ReDesign Business, a week-long series of talks and workshops…

Written by Cat Drew in collaboration with Hiten Kamari and Subuola Ojuola

A month ago we hosted Re:Design Business, a week-long series of talks and workshops around reimagining business in the face of uncertainty. The event was organised by Propela, supported by Innovate UK & Design District, and formed part of London Design Festival. Over five days, around 500 people from 61 countries attended 30 talks/workshops/masterclasses with 45 speakers. For us at Design Council, this was a really exciting opportunity to consider how businesses can be part of creating a hopeful future, supporting a healthy and thriving world. While the festival has ended, you can still listen to all the talks here.

The importance of design in business

We know that design can increase business productivity, innovation and resilience. We know this from multiple business studies and surveys, and from our pioneering Designing Demand programme, which supported 5,000 businesses and showed that for £1 invested, businesses saw £20 return, and that the businesses we supported with design were around twice as likely to survive the recession than the control group.

But a sole focus on productivity and profit isn’t enough. And worse than that, it can produce business decisions that can harm or exploit workers and our natural world, and continue inequalities through unequal access for all. Businesses that care about people and planet are not new of course. There is a growing number of mission driven companies, and the B-Corps movement is accelerating this. According to B-Lab, data show that purpose-led businesses grew 28 times faster than the national average in 2017.

But this is not the norm. And businesses have been — and will continue to be — hit hard due to the pandemic. As Government rushes to support businesses to stay resilient and pivot, there is an opportunity not just to ‘build back’ to the same but to question what ‘better’ means and for whom, and to reimagine something different that helps us all to thrive.

So we’re designing a programme of design support we’re calling Design for Good Business, where we’re using design to support businesses to innovate for inclusion, support the health and wellbeing of their staff, and act sustainably — or better regeneratively — for the planet.

For us, these talks were a great showcase of what is possible, and the types of business ecosystems that we could see and has given us much inspiration.

Here are some of our collective highlights from the talks:

Design for Workforce Wellbeing — Aracelia Camargo, Natasha Reid, Abi Freeman, Tom Pearson and Dr Sara Hamilton talked about design for workforce and workplace wellbeing. They all spoke from a slightly different design perspective: changing our (often unquestioned) defaults in organisational culture (e.g. whether you sit or stand, our working patterns); using human-centred approaches to redesign the experience of A&E to reduce aggressive behaviour against staff; providing more control over workplace layout. What they all agreed is that health is a complex issue that requires a more systemic response, understanding it holistically, or as Aracelia put it ‘ecologically’. She said that we had to understand both the psycho-social stressors of the urban environments (e.g. poverty, relationships with neighbours, etc) as well as the physical stressors (e.g. air, noise and light pollution). Designing within a complex system requires starting first with the people who are experiencing the worst healthcare — often the essential workers. Sara Hamilton said that these people are often excluded from decision-makers’ understanding of what is going on, and are least likely to access wellbeing interventions (e.g. cycle to work schemes). Having understood their holistic experience, designers can then collaborate with others to create a portfolio of interventions across what Natasha describes as the ‘wider determinants of health’ — i.e. physical environment, food, transport, community, etc. Which is part of the reason that Sara left her role as a clinician, and joined Brink to work with employers to prevent ill health rather than cure it. And Tom highlighted the need for designers to work with different professions — scientists, psychologists, security experts, etc — in order to do this.

Rethinking workplace wellbeing: Natasha Reid’s ecosystem choice and tool for wellbeing

Hacking for Inclusion — Tolo Farinto gave a masterclass on how to create hacks for making businesses more inclusive, which in turn can make them more creative and entrepreneurial (there are lots of McKinsey reports to show the business case for this). He started with a great metaphor about the difference between diversity, inclusion and belonging and why they are so important. If you think about a party, diversity is inviting different people to come, inclusion is reaching out and making them feel welcome, and then belonging is dancing like no-one is watching (and anyone who has done this knows it requires a whole lot of psychological safety). After a really good exploration into how people experience exclusion, and some of the strategies and barriers around tackling it, he explained the method of ‘hacking’ (one of four used by Utopia). A hacker is someone who enjoys overcoming or circumventing software systems, or who can find small ways to improve something over and over, which adds up to a bigger whole. He said if you removed. ‘software’ and replaced it with our organisational systems (e.g. leadership, recruitment, promotion), we can start find ways to make our businesses more inclusive.

