I’m three months into my role, and I’m exploring how different design practices can come together to have more impact around an issue. At the Design Council we run programmes around architecture and the built environment, public service design and business innovation.

These programmes have both a research unit who evaluate the impact of design and a communications design team who share that story (making the case to commissioners and policymakers). 

My job is to integrate these design disciplines in something we’re starting to call ‘whole systems design’, and to add to them with others such as speculative, transition and organisational design. And we’re thinking about outcomes first - health & wellbeing, inclusive growth, sustainable places - and how design can be in service to those.

Below are some of the questions I’ve been asking myself along with some of the people and places I’ve been looking to for inspiration. 

Increasing design across ecosystems
 

For policymakers, this means ensuring design approaches are not only being used within government but also within the wider ecosystem. When we build innovation or design capability within government teams, how can we ask them to invite their partners (developers, business leaders, the voluntary and community sector) into the learning with them and/or really coach them to be translators between innovation and non-innovation worlds? How can we build eco-systems of change?

• Read my blog on bringing place-based design and place-shaping together, including a wonderful talk by Melbourne's Leader of City Plans Kate Dundas on the soft and hard infrastructure of a city, and a great series of articles on place-shaping by The Developer.
• And check out Sarah Mann’s blog on design for the wider determinants of health, and the Gehl Institute’s work on healthy placemaking.

Evolving design practice

In order to tackle these bigger systemic challenges, we’re holding the term ‘design’ more loosely, and that’s reflected in the way the famous ‘double diamond’ has evolved into our Framework for Innovation. Design has already gone on a journey from product to service to organisation to policy. It’s not necessarily about new tangible stuff, but about better connecting what already exists.

And it’s not about a designer’s single idea, but building the skills, capability and permission within those delivering interventions to improve them. Within all our work, how can we record and make visible this ‘invisible’ layer of innovation that goes round the shiny thing?
 

• Read my own and others reflections and critiques of the Double Diamond - 15 years on - including Jennie Winhall and Sanjan Sabherwal.
• Take a look at these different systems design tools: including Adam Groves’ systems interventions and Nick Stanhope’s new blog about what roles to play.

Future of design

Finally, thinking about the future. Design Council is 75 this year, having been set up by Churchill to promote industrial design and improve the post-war economy. As relevant then as it is now (on the verge of Brexit, or 31 October, or whatever comes first), looking back has made me think forward. What will design look like in 2096 (if the world even exists then)? How will we un-design in a world with no new resources? How will we design our unconscious (in an all-knowing world)? And how will we design politics in post-nation communities?

User-centred design in the UK at least has embedded itself in public services. But it is limiting in that it asks people what they want and need in today’s way of thinking. Design can also propose new mindsets, but we have to be bold to do so. I think speculative design should be used more broadly, and we should apply this to ourselves as well. 
 

• Check out Radical Visions: speculative design applied to the future of Government (including my own screenprints that I made as part of a collective reimagining the future of Waltham Forest - was great to get back into the studio!).

• We've now launched our first UK-based learning programme, which will begin in January 2020. Any level of UK government (local, regional, central) can join and applications are open until November. Find out more about the programme,  which helps public servants become better problem solvers and embeds innovation skills into everyday working.

• Applications are also open for the next Australia and New Zealand programme, also beginning in January.  This new edition builds on the Victorian pilot programme we ran in 2018 in partnership with the Department of Premier and Cabinet and our current Australia - New Zealand wide programme.