Design for Social Change - A Conversation with Zoe Stanton

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Now, in this world of climate change and the damage we've already done to our planet, people are talking about it being more than human-centered. So it's not just enough for us to be designing for people, it's designing holistically, understanding the impact that people have on the world.

Welcome back to the podcast. It was great today to be able to speak with Zoe Stanton about the role of design in social change. Zoe is an entrepreneurial, creative, and collaborative leader with more than 15 years of experience working in social change and a passion for addressing the most important and complex issues. She co-founded and successfully led the UK's first health-focused service design agency, Us Creates, through to successful acquisition. Zoe has had leadership roles creating and scaling new ways to to bring about change, transform organizations, and design better services for positive social impact. She's led teams through significant transformation across sectors with notable clients including NHS England, Homes England, Macmillan, and Nestlé. She's passionate about working with young talent to help them grow and develop. You can connect with Zoe on LinkedIn or on Twitter, and you'll find the links in the show notes. Hello, how are you doing?

I'm good. How are you?

I'm good. Perfect. Okay. So we start with just thinking about your background in design and a lot of use of design and design thinking in education and in business and leadership. As an expert in service design, where do you see the role of design in society in terms of complex problems or organizational issues, environmental problems?

Now, that's a big question and I think really simple, big overarching role, like why design is valuable or helpful, is broadly about change. Whether that change might be a small improvement or adjustment or trying to solve a problem or trying to make the most of an opportunity or even change how we think or feel about things. So design's role for me is about supporting change and bringing the things that design is good at So I don't think design is the kind of silver bullet and can lead every type of change that needs to happen in the world. But design is part of a collaboration of all of those different approaches and methods and techniques and skills that we try and apply to change.

Yeah, I guess it's like an intentional process to improve or iterate on a product or a problem or to find a better solution.

Absolutely. Well, I think that design is a, is a process and that's what's helpful that people can buy into and get on board and follow. I do think it's also more than that. For some people, like I was talking to colleagues I've worked with over the years last night, for some people it's literally a way of life. Like they apply design mindset to their lives, like how they raise their children, how they buy houses. So it is a process, and designers love talking about mindsets, but it's also a kind of an approach, and it's a set of skills that designers and other people have and bring. To problems and challenges.

Yeah, and you know, you've been working in the design industry for 20 years now, right? Something like that.

Yeah.

And how have you seen it change over that time in terms of the application of it? Because it does seem like almost everywhere you look, people are talking about design thinking and application of design to their situations. Was that your experience at the beginning, or has it broadened out?

No, I mean, it's so wonderful now that people know what we're talking about when we talk about design and going to a dinner party and saying what I do and people knowing and understanding what it is, because 15 years ago when we originally started Us Creates, the design company that I co-founded and led with Mary-Rose Cook, service design, I heard about that term in my last year of university. It was kind of the beginnings of this practice, but nobody really knew it, knew what it was or valued it. And so what's changed is, I suppose we've been through all the kind of demonstrator, proving the value of design, I guess fighting for design's place at the table of change. That's the kind of point of design. I think there was a point where, because design had been fighting so much to prove its worth, it became like, we can solve everything and just let designers solve that problem. And I think as a group or as an industry, we've become a bit more humble that we're part of bigger collaboration to change. So it's really, I mean, it's just kind of less tiring that everywhere is wanting design, wanting designers. Valuing design. I mean, obviously the other things that have changed over time is the types of challenges or issues or problems that design is being applied to. Our first ever strapline was "design for social change." So we were really clear that we wanted to use design to solve meaningful, important challenges and problems. Actually, as a business, we went undercover for a number of years because we were strategic consultancy for social value and collaboration to empower people. You know, we We had all these other kind of taglines because design wasn't really valued and we were doing anything we could to try and use what we were good at and what we had to offer in different contexts. And then towards the sort of end when the business moved on and was acquired into a bigger change organization, we could be really explicit about it again. And everywhere was really crying out for service design and what service design can offer. So from it being the root of what we did, to kind of guerrilla tactics to try and apply it to places, to openly giving or serving, I don't know what terms you use, that's a change. But then the challenges are changing. You know, we've got climate change, we're in the middle of the corona crisis, but all of these, the world has changed. And so how we apply design is different. And then thinking about the role of design now, or where design fits or sits right now, there's some great thinking going on by leaders and pioneers in this. Ben Reason at Live Work has written an article recently about this, which is really, really helpful. But design has always talked about being human-centered and putting the user at the center of things and building around understanding of people and people's needs, which is, you know, I've signed up to for all of these years and has been centered to my practice. And now in this world of climate change and the damage we've already done to our planet, I really like the way people are talking about it being more than human-centered. So it's not just enough for us to be mindful or designing for people, it's designing holistically, understanding the impact that people have on the world and designing for our planet, being mindful of our planet. Yeah. And I think that's where we need to be thinking and be mindful going forward.

