In 2005, Design Strategist Hilary Cottam won the title of Designer of the Year. Since which, the London Design Museum continue to pitch her “radical design rethinking” of the “UK’s schools, prison system and health service” and her “work as director of the Design Council’s experimental RED team”, to be “championing a more inspiring and efficient approach to design in the public sector.” Hilary is now currently setting up her latest initiative, Participle – a new social venture to design the next generation of public services.
Participle is a unique hybrid: bringing together systemic policy thinking and new ideas with project methodology which enables us to harness the broader creativity and latent solutions visible on the ground to service users, front line workers and communities: we call this methodology Transformation Design. Participle creates future services with and for the public. Most attempts at innovation and service improvement start within existing institutions and ask how they can be reformed. We start from the individual, unlocking a unique set of insights and motivations, which we then apply to the broad systemic problems we are seeking to answer.
The four prestigious directors; Hilary Cottam, Colin Burns (former MD of IDEO London), Charles Leadbeater (internationally renowned thinker and innovator) and Hugo Manassei (entrepreneur and enterprise consultant), will be working with a small inter-disciplinary team of economists, designers and policy analysts. The Participle website [and plan] are due for public launch this coming April, to which I look forward to finding more about.
Filed under: On People, On Social Design, On Society , Charles Leadbeater, Colin Burns, Hillary Cottam, Hugo Manassei, Participle, Public Service, Social Design, Transformation Design
Seems like a good idea but French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud once wrote something pretty useful and I think relevant:
“In our post-industrial societies, the most pressing thing is no longer the emancipation of individuals, but the freeing-up of inter-human communications, the dimensional emancipation of existence.”
Transformation design is not a solitary endeavour.