Democratising Design

I don’t think you can take a great idea locally, put it in some sort of national machine, spit it back out again and roll it out.

The challenge of democratising design is polarizing people. You have a design community who is interested in this co-creation, co-development, participative model, and you’ve got another percentage who are really uninterested. Is this going to create a sort of two-tiered system within our design industry? And how do we give them the confidence and skills to actually embrace this kind of work and not be concerned about it?.

I’m also interested in how we actually create this sort of energy within our citizens to participate in the way that we all have a vision that they will. Because the experience that we find in our projects is that it isn’t that obvious. The citizens aren’t waiting there all the time,wanting to get involved. How do we use design to make that happen on a more practical basis?

But the thing that I’m really worried about at the moment is the bigger challenge, which is the institution. We fundamentally have a political system here of command and control, and therefore the whole premise of co-creation and participation by citizens is stifled because of the political system that we have in the UK. I think that is going to fundamentally prevent this movement going forward. Because until we radically change that or we provide models, which are acceptable to that political system, so they can see how the co-creation model can actually thrive, it won’t ever happen in practice. You’ll have pockets of activity which will be great case studies, great examples, but it will never be systematised.

The other bit I’m really interested in is the word scale. A few people have talked about it and I don’t know what we mean by scale. We talk about scale, we talk about scaling out, scaling across – what is it we are actually scaling? Are we scaling skills? Are we scaling ideas? Are we scaling knowledge? Are we scaling designers? Are we scaling people to do things more for themselves?

I think we need to really hone this down a bit so that we can understand what it is we are trying to scale. Otherwise the perception is that we end up taking a good idea and try to replicate it across many places, and fundamentally that is against the kind of co-development model because it will not be localized, it will not be unique and will not therefore be owned by the citizens or the people who develop something. I don’t think you can take a great idea locally, put it in some sort of national machine, spit it back out again and roll it out. How do we create a model for scale, which actually works and doesn’t just fall back into replicating the same problems that we’ve had historically?

So I suppose those are my two concerns: Scale – what does scale really mean, what does it look like? And democratizing design: how, within our current political structures, is it ever really going to take hold, because there are too many institutions in the way.

Executive Director at the Design Council, Ruth Hasnip directs the Dott programme of public engagement. Prior to joining the Design Council in 2002, Ruth held marketing roles in the commercial sector and was Director of Marketing & Communication at the Barbican Centre.