 years improving people’s health and well-being through meaningful innovation, building high-performing, engaged global design teams and communities, as well as leading transformational programmes with a unique blend of network leadership, team-building excellence, and strategic insight.

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