Adam Thorpe

Design with society: why socially responsive design is good enough

This paper seeks to make the case for socially responsive design. It does this by offering a broad contexualisation of previous accounts of design, including those made in this special issue, and by proposing new and useful ways of understanding the need to address multiple actors and design agendas in the design process. The paper also reviews and identifies problems with some ideas about collaboration and agency in the context of social design and design-led social innovation. It suggests that equitable arrangements between stakeholders are essential to ensure the successful delivery of design for social change in the real world. It also argues that robust socially responsive design and innovation methodologies and engagement strategies are essential, and need to be mindfully applied by designers seeking to make effective and appropriate contributions to meeting societal goals in new, sustainable ways.

Hey Babe—Take a Walk on the Wild Side!

ABSTRACT There is a self-evident need to “think thief” when designing against crime. If we do not understand how thieves operate, how are we to thwart their efforts? Also, precisely how should designers go about trying to think like a thief? This paper attempts to address a gap in knowledge. It seeks to introduce role-playing and empathic tools and techniques from drama and design to generate strategies that might inspire and help designers to design against crime. The paper describes how immersive and empathic methods employed in design and theater, supported by “scripting” exercises detailing the human and non-human actors and competencies in given crime scenarios, provide tools for designers to better understand the problem context. Such methods help generate insight into the opportunistic mindset of the casual thief, or even the professional career criminal, without losing sight of the need to design for users.

Criminality and Creativity: What’s at Stake in Designing Against Crime?

This chapter explains what criminals and creatives have in common. It examines the ethnographic methods linked to ‘thinking thief’ to generate designs against crime. It analyzes strategies used by a variety of artists, designers, entrepreneurs, and criminals that involve opportunism and visually focused modus operandi. Finally, the chapter considers the question: If designers, by ‘thinking thief’, are helped to deliver social benefit in terms of reduced incidence and impact of crime, what benefits might be afforded to society by facilitating criminals (and those at greatest risk of becoming criminals) to ‘think designer’ or ‘artist’?

Anatomy of local government/design education collaboration

Abstract The Public Collaboration Lab (PCL) is an action research partnership between the London Borough of Camden (LBC) and the University of the Arts London, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The research explored the potential for, and value of, strategic collaboration between design education (DHE) and local government (LG), and how design research and practice can contribute to service, policy and social innovation in the LG context. The project prototyped and piloted a new way of working that identified and leveraged synergies in the operational objectives of LG and the learning objectives (research and teaching) of DHE. The poster shares findings from the research in the form of an ‘anatomy’1 of LG/DHE collaboration, which articulates and visualizes the internal workings of LG/DHE. The ‘anatomy’ serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to reflect on collaborative projects by inputting data to the models to visualize their activities; and as a generative tool, providing a set of templates that focus discussion around the planning of collaborative projects.

Public collaboration lab

This exhibition introduces the Public Collaboration Lab (PCL), a one-year research project that explores the potential for, and value of, strategic collaboration between design education and local government to better engage council staff and the citizens they serve, in the development and application of design-led approaches to social challenges and to inform policy. It displays a selection of practice-based PCL collaborative design engagement tools that provide a site for argument, debate and exchange between participants in the process of creative engagement. Taking these tools as a starting point, the mini-workshop explores the various definitions of such tools (thing, boundary object, cultural probe, etc.), discussing their role in participatory design research.