Design, Public Service and the Fifth Wave
By Hilary Cottam
In 2004 Robin joined the RED Team at the Design Council, first in the form of an advisor, and later as the leader of the team whilst I took maternity leave.
During the early noughties we were exploring three core ideas:
How knowledge is made and with who? Robin writes of metis, knowledge that is thick and not routinised, the sort of insights that service users and front-line workers have, which can neither be seen nor clearly understood from the centre. The design process provided a way to engage with this metis, to think how we might use the insights available to re-design public services.
We were exploring how closed, industrial service systems – from the National Health Service to the Jury Service – might be opened up: how we could re-design our core public services in ways more appropriate for the modern age, with the citizen at the heart.
And we were explicitly looking at the lessons offered by new forms of industrial production (a core theme of Robin’s work over many decades); how the fifth digital wave – might offer possibilities for changing the organisation and the ownership of public services and utilities. This work drew primarily on earlier practice – my own experience in reforming the prison system and Robin’s work on waste systems.
Reading the papers, almost 20 years on, their relevance remains striking. In Open Health, Robin writes about chronic disease. He sets out the health system challenges: the need for new systems that can both cope with difference and that understand people not services create health. Robin looks at the challenges involved in moving from a centralised mass production health service to one built on ‘a new rhythm’ that of the patient’s life and their episodic needs. Open Health draws on the RED Team’s work with Kent Local Authority and the residents of the Park Wood estate and with the Bolton Diabetes Network. Both the analysis of the health system’s failings and the solutions proposed are pertinent and needed now.
In our paper on Public Utilities and the Fifth Wave we explore the coalition needed to bring into being a new paradigm (a question Robin later developed further in work at Nesta). The critical issue is the role of the State; ‘the State will have to reconstitute itself (in Britain at least) away from the subaltern status it has been driven into…to restore its specialist knowledge and public identity’. Again, this challenge and Robin’s thinking is perhaps more pertinent now than when we wrote in 2003.
And what of design? The work we pioneered at the Design Council was at the forefront of what has now become known as social design or human centred design. For Robin the abilities and processes of the RED team, offered a huge possibility to combine theory and practice and to ‘chat’ in new and democratic ways, opening up the potential for systemic change within our public services. At the same time Robin was frustrated that design (as opposed to architecture) was so under theorised. It is notable in his writing that he turns to architects, rather than designers for examples and inspiration.
‘When are things no longer useful?’, Robin asks, drawing on Illich. The deep insight in Robin’s work is more useful than ever and the need to re-invent and explore the power/knowledge nexus further is pressing.
August 2020