If we want design to be a force for climate action, we have to design for citizens, not consumers.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at Design & Climate. Rethinking our role — an event hosted by Design Declares, at the lovely Yorkton Workshops.
The event saw designers of all kinds — graphic, web, communication, product, service and more — coming together to explore the role of design in making a positive planetary impact.
In the context of the climate emergency, I’ve written before about the need to see people as Citizens (not Consumers) — an idea underpinning the work we do at New Citizen Project. This was the first time I’ve spoken on the topic, and applied the ideas directly to design.
From the products we buy, to the services we use, designers shape what we interact with, and how we interact. I can’t think of many professions with a more obvious role in reimagining how those same products and services, and the brands and institutions that represent them, might be repurposed in order to develop the agency needed to meet the challenges we face.
You can find what I said — well, at least what I imperfectly tried to say — below. I hope my talk contributed something to the conversation. I’d love to hear what you took away from it if you were in the room, or are taking away now if reading for the first time.
Enjoy!
If we want design to be a force for climate action, we have to design for citizens, not consumers.
This is my provocation for today. In the next 15 minutes or so, I’m going to share what I mean by this, and some tactics that you might be able to take into your work to get started.
I’m Andy from New Citizen Project. We’re a strategy and innovation consultancy. When it comes to what this event is about, we mostly work in the areas of organisational and service (co-)design — though we certainly dabble in Google Slides as well!
You might have originally seen Jon on the bill for today — co-founder of NCP and author of the book CITIZENS. Sadly he couldn’t make it so I’m excited to be stepping in. However it’s worth saying I haven’t quite written a book about this topic — so whilst I’ll cover the overarching ideas we work with on projects with clients from across a range of sectors, I’m going to focus mostly on my experiences of working with the ideas, and the tactical ways you can actually apply them in your work as designers.
It’s also worth saying that you’re all doing brilliant stuff already. So what I hope this talk offers is a way of thinking about the work you’re already doing, and a couple of tools that you might want to add to your belt to take it even further.
So let’s jump into that overarching theory.
Nb if you’re familiar with our work, you can skip this bit!
We see the world, and the times we’re living in, through the lens of three stories: Subject, Consumer, and Citizen.
The stories of the Subject and the Consumer dominated the centuries before this one.
When we were Subjects, we had things done to us. The extent of our agency was to obey and receive, and the role of organisations was to command us.
This story shifted through two world wars, and what emerged, and what we’re battling in many ways, is the Consumer story. This story tells us we’re independent, we have things done for us, our agency is to demand and choose between the options available, and organisations exist to serve us. For a long time, the logic of the consumer has dominated our institutions, and influenced the ways we feel we can solve the problems we face.
This series of stories is reflected in the world of design, where the Design Council was set up originally by Winston Churchill’s wartime government to, in the words of Sarah Booth (Director of Impact at the Design Council), support a shift “from a wartime economy, to a consumer economy”.
In many ways, the Consumer story was liberating throughout that period. There’s a reason it become the Design Council’s mission. But at the same time, we’re also seeing its limits.
We have a cost of living crisis which won’t be solved by believing that success is the accumulation of material possessions.
We have record low levels of trust in our political system, which won’t be solved by just providing people with alternative choices, with no opportunity to actually shape what they are.
And we have both an loneliness epidemic and ecological breakdown that we won’t solve by seeing ourselves as independent of each other, or separate from nature.
It’s clear we need a new story.
Whilst the Design Council now sees their mission as to support the shift from a Consumer Economy to a Regenerative one, we’d describe the story that needs to emerge as one that’s always been there — the story of the Citizen.
In this story, we’re interdependent, our agency is not just individual but collective. People’s role is to participate and create, and the role of organisations is to facilitate that.
There are examples of this Citizen Story emerging all over the world. Jon wrote about a lot of these in his book. From Citizens Assemblies, to community energy schemes, to collectives like Design Declares coming together around a shared challenge within an industry to find solutions.
Everyone relates to these ideas a bit differently. I’m sure many of you will recognise these stories in your own lives, in work, or out in the world.
For me, the way I came to understand this was through university.
I studied Sport & Exercise Science at the University of Bath. Not the most directly relevant course. And although I really enjoyed that part of my university experience, my most memorable times from university came from getting involved in the Students’ Union: from helping to run the Basketball Club, to hitchhiking to Amsterdam dressed as a banana for charity.
It was through all of this that I ended up becoming an Officer in the Students’ Union. For the non-student politics nerds amongst you, that’s where you basically become a mini politician for the year, within a university.
It’s a full time job, where you’re sort of half staff, half student — which basically means you have lots of meetings to attend and emails to respond to, but you can still play for the university basketball team and go to Happy Hour on a Friday.
There were six of us. We all had different roles, and I was responsible for sport.
