Hillary Cottam - Changing the World Through Design

"My policy colleagues say they went into politics because they wanted to challenge the status quo and make things better for ordinary people. That's certainly why I went into design. So maybe design is more political than you think." - Hillary Cottam

"Embodying ideology Monuments to political (and corporate!) ideologies are all around us in the design of buildings, goods and services. A few years ago, a team of architects, policy makers and educationalists from the Do Tank looked at redesigning prisons. Prisons are a powerful example of the way design reinforces and makes manifest political ideology. In the 19th century, the dominant ideology in criminal justice was of power through surveillance, control, punishment of the psyche and awe of the state. Architects then designed their prisons to oppress and remove any sense of autonomy or personal identity. The most extreme of these designs is the panopticon, a circular format with a central watch tower which allows an observer to observe all prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not: the architectural equivalent of Big Brother. These designs punished indeed, but did nothing to rehabilitate their subjects. In fact, surviving examples of panopticons are known to create psychological trauma in their prisoners. " Jennie Winhall

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What assumptions are embodied in our:

• Offices
• Schools
• Libraries
• Churches
• Government buildings
• Health facilities

What are the assumptions about the people coming in; about the leadership inside, about the organization"s relationship to its immediate community, about its legacy, about its interaction with the public?

"French philosopher Michel Foucault describes power as distributed and ubiquitous--embedded in our daily lives. The spaces we inhabit, the tools we use and the systems we interact with are all mediated by design, and so design, then, operates as part of that power. It is, whether we like it or not, being used to shape society--but by whom?" - Jennie Winhall

Many of the challenges we face as a society find their expression in design. Design is the outward expression of our philosophy, theology and worldview.