Definitely, with a more kind of systemic perspective on how everything is interrelated and, you know, we can't prioritize ourselves at the cost of the other things because the change here will create, you know, issues over there.

Absolutely, you articulate it much better.

No, no. And would you say that, because when you see it, people are much more aware of it now, have you seen a danger in that, that designers ironically are less valued because everyone sees the design thinking steps and thinks, oh, you know, I can do that. Why do we need a specialist designer to come in and support us when, you know, we can use the design cycle ourselves?

I suppose there's two parts of my answer to that question. So one is design has spent a lot of time trying to open up and build capabilities and build other people's ability to use design. So it's been trying to be open and rather than saying designers, I think it's Lise Kimble uses the term people who design. So how do you help people design? And that's great. Like, we want people to use the assets that are there in the world to try and do change better. Then that has the outcome that some people are like, okay, I've done this. I've read this book on design and I've done a project on it. So now I'm like as good as the next person who may have spent years studying it. The more projects that you've done or the more work you've done, the more experience you have, you know, there's a maturity around that that can be a challenge. But I don't think it's— especially now with digital and how digital support services that we're all using, there's a crying out for designers and design talent and different flavors of design and different skills. I mean, I can't do what a UX designer does, or a designer— I've been in industry for a long time, but I can't use a lot of the programs or technology. I don't have those skills. Skills, so it doesn't lessen the value of a designer and it's just great if people are trying it and learning. That's the only way we're gonna understand better.

Yeah, nice. And you talked a bit about Us Creates, so that was your first venture with Mary. So you set that up while you were still at university, right? At Goldsmiths?

Just straight after.

Where could you see, or why could you see a need out in the marketplace for what you then were going to go and offer?

I wish that I could say that we could foresee a need for what we were going to offer. I think it was probably more from a wonderful professional naivety that we had at that time. We were on this Forward Thinking Design course that I guess we were learning design thinking. We weren't using those terms then, but we were learning how to think creatively and understand problems and challenges in different ways. And when we left, we thought, of course, now we can go and apply those to the world. Where are all the jobs for us? And they just didn't exist. And, you know, I mentioned before, I'm not that technical in terms of my design skills, so I couldn't get a job being a graphic designer or web designer because I just didn't have those skills. And so really what it came from was from a place of interest and passion that we wanted to work on really interesting challenges and problems, and naivety and just setting up. I mean, we There's a longer story where we received a lot of support from great programs that were available then, but we set it up because we couldn't get a job doing the thing we wanted to. So we just made our own jobs and then we cut our teeth through trial and error over 15 years.

Sure. And it, I mean, it grew into a highly successful design agency.

Yeah, we're really proud of where we got to. We became focused more and more. So it's quite broad design for social change at the beginning. It was bought by FutureGov, which is a change agency for public services, and we'd become Design for Health. So we really focused on health in its broadest sense. And yeah, we got it to a really fantastic place, and then it's now in a different incarnation inside a bigger business, still building on lots of the practices that we kind of developed and refined along the way. So I'm really proud of what we did with it.

That's amazing. Yeah, brilliant. And you've done a A bit of work with education services and design.

Yeah, we've done, I think we did a bit across both businesses. I was thinking back to the first ever project that we did around education, which was probably 13, maybe 14 years ago in a London school. And they asked us to come in. There was lots of troubled families, lots of social challenges and issues with the school. And it was right at the beginning of service design. And they asked us to come and do a project with these primary school students. So we had a team of primary school students and the area that they wanted to tackle, like I think how they put it was that they wanted to stop some of their friends feeling sad at school. And we ran a process with questions like, how can we help people who are feeling sad at school? And it was a full-on process. We did research and they were interviewing their peers, and then we had lots of ideas about what we could do. And they came up with a peer-to-peer listening service, essentially. They branded it We're Here 4 U. And they created a service blueprint, which is what the design of a service looks like. We had models, plastic models, and what would it work, how would it work, you know, where are people going to come and talk to you about this problem, and then we had the bench, and then they'd go to the bench, and then how would they know that you were there to help them? So they defined touch points, which are like how you understand a service, where you interact with a service, and t-shirts. They did a pitch to the head about why this service should be introduced. They run an assembly. There was an awareness campaign, which was the assembly. So there was this really cool Tiny, tiny service in this school. And that was probably one of the first services we'd actually designed like end to end. So that was kind of like what we were doing then. And then just as I was leaving FutureGov recently, we're involved in all sorts of things. So from design being a kind of bring an agency in and help to design at Department for Education in the UK, building its design capability. So building a design research team, We were doing some work around teachers' experience and teacher retention. So job sharing, I think, is— that's happening to an extent, but how can we support it more? How can we make it easier for those teachers that want to share find sharing partners? I'm paraphrasing a bit, but the brief was, we think we need a platform to match people who want to job share together. So it was kind of like, here's what we think the solution is. And of course, as designers, we're always like, you know, hang on, is this quite right? Not quite sure. So, and we think it's for teachers who've been on maternity leave returning to work. So absolutely, that is a key audience, but there's lots of others like those who are maybe at the end of their career who don't want to teach full-time. So when we actually went out and spoke to teachers and schools, it was a much bigger audience, which is great. And I think platform probably helpful in some ways, but also the support for the schools. Some schools are doing this really, really well, and some are really, really struggling. And it can be helping schools to give flexible working. It's experience design, it's organisational design, it's the service around how you match all of those things together.

