The crisis as a material to design the future

Two weeks ago I found myself writing a blog to get my own thoughts in order and ready myself for the week ahead. Two weeks later, the world has shifted beyond recognition, and I find myself doing the same.

Despite isolation, or in fact because of it, there is so much noise. So much necessary communication with family, friends and colleagues to check in with how people are adapting and coping. So many offers of help, from the neighbourhood to the national, that need coordinating. So many updates, opinions, and people — like I am doing here — trying to make sense of what is happening.

I’m lucky to be connected to a number of different networks, which through conversations, have contributed to an emerging sense of design’s role. At Design Council, we brought together 18 of our Design Associates and Built Environment Experts* to explore how designers can help in the short and long term**; we’ve been redesigning innovation & systems support for local and national government policymakers with States of Change, and the LGA & Health Foundation’s Shaping Places for Healthy Lives programme. As a member of The Point People, we’ve made our sessions weekly over this period of transition. And on Friday we held the first of 10 conversations*** about systemic design, jointly hosted Design Council x The Point People. These have helped me make sense of the noise, and start to form a view on a path forward. Albeit one which will undoubtedly twist and turn.

In the short term, resources need to be reconfigured around what is most needed.

We are seeing amazing examples of how activity, skills and resources are being shifted towards a new collective need and common purpose: fighting the virus. Hotels are being turned into temporary accommodation for key workers and those who are homeless, fashion houses are producing protective medical clothing, perfume, beer and honey producers are turning production to hand sanitiser and vacuum cleaner manufacturers are producing ventilators. Parks have been opened up so more people can access green space (some now shut, others open but with better physical distancing signage). And volunteers in their thousands are offering their time, energy and skills.

We need more of these. Our Built Environment Experts called for roads to be temporarily pedestrianised to accommodate more people walking or cycling (as has been done in Berlin), or to provide further low-density places for children’s play. As unfortunately more people are made redundant or furloughed, we need to understand how best to make use of their skills elsewhere. And we need to rapidly increase the use of allotments which can provide food security, but also purpose and good mental health. And to design ways for these to be re-adapted in times of future need, for example the Catfish streets in Japan which can be turned back into emergency spaces in case of earthquake.

We also need these to be evidence-led and coordinated. So that they are channelled to the right people and places, and so that there is not duplication. Our experts and associates called for an evidence-led approach, so that we use data to identify areas of particular vulnerability, and identify the local assets that can best be reconfigured to support them. And, with an eye on the future, use this data to make the case for continued use of these — or similar assets — later on. But what about the types of resources or intelligence that we don’t have available at our fingertips in existing datasets? A big part of our conversation about systemic design was about bringing together different types of intelligence (not just stated user need, but also our emotions, ecological intelligence, city resources) to create a more holistic sense (or ‘collective intelligence’) of what is needed, and the materials with which we can design a response.

Distributed design learning networks

One of the ways in which this can happen is through designers coming together across organisations. It has been incredible to see the amount of design challenges setting briefs for designers to respond to (e.g. IDEO, the World Design Organisation), the number of open zooms and googledocs collecting together knowledge and expertise about how to rapidly redesign services (e.g. coordinated by Lou Downe), or support charities to work digitally and remotely (e.g. created by Third Sector Lab and SCVO Digital or the Coronovirus Tech Handbook) or other learning communities (e.g the UXD one). Cassie Robinson, Dan Sutch and Nick Stanhope have been developing a series of Digital Innovation Teams as part of The Catalyst, which draw together multi-disciplinary teams of designers and developers to support charities to respond to new needs of vulnerable groups, often remotely. But importantly, to learn about what is working and feed that back into the teams, so they can build a new collective practice which is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Design skills & mindsets

What we’re seeing through all this adaptation and pivoting are design mindsets and attitudes: of understanding what is needed, looking widely to see what resources are available, being creative in coming up with ideas within constraints (designers love constraints!) — and trying them out quickly, and iterating. We are seeing how frontline professionals, in times of crisis, are having to break out of the business as usual processes and rules, and innovating. Our new strategy, launched last week, has a major focus on design skills, with the ambition to increase these in non-design professionals. The creative responses to the crisis gives us a rich set of examples to learn from how non-designers design, and the conditions around it (beyond a crisis need), to make the case for a continuation of this in the future.

