Intervention Design Pattern Library
Design the conditions. Shape the flow.
Explore 53 real-world cases mapped across three domains and the Love/Power axes that shape how force and care combine.
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, love without power is sentimental and anemic.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
01 — EXPLORE
Explore Patterns of Intervention
The Explorer is where the Intervention Design Pattern Library lives — browse, search, and filter every published case by pattern, intervention type, country, and where it lands on the Love/Power axes. Free Hugs Campaign to Brown v. Board of Education, all mapped the same way.
02 — THE MODEL
Three Domains of Intervention
Every case in the Library is read through one of three lenses — not fixed categories, but ways of understanding how influence moves through a system.
Top-Down — power over
Policy, mandates, infrastructure, and formal authority. Fast and resourceful, but can lose touch with the people it affects.
Middle-Out — power with
Universities, NGOs, coalitions, and intermediaries that translate and coordinate between institutions and communities.
Bottom-Up — power within
Mutual aid, movements, and grassroots practice. Adaptive and legitimate, but often struggles to scale.
03 — ORIGIN
Where This Started
Intervention Design Thinking began as a practical problem, not a theory — food system change mapping work for Transforming Hawaiʻi’s Food Systems Together (THFT), led by Dr. Albie Miles at the University of Hawaiʻi–West Oʻahu and Kirk Bergstrom at WorldLink. Answering a concrete question — which interventions would actually strengthen Hawaiʻi’s food security — raised bigger ones about what counts as an intervention at all, and those questions turned out to apply far beyond food systems.