Design and Big Society

In a major seminar series, hosted by the Institute for Government, the Design Council and NESTA, public service leaders will debate the challenges and opportunities of implementing Big Society public services.

Nat Wei, Government adviser, member of the House of Lords and former McKinsey consultant, has been tasked with delivering Prime Minister David Cameron's Big Society vision and in the first seminar of the series he introduced an audience of public service leaders, policy makers, academics and leading thinkers in their field to the three Big Society priorities: 

1. To get people more involved in their communities and promote mass social action
2. To ensure people are able to contribute more effectively through a stronger social sector
3. To ensure people are better able to shape governmental policy and delivery

Participants in the discussions talked about government's role in Big Society and how they could support it to:

• develop policies that achieve the three Big Society priorities
• build citizen capability
• continue to tackle issues beyond the remit of the Big Society
• protect the most vulnerable members of society 

Design Council projects and the Big Society vision

The Design Council is currently helping to deliver projects that show the Big Society ideals in action including:

Public Services by Design is inspiring and enabling public service transformation through design thinking and techniques. With clients such as the North East Improvement and Efficiency Partnership, HMRC, Lewisham Housing Options Centre and others Public Services by Design is helping them transform their services in cost-effective ways by working with designers to better meet the needs of their clients.  

Dott Cornwall is bringing together local communities in Cornwall and partnering them with world-class designers to work on projects that improve how we live, work and play. Programme Director Dr Andrea Siodmok says: 'What we're trying to do in Cornwall is to tap into existing creative talents and shake it up by bringing in different thinking from around the world.' 

Read more about Dott Cornwall and the Big Society on the Dott Cornwall website

Design Council council member Jeremy Myerson says that design methods are an important way to deliver the Big Society vision: 'Designers have been great at scaling designs up to a national level. But now how do we now teach people to scale down to a local level and give people the tools to create their own improved communities?' 

For the Water Design Challenge, run in conjunction with Southern Water, we briefed Key Stage 3 students in schools in the South East to design a service, product or campaign that improves the way their schools use water. We partnered them with professional designers, who'd volunteered their time and expertise, to facilitate an innovative solution to water conservation. With the money the schools won for pitching their ideas they are going to invest in implementing their designs or in working with designers again to develop new ways to make their behaviour more sustainable. 

Design Council methods show that designers are skilled at protecting vulnerable members of society and designing solutions for them says our Chief Design Officer Mat Hunter: 'In the bad old days we started with designer centred design, and then we were enlightened and we moved to user-centred design. And then we got even more sophisticated and we started to design with, not just for. And now we're thinking about co-production. It's not even enough to design things together. We now must produce them and run them in this collaborative way.'

Read on to find out more about what's happened at each of the Institute for Government's Big Society seminar series, a platform for public service leaders to discuss the implications of the Big Society for public services. 

You can also keep the discussion going by having your say on the topics raised in each seminar.