Design and social innovation - 2

We need designers and designers need us. What struck me about the discussions in Melbourne and Sydney, with Ezio Manzini as part of the recent social innovators dialogue road shows, was the slight hesitation by those on both sides of the discussion about design and social innovation about whether and, if so, how they should each be dealing with the other. This is my take. Many of those involved in policy making and searching for better solutions to the challenges we face in just about any area you can think of have discovered design. Everyone has read Tim Brown's book "Change by Design" and they've heard of IDEO, the California-based design outfit of which he is the CEO. As a consequence, we've learned about the particular sensibility that designers bring to their work - human or user-centred, a capacity to disassemble and reassemble physical items or concepts in imaginative ways, a willingness to experiment - as well as about the set of tools they use - visualisation, start with a deep, almost anthropological understanding of the world of users and their real needs, building quick, simple prototypes to give ideas substantive form, a willingness to adopt a "fail fast, learn quickly' method. The question is how to adapt these tools into the world of those whose task is to create innovation in schools, hospitals, education systems, ways to make it easier for people to live with dignity and independence as they age and so on. In other words, how do you take design out of the world of products and artifacts and into the world of systems and institutions? My favourite story was of the designer in the UK who started designing new furniture for schools, then designing new classrooms and learning spaces and eventually taking a design approach to reforming whole learning and education systems. On the other side, designers wonder how to make their skills and capabilities more widely accessible and useful. How do they find the points at which they can join the work of social and public innovation? How do they convince people to take up a design career because there will be real demand for their services and skills? This hesitant sense of emerging mutual interest sets the scene for a more vigorous engagement between designers and social innovators and policy reformers. The discussions that are already underway to set up an Australian node in the DESIS network (designers for social innovation and sustainability)will be a good start to that process. But my sense is that the next decade will see a dramatic rise in the use of designers and design thinking and tools for all sorts of social and public innovation. Not because design thinking is a simple or singular panacea for all our ills - which is an impression some of the more fulsome rhetoric about the redemptive potential of design thinking and designers can sometimes give - but because the ethic and working methods of design have much to offer the search for innovation and creative solutions. The conversations which Ezio's visit sparked were lively, creative and engaging. Over 1,000 people in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney contributed to the discussions, which is a great outcome for the joint exercise between ASIX, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW and with great support from the Macquarie Foundation. I think the role and impact of design will come to feature more and more prominently not only in the work of social innovators but in the wider tasks of policy and government too. Roll on the revolution...