Participle, a new social venture to design the next generation of public services

Hilary Cottam, UK Designer of the Year 2005 and former director of RED, the meanwhile closed innovation unit of the UK Design Council, is currently setting up Participle, a new social venture to design the next generation of public services, working with Charles Leadbeater, the internationally renowned thinker and innovator, and author of the book We-Think, and Colin Burns, designer and formerly the CEO of IDEO London.

From Hilary Cottam’s website:

“Participle will be a unique hybrid bringing together systemic policy thinking and transformative ideas with a project methodology which enables us to harness the broader creativity and latent solutions visible on the ground to service users, front line workers and communities: we call this transformation design.

We will engage in three closely linked types of work: transformational projects: ‘proof of concept’ solutions that work at scale; you will be able to see and measure the difference we have made at the neighbourhood level, in cities and rural communities nationally; transformational ideas: world leading, rigorous new analysis and proposals to influence the development of policy; transformation design: training in the tools and methodology of our inter-disciplinary team’s approach to any issue.

We will work in partnership with the private, public and third sector organisations.”

UPDATE: RED was set up in 2004 by the Design Council to tackle social and economic issues through design led innovation. The people in the unit left the Design Council in December and will be aggregating around Participle. A RED project archive site can be found here.