New Forms of the State
Robin Murray and Geoff Mulgan in China, 2006
Robin Murray, the Potential of Social Innovation and Transforming the Fiscal World
Geoff Mulgan first worked with Robin at the GLC, then as a collaborator on many projects, from reimagining tax systems to recycling, to later teaching municipal officials in China, to mapping the world’s social innovation system. Here Geoff sets out how Robin would approach a problem - forensic attention to detail, questioning, liberating potential, remaking production and using the small to illuminate and transform the big - and how this ‘method’ is needed now more than ever.
Open Health
Jenny Winhall recounts the time she spent working with Robin as part of the Design Council’s RED Unit, where their task was to bring to life the contribution design could make to re-conceiving the health system on distributed, person-centred lines. The result was a set of live experiments, two prototypes for a new kind of health service based in Bolton and Kent, and the report Open Health. This detailed a new ‘platform economy’ model for healthcare, and described the ways in which a transition to this new kind of adaptive system, based on prevention, distributed production, participation and so on, could be achieved.
These cards were developed by the Design Council as part of their project with diabetes sufferers in Bolton. The cards were used to help patients talk about diabetes and their experiences of living with it in a non-medical way.
Design, Public Service and the Fifth Wave
Hilary Cottam explores Robin’s work on public service design at the Design Council in the early 2000s. Most notably his work on Open Health which examined how the National Health Service could be re-designed with citizens not only at its heart but also as contributors and key sources of information and control, and not simply passive recipients of services.
FURTHER READING
Geoff Mulgan and Robin Murray, Reconnecting Taxation, London, Demos, 1993
Robin Murray, “The State after Henry”, in Marxism Today, pp 22-27, May 1991. Translated into Italian here.
Robin Murray, New Forms of Public Administration: notes of discussions, IDS, 1989
Robin Murray, ‘Ownership, Control and the Market’, New Left Review, no.164, 1987
Robin Murray, “Public Sector Possibilities”, Marxism Today, July 1986, 28-32
Robin Murray, “New Directions in Municipal Socialism” in B Pimlott (ed.) Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, Heineman, 1984 (also in Spanish)
Robin Murray, Pension Funds and local authority investments. Capital & Class, 7(2), 89–103, 1983