Co-designing for Society (journal paper)

This year the Australasian Medical Journal (AMJ) ran another special Design + Health edition to explore ideas in designing for health. Deborah Szebeko, founder of social design agency thinkpublic and I followed up our previous year's Co-designing for Dementia: The Alzheimer100 Project (2009) paper with this new one called, Co-designing for Society (2010).


In this paper, we elaborate more on co-design, its approach, tools, processes and practices using several of thinkpublic's projects. At the end of the paper we also touch on what next for co-design, especially in line with the political climate here in the UK where the Coalition advocates Building Big Society which sees “a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control.”

The Design Council have also been actively exploring co-design and organising discussions among the design community to understand the practice better. Check out their published summary here.

'Personal projects'

It's been a long time since I have posted here, and I make no excuses except to say that finishing a PhD is the hardest and longest process ever! But more on that later...

Today, I felt compelled to post something after a Skype chat this morning with my friend Natalie's MA Design class. This post is not just for designers, but everyone, who seeks a space for themselves that is totally their own. It's not a physical space, but a mental one. This space lets you explore your own ideas, passion and interests. It's what Ji Lee (a Creative Director a Google) calls 'personal projects.'

I first encountered Ji and Ji's personal projects in 2008 at the Graphic Design Festival Breda in the Netherlands (an earlier blog post and some photos can be found here). I was struck by Ji's Bubble Project. And on many levels. The Bubble Project is about giving a voice to the public in the one-way communication culture of advertising and media that surrounds us. Empty white speech bubbles on ads invite the public to fill in their own commentary.


I love the idea for inspiring the creativity of people, of giving them a voice, and also for the fun it evokes (check out some bubbles here on Flickr). A lot of it was reminiscent of the Dott 07 projects and there was no doubt that Ji and his project would be appearing somewhere in my PhD thesis.

But there was another level of Ji's project that interested me. That was the idea of doing 'personal projects.' Those projects where you give yourself the space, time and permission to explore and pursue your passionate interests that exist outside of work. I can already hear questions such as, 'But what if I don't have the time?' so I'm going to leave you for 8 minutes with Ji, and let him tell you a bit about the Bubble Project and explain what he's learnt about doing personal projects, including some thoughts about the concept of time. I hope it helps inspire the creation of your own space to pursue and explore passionate interests, just like Ji did.

Ji Lee: The Transformative Power of Personal Projects from 99% on Vimeo.

FastCompany's 100 most creative people in business

This month, FastCompany magazine publishes the 100 most creative people in business. Of their list they say:

There are no rules about creativity. Which made constructing our list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business a tricky task. We looked for dazzling new thinkers, rising stars, and boldface names who couldn't be ignored. We avoided people we've profiled in the recent past. We emphasized those whose creativity addresses a larger issue -- from the future of our energy infrastructure to the evolution of philanthropy to next-generation media and entertainment. So read on. Enjoy. Quibble. Complain.

Image from FastCompany's website

Scanning the top ten it's great to see two designers feature on the list demonstrating that design clearly contributes to the business's (triple) bottom line.

Apple's Jonathan Ive tops the list at #1 for revolutionising the way we all listen to, interact with, exchange and buy music. Ive was first interviewed by FastCompany for breathing new life into the computer hardware and software industry. He brought not just functionality but sheer delight for many who would otherwise be engaging with a "beige box" everyday.

Design in Apple has propelled the company to generate no less than $US32 billion in sales last year and FastCompany touts Apple as the, "most successful and faithful marriage of business and design." No wonder so many of us look to (and desire) not just Apple products but the behind-the-scenes operations and philosophies of the company.

Apple illustrates that design is yes, user/customer-led, but if an organisation that wants to achieve Apple's success it needs design to be CEO-led. Apple says, "You need a CEO who gets it [...] Something like the iPod is a melding of design and user experience and marketing and pop culture, and you don't achieve that without coordination throughout the company."

The other designer in the top ten is Sandy Bodecker, vice president of global design at Nike. The top twenty adds another three designers to the list: fashion designer, Stella McCartney; architect Thom Mayne; and sustainable design program manager at Autodesk, Dawn Danby.

Check out more details on these designers, and the other 95 creative people who make it on the list at FastCompany's website, which also happens to have a really neat interface and content (eg. Wikipeadia, news and Twitter profiles of each of the 100 individuals).

Let's get creative - with design business models

In my last post, I touched upon the challenge of economic paradigms faced by designers, especially those wanting to participate in the public sector. Today's Guardian supplement, Lets Get Creative, paints a perspective on the Government's involvement with the creative industry, one year after it launched, Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy.

Screengrab from the Guardian website

The article Cultural Stocktake, take the perspective that not enough is being done, despite the fact that Britain is a hotbed of creativity.

The UK still has the largest creative sector in the European Union, and probably, according to the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta), the largest in the world relative to GDP. Until recession hit, the sector accounted for 7.3% of total UK gross value added (GVA), and was growing at double the rate of other sectors."

But the problems are complex. The article cites the fragmentation of the industry, the small size of companies and the common, "shortage of high-level management expertise and a serious lack of investment, according to the research director for Nesta, Hasan Bakhshi. "We don't seem to be able to grow companies so that they are leaders in Europe, let alone globally," adds Sir Michael Bichard, chairman of the Design Council."

It seems that it's not necessarily more creativity and design needed in Britain, but rather acting on those enabling conditions (provided by Government), networking in the industry (as seen in the Creatives v crunch article), business knowledge and know-how (provided by design schools and other organisations eg. NESTA who run a Creative Business Mentor Network) and more (continued) investment in education, research and development (as Dyson states in his article, Man with a plan) which can help the economic paradigms of the design and creative industry.

I am sure there is loads more to add, analyse, synthesise, discuss and debate here, but just some starting points for some thoughts collected from and in response to today's supplement.

It is as the article ends, "The danger, it seems, lies in assuming that creativity alone is enough."