"Design is only ever one tool in the mix, but it brings something very special -- from an ability to help people articulate their problems to a focus on ingenious solutions.” These are the words of Hilary Cottam, founding director of Participle, which is a social design business launched originally in Peckham England in 2007 with a dotcom entrepreneur, an industrial designer, an innovator and Hilary who is a social scientist. Over the past 3 years Participle has opened other offices throughout England. The goal of the company is to bring designers from different disciplines together to identify and offer design solutions to problems faced by modern society. The problem could be as simple as how to keep senior citizens involved and active in society without having to leave their own home to looming social and political issues of how to design effective water delivery systems in Africa.
What is surprising is that Participle isn't a traditional group of social workers, it is a design team. The company includes anthropologists, economists, entrepreneurs, psychologists, social scientists, and others driven by design techniques. Cottam who is 42 has used her design strategies to solve problems like the ineffective health and school system in England. The company’s favorite kind of design has to do with making people's lives better, many times taking routine daily concerns and designing effective modern day solutions. The senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Paola Antonelli, says. "Her projects not only work, they give people a sense of hope and strength."
I think Cottam and Participle are a great example of Design in Society being used as conversation. In fact, one of her methods is to have her clients “draw” their problem on paper. It is a great way for a client to communicate their needs to a designer. This “conversation” between designers and clients helps identify the design issue and sometimes even presents the solution by the time the problem is drawn or modeled.
Companies like Participle seem to be part of a new wave of designers who are trying to speak to the world and change it for the better. They speak to their society and the people in it through the projects they design. These companies believe that many of the institutions and systems set up in this century are failing and that design can help to identify the failed systems and to build new ones better suited to the demands of this century. Failed systems include the increasing amount of people who live at the poverty level and looming environmental and ecological catastrophes. Solutions include self-help systems for poor people to sustainable materials used to construct buildings, make clothing, fuel cars and much more. The important concept is that design is not the only tool needed to solve social issues but it can be very effective particularly when designers from different disciplines come together to attack a problem.
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