So Agile has made an appearance in lots of industries now, coming out of software development, and I've had conversations with you before in my early days of investigating Agile. How did Agile come to be a part of your working life within design?

Yeah, I'm not sure I can pinpoint exactly when we started using Agile principles. I guess it sort of gradually became part of the way that we work. So I remember one of the first things that we did as we were starting to scale, and we were kind of struggling a bit with managing loads of different projects and people working across projects. And I'm not sure we described it as Agile, but we started talking about how we would create a rhythm for the business and the rhythm for the projects so that we could all move at the same pace. So, I mean, lots of these are sort of agile rituals that teams use, but we were kind of essentially having a standup and checking in on how projects were working on a Monday. And then we'd all go off and do different things and we'd sort of share back and do a show and tell at the end of the week. So I don't think we were using sort of true agile, but we started understanding the value of the rhythms and rituals of agile. And then as we were getting more and more demand from our clients as we were supporting them, I think the Health Foundation was one where they really wanted to build design capability and agile capability. And so, I mean, the best way to really learn something is teaching someone else. And so we had to get a bit more formal about what we were doing because we were sharing how we worked with another organisation. And so that's probably where a lot of the work was done. And then joining FutureGov, whereas us creatives came from design, FutureGov had a much more digital background. The rituals and rhythms and practice and principles there kind of really built on Agile. And so I guess I honed my experience and skills there, which is great to see it working in lots of different ways and places.

Yeah. Nice. And explicitly came into the standards for the UK government policy and service design requirements, right? Relatively recently.

Yeah. Government Digital Service has set Agile principles. There's design standards. Introducing these standards has been an effective way of really building adoption for this, because to get the funding, to get to the next stage of a project, to release a project, you have to hit these standards. And so it's really helping people talk the same language, work in similar ways, and collaborate better together. So yeah, I think that's been really helpful.

Yeah. Interesting. So it's more widespread use of those kinds of ways of working because they're being mandated by the UK government.

Yes, absolutely. And then of course with that, as more and more people use them and understand them and they work out what's really good about them and what doesn't work and how, where they don't fit. And so there's lots of kind of challenge and development and yeah, alongside the standards and some of the work that I was doing before I left FutureGov was around developing the experience principles for FutureGov as a business. So what would it feel like to work with us? And how would we describe those? So rather than it being standards that we had to hit, it was about how we articulated what the experience of working with us should be like. And lots of that was built on kind of agile principles. So for an example, one was confidently incomplete. So if you're working with us, it should feel confidently incomplete, which talks to the fact that you may think like, well, when we've done this work, when we've finished it, when we've launched it, like The work is never done or finished. Like change is ongoing and we have to really acknowledge that and be clear that that work's not done. I think another one was around purposefully uncomfortable. Like change is hard. It's going to feel hard. Like working with us might not feel great all the time because what we're doing is hard. And then I did some work around the, the Grooper on this too. Like really thinking about the value. So rather than it being standards, the values or the principles or how you build that into your sort of organisational culture and DNA and how you use those to work together successfully as a company, as a team, but also with all your collaborators out there. It's a counter to the standards that you must follow this. It's more of an interpretation.

Nice, but there's still an intentionality about consciously trying to create a particular type of culture that you want. I mean, whether you're using standards or kind of more supportive incentives, there's still a good intentionality that actually maybe this is just a nicer, a better way of working.

Yes.

Somehow more productive, but also more kind of enriching and life-affirming for the people in the organisation.

Exactly. And even use the word better there, like we're often saying we want things to be better or it needs to be quality, but what does that mean if we can't describe what better is? So really taking the time to try and define that and have a shared understanding of what that is when it's not kind of like we've got a hit this target or this goal so that we can work together in that way.

Totally, totally. Brilliant, thank you so much. I mean, it's a fascinating conversation, but also then seeing it just happening in more and more places and more and more industries. Amazing, thank you so much.

Sure, bye-bye, thank you.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

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