Designing for Social Change
case studies
“If design is a holistic, human-centred, collaborative and dynamic process used to develop solutions to complex problems, then why couldn’t the same principles be applied to create innovative solutions for complex social issues?”
Nicola Rudge
In the world of social change, key challenges lie in designing new solutions for and with the communities who experience them. Enabling a solution to be designed and built by the communities themselves (rather than imposing a solution on them), in my experience, makes for very effective change, and very innovative and less costly solutions. Mapping the problem, ideating solutions and looking at points of intervention, enables us to find opportunities to influence change. Once identified, my design expertise can be used to transform those ideas into reality and my coaching skills can enable those communities engaged in the process to reach their goal.
Both skill sets are important, as coaching and design are transformational processes. Combined they offer incredible opportunities, to help guide and create a roadmap for the desired outcome. Identifying the goal, defining the process of exploration, breaking plans down into achievable steps, monitoring progress, tackling obstacles and revising/reiterating them towards success.
Fostering my passion for more sustainable solutions and methodologies to create socially responsible design, I continued applying my film experience from earlier in my career. I create documentaries and use filmed stories as a catalyst for inspiring and designing powerful individual and collective change models. By the community for the community.
By identifying a need for change and mapping and identifying the problems in people’s journeys and stories, we find we can identify pivotal moments where changes in systems, processes or procedures could have allowed for different outcomes. Working with the communities who need the change, we employ their storytelling to find these pivotal points. We can leverage these stories to demonstrate, why there needs to be change, and then invite people to consider how we can create change. And as the stories unfold, we ask communities to come up with solutions they believe would work. But if we are clever, we can also engage other communities of interest, decision-makers, policymakers involved in the problem, to consider where in ‘their system’ changes can also be made. This allows for a raft of creative solutions to the same problem, tackling it from different perspectives. As opposed to imposing an outcome from a single pre-defined point of view. This collective impact on any given challenge is a far more effective way of creating change. And by allowing the process to be dynamic and emergent, we have found the resulting innovation to be diverse and far reaching.
Tim Brown, CEO IDEO
RISING TO THE CHALLENGE
I continued to celebrate new proficiencies in my career which led to several new opportunities to work on projects close to my heart. In 2000, I became a facilitator of the Autobiographical Monologue Process, and in 2008 I updated my film and television production skills with the San Francisco School of Documentary Film to affect social change as a documentary film maker. I later became an ‘expert patient’ programme trainer for the NHS, an initiative that recognises the power of patients’ expertise about their own conditions and abilities, to support self-managed goals of care. As opposed to imposing goals (which often fail). An idea that in the past was rarely considered in health care.
Applying these new skills and coaching processes along with my other coaching expertise, helped me to explore social challenges in new ways. It led to individual and emergent change models which facilitated much more far-reaching solutions and changes in systems and communities.
Where it all began - The Manchester Diabetes Centre
How the method and the puzzle came together.
My first experience was personal. As a patient with adult-onset Type 1 Diabetes, I had been complaining about how services were disconnected. I was working full time in media, which was demanding, and the disjointed nature of each of the services required in diabetes care meant lots of appointments and time away from work. I surmised that if all appointments could be in one place (basic services, blood draws, basic tests, updates of care), they could probably all be done in an hour, once every 3 months. This would benefit the patient and mean that doctors would not be required to refer to all the different services, across multiple sites, wasting time and money. If it could be done, it would be cost saving, time saving, and effective, including new patient education, all in one place!
Rising to the challenge - Nourishing the Kids of Katrina
Using filmed stories strategically to influencing change. In 2005, I was at San Francisco Film School and worked as a production assistant with co-student, Robert Lee Grant. Robert had an idea to create a model to influence change, tackling diabetes and obesity in children in America. He did this by influencing local government to create edible school gardens based on the work of chef and advocate, Alice Waters.
The devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans left schools in need of rebuilding from the ground up. Grant’s vision was to use documentary film about the Edible School Gardens to gain support from influencers in the school district rebuilding programmes.
Get Hip to Good Food was an impactful project which later became the core of a bigger documentary ‘Nourishing the Kids of Katrina’, encouraging more schools to join in edible school garden programmes, and their influential effects on health and wellbeing.
TWO FIRM FAVOURITES
‘Conversations for Life’: Let’s talk about living and dying well. Education resources and training for the public and heath care.
In partnership with Mary Matthiesen, I was part of creating an approach and community models to address a gap in education of both public and health care in the taboo subject of death and dying. The aim was to engage each in their role to affect future care outcomes.
Our dynamic and emergent design process identified challenges and developed models for social change. It included gathering and creating a board of stakeholders, researching verified data, filming individual and community stories of problems and mapping opportunities for impact. Stories created the catalyst for conversations between the different stakeholders, and all were invited to experience each other’s perspectives, share “aha” moments, consider, explore and co-create solutions to the problems they each experienced, informed by a specific process.
And ‘Through our eyes’ tackling inequities in health services.
Following the success of the Conversations for Life project, we were asked to develop a similar model to improve outcomes for communities who were experiencing inequities in health care services. ‘Through Our Eyes’ was another transformational project. It tackled and questioned the difference outcomes between the BAME community and that of the White/British population. In a community event with all stakeholders for care in the room, it used filmed stories as a catalyst to explore where changes could be made. It recorded the outcomes and set goals for implementation of change ideas.
Areas of Work
Hi, I'm Nicola
- Award Winning Designer of Built Environments:
- Boutique hotels, cruise ships, film and television
- Social Entrepreneur & Advocate for Sustainable Change:
- Diabetes, End of Life Conversations, Sustainable/Green Communities & Environments
- Expert Coach
- Creatrix of the Alignment Process to cut through the biggest and most expensive obstacle to designing a space or a life that truly supports the desired outcomes: “I don’t really know what I want”
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Research
- Concept development – visioning – ideation
- Special effects and illusions
- Communication
- Technical & construction drawings
- Model making
- Finance – budgets – procurement
- Managing teams
- Construction
- Set decorating – dressing
- Working with construction companies – engineers – ride designers and manufacturers – specialist designers – architects – engineers – animators – trades people – electricians – plumbers – decorators – floor fitters – carpenters – joiners – plasterers – bespoke fitters – landscapers – gardeners
Qualifications
- First class honors degree – Manchester school of film and television
- Design for the communication media.
- Building heritage and conservation.
- Retrofitting buildings