Date: 26th November 2012, 6 – 8pm
Location: Central Saint Martins, The LVMH Lecture Theatre (E003)
Speaker: Steven Johnson, Director, Collaborative Change
Respondent: Charles Leadbeater
The urgent social, economic and environmental challenges we face demand radical innovation on a global scale. If we are to rise to these challenges with sufficient speed and impact, social design must become more than the niche concern of a minority community.
Currently the vast majority of the world’s creative and design talent is siloed in mainstream practice—working on commercial briefs largely antithetical to social and environmental progress. Research shows that they are eager to use their skills to make a positive difference, but lack opportunities to do so.
This global community of creative practitioners represents a massive untapped pool of change potential. There’s a sleeping giant in our brave new world and Considered Creative is the wake up call.
Considered Creative is a new project that works to embed sustainability and social design principles into mainstream creative practice. It has two core strands of activity:
- It partners with agencies, brands and educational institutions to encourage development of the skills required to drive positive social change.
- More importantly, it promotes an understand of how every brief is a social change brief and popularizes the concepts and skills required to embed positive social change into every creative project, regardless of what brand, service or product it focuses on.
Considered Creative is social design operating at scale— social design for the other 90%.
About Steven Johnson
Steven is Executive Creative Director at award-winning social research and design company The Hub, Director at Collaborative Change®, founder of the Considered Creative® project and author of an upcoming book of the same name.
He has been responsible for leading insight and design on a wide range of social and behaviour change projects for private, public and third sector clients and his work has received recognition from the Design Business Association, IPA, AHC, D&AD, How-Do and the German Design Council.
More recently his work has turned to focus on working with agency teams to incorporate social design, co-creation and sustainability principles into the creative and planning process.
Steven speaks regularly on behaviour change, social design and sustainability issues and advises a range of industry bodies and educational institutions on social change and sustainability issues. As a D&AD trustee he is working to embed responsibility into the organisation’s growth strategy and shape the future of the White Pencil movement.
About Collaborative Change
Collaborative Change® is a participatory approach to innovation and change, driven by the power of co-design™. It is being applied by public, private and third sector organisations to develop more inclusive, effective and sustainable responses to innovation challenges.
The approach synthesises insights from a wide range of disciplines, including social marketing, design thinking and community engagement, and is based on the latest behavioural science. At its heart, it is driven by co-design principles and assets-based optimism as a means of empowering change within a holistic systems context.
About Considered Creative
Considered Creative® is a project design to build capacity around sustainability and social change issues within the creative industries. Through professional development opportunities, certification and examples of best practice it aims to equip a new generation of creative practitioners and agencies with the skills required to drive positive social change. Considered Creative is also the title of an upcoming book by the project’s founder, Steven Johnson.
If you would like to attend talk 7 please rsvp to joe.julier@policyconnect.org.uk/ 0207 202 8588
Social Design Talks 
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I don’t get it. There is no such thing as Social Design. Social, behavioural, economic, environmental and political changes in our society are continuous and intertwining as each decade passes. This is an entirely natural evolutionary process and everyone involved in the production and decision making within these sectors respond to these changes in a creative way already. They do not need the likes of Steven Johnson to tell them the obvious. Either a political decision enables new things to happen, an invention of making enables a new product to be made, a reflective analysis enables us to learn from past mistakes and go forward, life systems and people habits alter in response to advances in consumer goods and services – all of this is part of the designer’s lens into the world and fuels the creative juices to solve whatever problems are posed by the projects in hand.