In this talk, Rawsthorn looks at the role of design in social change. She looks at how design has been used to solve social problems. From the visualisation of poverty in London and the spatiality of slave ships, to the role of designers in designing solutions to aged care.
She talks about the skills and knowledge that designers bring to social problems.
… designers have excellent instinctive communications skills help them to squirrel out information from people – design is also strong on lateral thinking – their communication skills also prove critical in raising fund – there’s a determination to apply design for the good of society – secondly interpret design in its broadest strategic sense as a process change management and a series of skills to be applied in different contexts – thirdly they have to entrepreneurial drive to do so and developing new ideas and the strength and chutzpah to realize them – and critically they also have access to digital technology – there are of course many more designers equally determined to to work for the good of society – now i’m not going to pretend remain in the design is a panacea for these problems far from it – it is a very powerful tool to tackle them provided it gets deployed intelligently and the more we know about design the greater our chances will be using its power wisely justice… (adapted from YouTube transcript