Can Design Solve Social Problems?

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2008 Masters of Design

Back in Britain, she cofounded School Works, a nonprofit that revitalized a failing London high school. A team of educators, architects, and psychologists worked with teachers and pupils to identify their needs. The team then redesigned the building, curriculum, and management systems. Among their changes was enclosing a dingy courtyard with a membrane roof, turning wasted space into a desirable social center. They also added vocational subjects to the curriculum, enhancing pupils' job prospects. The result was one of the U.K.'s 20 most improved schools for three years running. School Works has since worked with more than 40 schools across the nation.

Earlier this decade, while working for the Design Council, Cottam turned to health care. Originally she planned to rethink hospital design but became more interested in community-based services for sufferers of chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. "One in four people in Britain now has a chronic disease that's treated at home," she says. "So why are we investing in hospitals rather than community-based solutions?"

One problem the Design Council team identified is that diabetes sufferers often forget to raise important issues with doctors and caregivers. The solution was a pack of diabetes cards, each printed with a question to be used as a prompt. Superficially it looks like a health-care project but, as Cottam points out, design techniques were critical in identifying patients' problems and producing an efficient graphic solution. "It's amazing how new the simple design concept of understanding users is to many in the health-care field," says Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm Ideo, which works in U.S. health care, among other industries. "Hilary's work has shown that you can take rigorous design methodology and apply it successfully in social systems."

Participle itself came about following rigorous thought about how to address society's problems most efficiently. Rather than wait for commissions, it conducts what Cottam calls "quick and dirty research" to outline its plans, then finds partners to fund them. For the aging project, the Borough of Southwark teamed with Sky, a satellite-TV subsidiary of News Corp., to foot the $1.6 million development bill. The circle concept, tested earlier this year, will go live this month as a self-financing project: Southwark pays for some services, the seniors for others. Participle has also formed a for-profit firm, Future Participle, as an incubator for innovations. It will commercialize products and technologies that spring from Participle's work. "The market is huge," she says. "We're trying to set up a concierge service for seniors, because it would pay for the rest of our work."

There's plenty to pay for. She has already begun a new project aimed at helping youth better integrate into their communities, and she's also thinking about affordable housing. Long term, her challenge is to prove that Participle's ideas can work on a national scale. Arguably her biggest problem will be deciding how to allocate her time and resources to all the social problems she hopes to solve.

"Aging is a really good example of the issues we'd like to tackle, a systemic crisis that no one knows how to solve," she says. And huge as it may seem, that is, to Cottam, just a small example. "There's something much bigger to play for: the growing realization that many of our social institutions and public services have run their course and are out of spec with society -- like Zambia's water pipes."