In many ways, it was a bit like a microcosm of wider society. We were the elected representatives (politicians), supported by staff (civil servants), we had our own manifestos to try and deliver on, and we were ultimately accountable to the students (electorate) who had voted us in.
About half way through the year, we started to look at refreshing our five-year strategy. The union was interested in how we might recontract the relationship between the Students’ Union, and the students. In recent years, it had felt that that relationship had become more transactional — more consumer.
Students saw the union as a service provider — of sports clubs, a bar, and other things people could get involved in — and with increasingly scarce resources, there was a risk that the SU would further step into this role, and start to see students as simply consumers of those services — independent, almost selfish individuals, whose only agency was to be served, and to demand the best value for money from their institution.
I experienced this in my own role. For the first six months, I’d felt pressure to deliver for students. To get them what they wanted from those with the power — whether that was bits of funding or a certain decision.
I saw the Subject story in the way we mandated club committee members to attend our monthly update meetings, for fear of club fines, but created little opportunity for people to play a meaningful role (especially when they took place the morning after the SU sports’ night!).
And I saw the Consumer story in how officer elections worked in the first place — focussing on what we could say we’d deliver (with little actual knowledge of what was possible), and what students as individuals, not necessarily what’s best for the whole.
Through this strategy process, we began exploring what a different relationship might look like, in a series of co-creation workshops.
We reached an articulation of a very different relationship. One where our purpose as an SU wasn’t just about being there to “help you get the most out of your time at university”, but to “enable students to come together, to make themselves, and the student community, the best it can be”.
It was only a few months until my term as an Officer came to an end, but this shift started to manifest in a number of ways — in our communications, our physical space, and our daily interactions as staff within an organisation.
In my role I started to think more about how more members of sports clubs could be part of shaping the future of sport at Bath — not just the recipients of my actions and decisions — which was really freeing for me as a representative, and unlocked more possibilities for students and their clubs as a result.
Of course, it’s not easy.
I saw the beginnings of this within the SU, and have continued to since in five years working at New Citizen Project. We have to rewire our own thinking, change processes, and equip people with the skills needed to facilitate and enable as a ‘Citizen’ organisation, which are different from the skills needed to serve or command.
So if the SU was a microcosm of wider society, how can other institutions do the same?
In the context of climate, there’s a similar risk that — especially with a difficult economic backdrop — organisations further see their role as solving the issues for us.
Now, that’s not inherently a bad thing. We need organisations to campaign on issues, increase public awareness, and make more sustainable choices more accessible and appealing. We need that.
The risk is that if we only see our role in this as recipients, not participants, then we’re stopping ourselves from seeing potential solutions that are commensurate with the challenges we face.
There’s a huge role for designers here, to not just create a world of less damaging consumers, but a world of more engaged citizens.
But how?
Well, I think there’s two sides to this.
1. Designing stuff in participatory ways.
This is where organisations co-design, collaborate and generally boost levels of participation within their own design processes. The aim here is to use the power of participation to make whatever you design better (in functionality, efficiency, aesthetics etc), and to ensure it meets the needs of whoever you’re designing for.
There’s huge value within participatory processes like this — and we’ve run many, from strategy co-creation, to membership redevelopment, to NHS service re-design. It’s a huge part of being what we call a ‘Citizen’ organisation, and we think more organisations should be equipped to do it.
Nb Priya Prakash (Design for Social Change) gave a great talk on People, Profit, Planet & Potholes, covering co-design in more detail at the event.
However, whilst co-design enables us to create a ‘better’ product (policy, service etc), it doesn’t necessarily result in participatory products.
We can design with people, but how can we be sure that what we’re designing isn’t just another ‘Consumer’ solution?
Co-design builds agency in the people involved, but how can we go further than that, and actually build collective agency through the product itself?
That’s where the other side comes in.
2. Designing participatory stuff.
There’s a huge opportunity here for designers, in not just designing solutions with people, but in creating meaningful, joyful opportunities for people to be part of the solutions themselves.
We often ask:
Why is consumption so creative, but participation so dull?
It’s time we flipped that on its head.
One of the tools we use to help with this way of thinking is called the Seven Modes of Everyday Participation.
It’s based on the idea that often the things that people can get involved in — with and through organisations — often sit at two ends of a spectrum. They are either very small and light touch, or very deep and intensive. Think of the difference between answering an in-app feedback question, and being part of a whole co-design process — that’s a huge jump that not everyone is prepared to make.
We think, however, that there is a valuable and important space in the middle, which enables us to view our organisations, products and services, through a ‘Citizen lens’.
The tool does what it says on the tin. It covers seven ways that people can participate, in whatever you’re trying to do in the world, that go beyond the quick, occasional and transactional, and introduce some joy and meaning, without becoming so onerous and structured that few people would actually get involved.
