Helsinki Design Lab - Recipes for Systemic Change

The Helsinki Design Lab is an agency whose strategic design processes are oriented to "a wide coalition of organisations and individuals" who seek systemic solutions to pressing social problems.

It's processes are not oriented solely to governments.

Yet a forthcoming Social Innovator Dialogue presentation on the Helsinki Design Lab has billed these processes as being a tool for governments.

"Helsinki Design Lab helps government leaders see the "architecture of problems."

Earlier this year, this Dialogue series presented Charlie Leadbeater on "Social innovation in government and the public sector". In fact, Charlie's seminars were on the relationship between the world of public service management and the "social innovation life world" (the world of social innovation outside government and the public sector).

This fundamental misrepresentation is repeated again in the next event in this series. A "coalition of organisations and individuals" is identified by the Helsinki Design Lab as the agency for effecting systemic social change - not "government leaders".

"Who is this Seminar for? This seminar is for policy makers, leaders in the public and third sectors and designers who are interested in strategic design as a response to complex problems".

Might it not also be for citizens who seek systemic change in education, sustainability and ageing?

In September, I heard Geoff Mulgan explain his newest and preferred definition of social innovation as "innovation which is social in both its goals and its means".

I like this formulation. It requires social means (relationships, coalitions) between social actors (organisations, individuals, governments) to achieve social goals (social well-being and positive change). 

It is not a practice or discipline oriented to governments and the public sector. How many times must voices from the "social enterprise life world" be raised before this understanding begins to sink in?

Vern Hughes