Design / Redesign

It may not be quite a movement, but things are moving in that direction. Thanks to the RED team of the UK Design Council, we may be hearing ever more about the interdisciplinary field of "Transformation Design."

RED is a 'do tank' that develops innovative thinking and practice on social and economic problems through design innovation. RED challenges accepted thinking. We design new public services, systems, and products that address social and economic problems. These problems are increasingly complex and traditional public services are ill-equipped to address them. Innovation is required to re-connect public services to people and the everyday problems that they face.

RED harnesses the creativity of users and front line workers to co-create new public services that better address these complex problems. We place the user at the centre of the design process and reduce the risk of failure by rapidly proto-typing our ideas to generate user feedback. This also enables us to transfer ideas into action quickly.

There are few firms that have approached this work in the US. In fact, there have always been very few design firms in the US able to pull off Euro-style Participatory Design, from which much of the social import of Transformation Design has grown.

IDEO comes to mind, with a number of service design projects, including their well-known redesign of healthcare environments. However, the US does not fund a public sector think tank in design such as the Design Council, that I know of. The UK's RED group has the liberty of making excellent use of public funding to explore and experiment in public service provision. Its clear that, regardless of whether these projects evolve into new public services or not, the use of participatory design as social experiement will wake people up.