UK Design Council takes Design to Social Issues

'A new design discipline is emerging. It builds on traditional design skills to address social and economic issues. It uses the design process as a means to enable a wide range of disciplines and stakeholders to collaborate. It develops solutions that are practical and desirable. It is an approach that places the individual at the heart of new solutions, and builds the capacity to innovate into organisations and institutions,' says the latest report from RED.

"Transformation Design" has been put together by the UK's Design Council, involving Colin Burns, Hilary Cottam, Chris Vanstone and Jennie Winhall as authors.

RED, a unit in the Design Council, has been applying a design approach to some of the UK’s social problems: prisoner re-offending rates, failing secondary schools and the rising burden of chronic healthcare. Multidisciplinary teams – with designers working alongside policy makers – use the design process as a means of collaborating with pupils, teachers, patients, nurses, prisoners and prison officers to develop new solutions. 'RED is applying design in new contexts. We use product, communication, interaction and spatial designers’ core skills to transform the ways in which the public interacts with systems, services, organisations and policies. RED is not alone in doing this type of work. But the community of practice is small, and its emergence has already caused controversy.

'There are those who argue that it’s not design because it doesn’t look or feel much like design in the familiar sense of the word. Its outputs aren’t always tangible, and may be adapted and altered by people as they use them. It is a long way from the paradigm of the master-designer.'

RED suggests that companies and public bodies are increasingly faced with complex and ambiguous issues. At the same time there is a growing desire among designers to tackle society’s most pressing problems.

'This paper is a call to action,' they say. 'It begins to set out the characteristics of this emergent discipline. It identifies a nascent but growing community of practice. It highlights an under-supply of designers equipped to work in this way. And it explores the market for, and the challenges facing, designers who are starting to work in this new discipline.'

Associated Link: Transformation Design (.pdf)

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