Conversely, we’re also seeing the importance of sticking with design and innovation principles, even in a crisis. Policymakers are having to make quick decisions, with incomplete and changing information. There is no time for deep citizen engagement, and physical distancing clearly makes that harder. But even in the midst of this, there is still a need to put ourselves in the shoes of the most vulnerable, as well as seeing the bigger picture and thinking through unintended consequences. To breathe and reflect as well as act.

In the longer term, embed the new practices and possibilities of the crisis, into the future

As many people are observing, there are many positive behaviours and practices that we are seeing now — albeit under duress — that we were not able to achieve voluntarily at scale. Just weeks before this, Jennie Winhall and I ran an innovation session at the Transform Ageing showcase event, and one of our ‘radical’ questions was ‘how might we create a system where 20% of the population make caring their top choice activity?’ I don’t have the exact figures of how many people are caring now, but I’ve now got a flavour of it. As my colleague Gyorgyi Gallik put it, so often people implicitly don’t believe these things are possible, which limits concerted action towards it. Now that people have seen it is possible to live in this way, how can we use examples and evidence of this, to make a stronger case in the future?

Signals of the future now:

• Caring and reaching out to neighbours
• Prioritisation of services (including food/shopping) for the most vulnerable first
• Creative community-led responses, frontline staff creatively adapting and pivoting how they work (not sticking rigidly to process)
• Designers from different private sector agencies coming together to share learning and methods openly to support the greater good
• Government recognition of basic income needs (including self-employed which we at Design Council campaigned for)
• Cycling rather than driving or taking public transport…
• Huge reduction in air travel and movement of international conferences and meetings online, with reductions in air and noise pollution
• Going for a daily walk and noticing nature (made much more pleasant by above)
• As discussed above, businesses switching their activity to a social purpose (although to be fair, also for business survival)

There are of course lots of damaging behaviours, responses and unintended consequences, and the positive behaviours will not be experienced equally across society. For all the reduction in carbon emissions from air travel, there may be an increase in disposable plastic waste. Increased online communication is prompting concerns about surveillance. Off-licenses staying open at the same time as couples being at home in tense situations may increase domestic violence. There will be long-term impacts on children’s learning, on key workers’ trauma, on poverty and unemployment, and other inequalities that they exacerbate. We need to anticipate these, course correct where possible, and prepare for long-term focus.

But there is also a role for design in highlighting these positive behaviours and designing ways to embed them as future societal norms, through governance, the planning system, skills provision, frameworks, policies and social movements. And for these to be the way that we rebuild our future world as well as trying to protect it through the crisis.

As Geoff Mulgan sets out in his recent article ‘How not to waste a crisis’, there are many possibilities for Government and others in what we’ve seen.

Our Design Associates & Built Environment Experts called on us as Design Council to lead the way by setting out some of the principles or frameworks for designing a future society. Our new strategy, launched last week, set out how we use design to improve health & wellbeing and sustainable living through building design skills in us all. The current crisis is providing rich terrain for people to do that creativity, rapidly and quickly. Let’s learn from this and embed in the future.

Get in touch if you want to join us, or this aligns with what you are doing so we can be braver and bolder together.

Acknowledgements

*Our Design Associates and Built Environment Experts who joined us were: Marcus Grant, Peter Neal, Tim Gill, Camilla Ween, Beatrice Fraenkel, Maayan Ashkenazi, Andrew Cameron, Deb Upadhyaya, Laura Williams, Neal Stone, Phillipa Rose, Sophie Dennis, Megha Wadhawan.

**Questions they were asking were:

• How can services be rapidly redesigned to work remotely, deliver through volunteers and support new needs of vulnerable people at this time?
• How can processes be redesigned and reconfigured to get the right food and equipment to the right people at the right time?
• How can we provide information and advice quickly that people trust and act on?
• How can businesses rapidly pivot their production and delivery models, and their missions to a new collective purpose during times of crisis?
• How can places support the needs of vulnerable people — including providing temporary accommodation, safe social isolation spaces, food etc?
• How can places be redesigned to promote physical distancing, hygienic travel and safe play and exercise? At the same time as social connections, health & wellbeing?

***Designers part of the systemic design conversation were: Cassie Robinson, Eirini Malliaraki, Sarah Gold, Nick Stanhope, Makayla Lewis, Julia Schaeper, Indy Johar, Alistair Parvin, Seetal Solanki, Nat Hunter, Jo Morrison, Laura Williams