Pro-AM Design = Innovation (Leadbeater TED Presentation)

Design is a very powerful tool. It elevates the likelihood of certain kinds of choices and shapes certain kinds of behaviours. Most designers balk at the idea that design is a form of social engineering, but Hilary Cottam, director of RED at the UK Design Council, maintains that "if you don't look at what any design is governing, then you are being governed by it." She continues: "The question for us is how do we find out what the effects of design are and make sure we're using those for social justice." So in our diabetes example, we can reasonably ask, How might things be different if the power of design was deployed to keep us healthy and fit?

As Charles Leadbeater puts it: "Design used to be done by specialists for users. From now on, in a growing number of fields, design will be done with users and by them." In this context the designer is becoming the facilitator, the enabler, rather than the dictator of what people themselves want to do.

Click and Listen or View the TED presentation.

Leadbeater explains very clearly the power of the Web 2.0 paradigm.

This is a must hear/view presentation.

The bottomline - most of our innovation will come outside our walls.

Perhaps this is exactly what Einstein had in mind when he said; "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Changing Schools Through Design

Here is a link to the audio and video of Sir Ken Robinson's TED presentation. Education is in dire need of redesign. This audio is followed by an excerpt from an post regarding school design in the UK.

In the UK secondary schools were built in the 1950s on a comprehensive ideology that promoted equality, but also a Fordist, one-size-fits-all approach to learning. Pupils sat in rows in front of the teacher who dictated lessons from the blackboard. 50 years later this scene has not changed, despite the huge changes taking place in the modern workplace, such as an emphasis on IT and teamwork. Now that government has a new ideology (based on creativity and diversity of learning styles) and a new curriculum, it has embarked on a massive program designing and building new schools. These new schools are just as attractive as the shopping malls where kids typically truant, and designed with flexible spaces for a mixture of group and individual work, desk-based work and role play, and opportunities for students to learn independently. The UK Design Council has worked with schools across the country to redesign their learning environments, creating new types of furniture and flexible learning spaces that support creative learning.

What better way to make the public--and teachers--see the radical changes being made to something as intangible as the philosophy of learning than to design new schools? New ideology, new design.

There has been a shift in conventional politics; a realization that top-down policies no longer work and that public services in particular must be redesigned around the user. Conventional policy makers are not readily equipped to do this. Designers are. Jennie Winhall