Designing Transformation
Join UCL IIPP for this IIPP Forum 2024's plenary sessions, taking place on Thursday 13 June at 09:00 - 10:15 BST.
Designing Transformation
13 Jun 2024, 09:00 – 10:15
IIPP 2024 Forum
As part of the IIPP Forum 2024, UCL IIPP is hosting five plenary sessions. These sessions are an opportunity to rethink existing policy systems and explore what transformative ‘market shaping’ policy approaches look like in practice.
About the talk
The turn of the century saw design move from the engine room of industry, and core aspects of public service delivery, into the forefront of industrial transformation, ultimately helping drive the success of the tech sector. Over the last decade, its practices and culture have moved into government transformation, helping refine public services. Yet as our shared challenges multiply, diversify and intensify, design must move upstream. Design’s true value is not in simply refining existing services, but in fundamentally reimagining systems. It can reveal and challenge assumptions, nimbly reframe questions, make tangible possible futures, and devise alternative infrastructures of everyday life. Design’s potential for integrative, participative and systemic approaches, capable of shaping both our environments and the dark matter of policy, regulation and governance that produce them, allows it to meaningful address climate and biodiversity crises, as well as its tangles of linked challenges: social justice, public health, demographic change, and new waves of radical technologies. Yet design remains far from the ‘top table’ when it comes to devising and delivering ‘just, green transitions’. Few governments have design at the core of their cultures of decision-making. Policy labs can end up sidelining design rather than truly integrating it.
This session discussed why this might be–but also to hear how to unlock the potential of design for systemic transformation, as our array of leading design practitioners demonstrate and critically debate its potential for tackling the climate emergency.
Meet the panel
Our expert panel included Rowan Conway, Deputy Director at The Just Transition Finance Lab based at The Grantham Research Institute On Climate Change and the Environment and IIPP Visiting Professor of Strategic Design, Dan Hill, Director of Melbourne School of Design and IIPP Visiting Professor of Practice, Julie Hjort, Director of Sustainable and Circular transition at the Danish Design Center and Anab Jain, Co-Founder and Director of Superflux, to find out more about how best to apply design and engagement strategies across different contexts both in theory and in practice.
Key information
- When: Thursday 13 June at 09:00 - 10:15 BST.
- Where: Henry Wellcome Auditorium at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd., London NW1 2BE
Professor Dan Hill is Director of Melbourne School of Design, the graduate school in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia. A designer and urbanist, Dan's previous leadership roles include the Swedish government’s innovation agency Vinnova in Stockholm, Arup in London and Sydney, Fabrica in Treviso, the Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA in Helsinki, and the UK's Future Cities Catapult and BBC in London.
Co-Founder and Director of Superflux
Anab serves as Professor of Design Investigations at the dieAngewandte, University of Applied Arts in Vienna since 2016. Her hope is to instil a culture of radical enquiry in her students, so they can become active designers-translators-catalysts for a complex and uncertain world.
Policy Fellow and Visiting Professor of Strategic Design, leading the Transformation by Design module of the MPA in Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value
UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
Rowan is a Policy Fellow and Visiting Professor of Strategic Design, leading the Transformation by Design module of the MPA in Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP).
Julie drives DDC's work on sustainable transformation and is dedicated to accelerating the transition to a circular economy. She's passionate about mobilising cross-cutting and interdisciplinary collaborations to drive collective sustainable action.
Further information
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