Redistributing the Tools

But we do recognize that actually, as design begins to be invoked in everything from synthetic biology to public service reform, we really run the risk of losing a grip on what design means?

I’m Director of Design at the RSA, the Royal Society and encouragement of Arts Manufactures and Commerce. It is an 18th century society which for most of its 250 old year history, could construe arts, manufactures and commerce as the best framework for social progress. The framework of arts, manufactures, commerce, enterprise and so on gave it an unequivocal and enduring relationship with design.

Last year I published a new account of design for the RSA, looking again at how design could contribute to social progress and citizenship.

We argued that design's value today was that it could help everyone to be more resourceful and self-reliant. Designers are very resourceful, and self reliant, very ready to prototype and improvise and very unafraid of disorder, complexity and uncertainty, and very good at judging the relationship between all these things, which we argued should be more generically adopted.

This raises two challenges. The first, of course, is, how? How do you redistribute the tools of design, how do you hand over enough design to more people that it’s useful and effective? There’s lots of people in this space: we’ve heard Nabeel Hamdi and Ezio Manzini talking about how they would recommend that might be done. Dott is in itself very vigorously and imaginatively giving a good work-out to the idea that innovation might be led by citizens. We are in this space too and I just wanted to give you a hardcore example.

I’m running a design training prototype for people with spinal cord injuries. Here’s the idea: if you have broken your back and you are in rehabilitation your goal is autonomy, it’s independence and self-reliance, and have I not argued that design is something that can contribute to your self reliance? So I’m arguing that while you are learning to catheterize yourself, and transfer in and out of your wheelchair, actually a really good thing for you to learn is design. Actually Jeremy Myerson kind of beat me to it, on the prepositional move from designing for disabled people, to designing with disabled people, to actually what I’m after - I’m going straight to the idea that disabled people do some design for themselves.

Obviously this is, in Ezio’s words 'not obvious', but I think if we can crack how to hand over enough design to be useful to people in this situation we will be in a position to hand that over to some other people as well, to replicate this idea.

The second challenge raised by my thesis that design increases people's resourcefulness and self reliance, is just really about design itself. We have moved from the idea that design is done by designers and manifest in things and environments to a situation where design is collaborative, and design is not manifest in things, does not have a physical form necessarily.

This argument about resourcefulness and self-reliance kind of places the RSA quite unequivocally in the kind of 'design thinking, design is a process' camp. But we do recognize that actually, as design begins to be invoked in everything from synthetic biology to public service reform, we really run the risk of losing a grip on what design means?

What I’m trying to do with the programme that I am running – thoughts and debates and publishing and education and a national student design awards programme, and many other things – is really to enquire how design should be used and paid for and taught and explained today.

Director of Design at the RSA, Emily has developed new thinking about the relationship between design and citizenship. The Design and Society project urges designers to demonstrate how the insights and processes of design can increase the resourcefulness of people and communities. Prior to this she was the British Council’s first Head of Design & Architecture. She has been a pattern-cutter for Jean Muir as well as a project manager and a graphic designer at Pentagram. Emily has a BA in English Literature from Cambridge, a Diploma in Clothing Technology from the London College of Fashion and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale. She writes widely on design.