How Utopia describe diversity, inclusion and belonging

Future Fitness for Design — Malin Persson held a conversation between Kevin Bethune and Simon Gill. Both are industrial designers, although Kevin started off in the nuclear industry and moved to consulting, before starting his own practice. The themes of diversity and time came up throughout as being central to creativity. Design agencies need to be open to people coming in from non-traditional routes, inviting different perspectives. Simon said that so many agencies are the same, and if you want to stand out or be different, you have to include difference in how you work. Time is important for this — to allow space for serendipity, and allowing people to immerse themselves in different experiences to provide inspiration. But as Kevin said, also time to ask the bigger picture — the why — and to use design to unlock the ‘flow’ of people, so that they are not just consuming products for profit, but so they can unleash their potential into the world. And to do this, design agencies need to reflect the world that they are designing for — or better — with.

Creativity and collaboration — Helen Arvanitakis led a conversation with James Turner, Ansel Neckles, Lara Kinneir about the future of collaboration in our with-COVID, digital world. The session started with a poll, which revealed that 77% of the participants would prefer to collaborate in person than use Zoom.

Ansel Neckle explained that the preference for room is because creativity requires you to reassure and give confidence to people as they create ideas, and collaboration is about decision-making, and both of these are better done face to face. However, there are positives to digital. James shared that the switch to digital has opened massive opportunities for people who don’t live in London to attend virtual events, bringing in greater diversity of perspectives, which is important for creativity and innovation. The digital space has also caused the blurring of the boundaries of our human lives; there’s no longer a division between our personal lives and work personas such as children walking in on virtual meetings and people seeing your washing machine. So while this can be stressful, it has also led to a more holistic approach to working as we are able to bring our whole selves to work.

Feminine Business: I chaired this session with Abby Rose and Sophie Slater exploring what feminine business principles look like. Inspired by Jennifer Armbrust’s work in the US, Abby and Sophie talked about how they have designed their businesses (Vidacycle and Birdsong) to hold true to honesty, experimentation, empathy and beauty. Sophie explained how important honesty is. For instance, they found out that one of their suppliers was not 100% ethical. Another example is that they do not photoshop their models as they include all shapes and sizes of women, and how this is rare in start-up land and requires bravery. Abby shared how she uses the traditional structure of key results indicators, but does so in a way that allows autonomy and experimentation, and also includes radical goals such as beauty within them. Both agreed that they were not necessarily against profit (as it is important that businesses can reinvest and set some aside in uncertain times), but were against profit as a single measure of success and where it is created through extraction or exploitation. We ended the session with an exercise (inspired by Dan Lockton’s New Imaginaries) where we all took a current business metaphor or artefacts (e.g. worker bees, timesheet), added it to a new feminine business principle (e.g. “You have a body”, “Tell the truth”, “A business can be healing”) and created new tangible ideas that encapsulated what this new business way of working might look and feel like (e.g. instead of a sales pitch, create a playful pause for people to get to know each other; instead of winning, think about sharing; instead of employment, think of it as co-creation).

Jennifer Armbrust’s sister principles that Abby Rose and Cat Drew used for their discussion with Sophie Slater

Ideas to Change the World: Indy Johar’s talk was typically provocative and inspiring. The key points we took away from it were: (1) leaders need to think much more deeply about what they are doing, and shift from a management and control way of operating (which just produces more people following the same rules), and into one which is about freeing people to question and learn, and creates better conditions for collaboration. (2) In the past repetitive work was compensated by money which has led to consumerism and damage to our planet, so constructing more purposeful work for people is one way for us to live more sustainably. And (3) designers have a crucial role in creating these new types of worlds because they combine ’synthesis’ with ‘intent’, i.e. they are able to bring together lots of types of knowledge and different perspectives (synthesis) and propose something which helps a new world emerge (intent).

“Designers have the ability to synthesise intentionally and create these knots of possibility into the future. They are doing propositional analysis not analytic analysis.”

And finally…

The SOMA sleep sessions (by artist Rachel Wingfield and Sound Meditator Leo Cosendai) introduced a moment of tranquillity through a series of immersive sounds and light meditation. A mindfulness experience like I have never endured, it felt like dipping a toe into the ocean of the future! As Deborah Rey-Burns of Propela (the festival organiser) said, “creative ideas come from rested minds”.