I’ll go through them one by one, give an example for each, and share a design question so you can see how it might apply it.
If you’re already familiar with the 7 Modes, then this might not introduce anything new. However, we are looking at updating our toolkit with new examples, prompts and ideas — if you’re interested in staying updated on this, sign up to our mailing list and we’ll keep you in the loop.
Tell stories
This is where you give people a framework and structure to share their personal experiences. This can be an incredibly powerful design tool, both in individual co-design workshops, and as part of larger scale participatory processes.
One powerful example is Conversations From Calais — re-humanising the refugee crisis by gathering stories from volunteers in Calais, and enabling anyone to post them in local places around the UK to highlight people’s experiences, and build empathy.
Design question: Who could you invite to tell their stories?
Gather data
Also known as Citizen Science. This is where you ask people to collect information with you as part of a data gathering exercise. Crucially this isn’t about gathering their data — it’s about capturing data that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
We really like Walrus from Space, an initiative from the WWF and the British Antarctic Survey, where the public can help track walrus populations online by becoming “walrus detectives”.
Design question: What information could people help you to to gather?
Share connections
This is about creating an incentive, structure and reason for people to talk about your organisation, your work or your mission with others.
Viral challenges like the Ice Bucket Challenge are really good examples of this. But from a design perspective, we really like 3 Things For Calgary — an online mechanism helping citizens to identify three acts, big or small, that could make a difference to the places they live. A key part of it is that you then invite and encourage at least three other people to do the same.
We’ve used this example for a while now — because it’s great — find out more in this piece by Jon back in 2017!
Design question: How could you make use of people’s connections and networks in support of your mission?
Contribute ideas
This is about sharing the problem or opportunity you are working on with people, and asking for their ideas. It’s very common to do this later in a project, to ask for feedback. But from a design perspective, this is about opening up from the very start — right at that discovery phase, and asking for ideas.
Now, often people’s hesitation here is that when you open up, there’s a risk that you get everything chucked at you, and there is no solution that everyone’s happy with. Therefore this needs to be about sharing the challenge, and the tradeoffs, not just asking “what do you want?”.
The best examples of this can be seen in participatory democracy processes like Citizens’ Assemblies (see DemNext’s Assembling an Assembly Guide), where people learn about an issue together and deliberate over potential solutions. You don’t need to run a whole Citizens’ Assembly to do this. You can apply the same principles to how you gather mass feedback or input on big strategic (or product) challenges.
Design question: What are you working on that could use more people’s ideas and perspectives?
Give time
This can be quite simply thought of us volunteering, but specifically this is about creating opportunities for people to offer small, manageable amounts of time towards your mission.
We really like the example of GoodGym. They’re a running club, pairing members with volunteering opportunities, so that people can have a positive impact in their communities, whilst also staying fit.
Design question: What simple, short tasks could people do to help your organisation?
Learn skills
This can be about unleashing skills that exist in your community, or sharing skills that you have developed as an organisation with others in service of your mission.
The Restart Project is a great example of this; a social enterprise hosting Restart Parties, where people can bring along broken electrical items and volunteers help them to fix them. Crucially, it’s not a repair service, it’s about equipping people to fix things themselves and share their skills with others.
Design question: What skills or knowledge could you or your community share?
Crowdfund
Finally, crowdfunding is about asking people to fund a new product or service before it exists. You might be familiar with equity crowdfunding where you can buy a share in the future success of a company. It can also be used by organisations wanting to ‘match’ funds raised by communities — helping to gain more grassroots support for citizens’ own initiatives.
A good example of this, following the People’s Plan for Nature which we worked on with WWF, the RSPB and Aviva, was the Save Our Wild Isles Community Fund, which aimed to make it easier for communities across the UK to take action for nature in their local area. The Fund gave £2 for every £1 raised, to help community groups reach their fundraising target quicker. 249 projects took part, raising over £2.5 million from over 12,000 supporters, to help bring nature back to life.
Design question: How might crowdfunding help you to test something out? Or how might you support communities to crowdfund for themselves?
Not all of these modes will be relevant for everyone, and of course there are often more obvious ways to apply these ideas when working in B2C (business-to-citizen) organisations, as opposed to the many B2B organisations who are part of Design Declares.
However, we think there’s a way for organisations of all kinds to apply these ideas, and build collective agency from wherever you are.
I hope that one or two of those examples have sparked an idea for something you’re working on. If it did, I’d love to hear it: feel free to drop us an email at hello@newcitizenproject.com to share what you’ve come up with.
The last thing I’ll say is that, when we’re working with organisations on these ideas — building participatory stuff — it’s rare that it’s in the brief. Usually our work involves flipping a brief on its head and asking: what if you did it like this?
So that’s my invitation to you.
How will you use your next design to build collective agency?
Thank you.
