Design for Living Change

The RSA is developing a new approach to ensure its research and innovation have greater impact.

We design at our best in times of uncertainty, urgency and crisis. As the American architect and educator Ann M Pendleton-Jullian puts it: “design for emergence is designing for change in a context or system already in motion.”

Last year gave us all the signals we need to know that now is the time to actively question whether the old normal – designed through habits, values and systems for living, working, making and trading, and how these all intersect with one another – is healthy and sustainable for the long term.

We saw communities and organisations come together to embrace uncertainty as an opportunity for innovation, experimentation and renewal. The value of social capital came to life overnight as neighbourhoods all over the UK formed mutual aid groups to care for the most vulnerable. Within a week of the first UK lockdown, my own local group for our estate had identified champions, designed a support service, created on open toolkit of resources and information using free collaboration platform Trello, and leafleted all 2,000 houses offering and asking for support. Nearly a year later, these groups are already delivering value to members and strengthening community resilience beyond the immediate crisis we all face.

Meanwhile, parts of the public sector that could deliver their services remotely shifted their operations to digital first as soon as they were able to. GP practices are tapping into a national network of GPs beyond the capacity of their local practice in order to be more responsive. They are also using WhatsApp for visual diagnosis of symptoms, making healthcare more convenient for patients and practitioners alike.

Likewise, catering and food production services pivoted their business models with little notice, from business-to-business to business-to-consumer in response to lockdown. Food sourcing company Natoora is only one of many examples, shifting from supplying food to chefs to re-imagining food supply across the entire system: from farming to retail and consumers, and towards food waste elimination. Opening up to wider markets has diversified revenue streams, enabling these businesses to be more responsive in the long term as new challenges emerge.

The Living Change Approach

This is what we mean at the RSA when we talk about Living Change, which is being applied to all our programmes; this includes our work on cities and sustainability. The approach challenges us to think like a system as we strive to understand and define the challenges we are experiencing (the ‘what is’), and to act like an entrepreneur as we innovate and experiment with interventions that shape inclusive, equitable and sustainable futures (the ‘what if’). We need to see the whole system as a complex web of interconnected social events, trends, structures, models and players.

For example, the pandemic has hit minority ethnic groups the hardest because many of them are low-paid key workers risking their lives on the frontline, and because these groups have higher rates of underlying health conditions. Both of these factors are driven by an inequitable social, economic and political system that hinders the ability of these groups to access and negotiate better-paid work and to achieve the living and working conditions that are essential for good physical and mental health. Thinking like a system about these root causes and interdependencies is the first step in achieving a real understanding of what is driving the challenges we face today and where there might be energy for change.