Can Design Solve Social Problems?

By: Alice RawsthornMon Oct 13, 2008 at 5:45 PM

Can design save the world? Hilary Cottam thinks so.

Related Content

When Liz Demontford's husband died, her world fell apart. "I was at a loss," recalls the retiree, who lives in Peckham, an impoverished part of London. "Our finances were in a mess, and I didn't know what to do with my time." Enter the Peckham Circle, a prototype nonprofit set up to aid local seniors. It arranged for Demontford to see a financial adviser and to join a gardening project, where she made new friends. She was also given a Webcam to keep in touch with her son and his family, who live in Australia. "I didn't think I'd use it, but now I'm hooked," she says. "I can see my grandson growing up."

The Peckham Circle was an experiment devised for seniors in South London -- providing practical assistance as well as encouraging members to help each other, say, by trading cooking lessons for Internet training. "Many seniors worry about their safety, losing their money, and what to do when the heating breaks down," says Hilary Cottam, founding director of Participle, the self-described "social business" that invented the circles, which will launch in other parts of England starting this month. "The secret of a happy old age is getting on top of the everyday and being networked. The circles can help."

Great idea, but what may be surprising is that Participle isn't a conventional bunch of social workers or do-gooders. It's a design team. Participle's interdisciplinary crew includes anthropologists, economists, entrepreneurs, psychologists, social scientists, and a military-logistics expert, but it is driven by design techniques and headed by Cottam, 42, who also has used such strategies to tackle the shortcomings of Britain's school and health systems. "Hilary's -- and my -- favorite kind of design has to do with making people's lives better, often taking account of their mundane daily concerns," says Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "Her projects not only work, they give people a sense of hope and strength."

Cottam is one of a new wave of design evangelists who are trying to change the world for the better. They believe that many of the institutions and systems set up in the 20th century are failing and that design can help us to build new ones better suited to the demands of this century. Some of these innovators are helping poor people to help themselves by fostering design in developing economies. Others see design as a tool to stave off ecological catastrophe. Then there are the box-breaking thinkers like Cottam, who disregard design's traditional bounds and apply it to social and political problems. Her mission, she says, is "to crack the intractable social issues of our time."

With her plummy voice and cropped dark hair, Cottam is a contemporary incarnation of the indomitable English roses who helped the needy by running 19th-century missionary hospitals and schools. She's uniquely equipped for modern problem solving; as David Kester, CEO of the British government's Design Council puts it, she has a rare ability "to talk with politicians as easily as designers."

Cottam is mounting her campaign from Participle's studio, in an old industrial building near London's Tower Bridge, where the walls are covered with giant sheets of paper bearing plans and lists and photos of people the company has worked with. She founded Participle in 2007 with dotcom entrepreneur Hugo Manassei, innovation strategist Charles Leadbeater, and industrial designer Colin Burns. "It's really important that we have a genuinely interdisciplinary team," explains Cottam. "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.

Cottam's catholic vision may reflect the fact that she's not a designer by training, but a social scientist who happened upon design in her quest for answers. One teacher on her master's course at Sussex University was Robert Chambers, who developed a new approach to rural appraisal in India. "He had this breakthrough idea that if you get people to physically model or draw their ideas, you'll have a different dialogue with them -- more honest and less defensive," says Cottam. "Designers use those tools instinctively."

Her conversion to design-driven thinking was completed after she joined the World Bank in 1993 as an urban-poverty specialist and worked on a project in Zambia. The existing water grid was dilapidated and didn't reach Zambia's fast-expanding urban areas. The bank planned to spend millions of dollars renovating it. "We worked in communities to find out what they needed, what we could provide, and whether it would be looked after," she says. "By spending the money differently, we made a social difference. I was very interested in whether you could also make a difference by spending the capital budgets for schools and hospitals differently." What would happen, she mused, if you redesigned those institutions -- not just the buildings but the operating systems too?