Community Designers

Design Council is an independent charity which seeks to use the power of design to improve processes, products and places, and thereby to improve peoples’ lives. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they received funding from the Emerging Futures Fund to build a diverse, UK-wide network of non-professionally trained designers who work within their communities to help shape the future.

At the beginning of Covid-19, the Design Council were inspired by the ways in which both trained designers and ordinary people used design to solve some of the problems communities faced - from sustainable PPE to creating new food services. In their project, Design, differently, they engaged with a cohort of community organisers and organisations to understand how they were already using design.

In order to achieve these goals, they carried out individual dialogues, workshops and storytelling sessions to better understand design mindsets and how these skills could be used within communities to increase problem solving capabilities. They worked together with participants to share some of Design Council’s methods, and to co-design and prototype what further support might be needed for these community organisers and their communities to reimagine and achieve radical change.

What Design Council found was that communities and organisers are often already using design to tackle their biggest challenges, achieve their dreams and have more ownership over their local spaces - even if they haven’t recognised it as such. One of the barriers these communities face, though, is a lack of sharing of knowledge and skills - whether these be around how to engage with local authorities to explain the importance of their work, or professional skills like graphic design to help them visualise the future.

Design as a word or a field can seem impossibly vague, obscure, or irrelevant. What use does design have for people organising their communities around pressing issues like hunger, houselessness, or climate change? Design, differently effectively opened up the black box of design, helping organisers and community activists around the country to understand how they were already using design, opening up space for them to deploy it more intentionally and effectively to change the world around them. 

To learn more about the project, read their post on Medium about it here.