Engineering a brighter future
Alice Rawsthorn, design critic of The New York Times, reports on Loops, an experimental project created by Participle, the British social design group, that aims to help young people to become more confident, ambitious and resourceful.
“[Hilary] Cottam [, co-founder of Participle,] and her colleagues are at the forefront of the increasingly influential discipline of social design, whereby designers collaborate with specialists from other fields, like ethnographers, psychologists and anthropologists, to try to develop more efficient, inspiring and cost-effective ways of dealing with social problems.
Rather than using design to produce visible things, such as objects or images, social designers apply the principles of design thinking to address social, political and humanitarian crises. They also use their instinctive flair for identifying the causes of problems and inventing ingenious ways of solving them, as well as their ability to “sell†those solutions clearly and persuasively.”
