The Battle of Ideas
By Jason Mesut 26 Oct 2009.
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At 3:45pm Sunday November 1st 2009 in the Royal College of Art’s Student Union, our own Director of User Experience, Jason Mesut, will be on a debating panel at the Battle of Ideas event.
The Battle of Ideas 2009 will be a two-day festival of high-level, thought-provoking debate organised by the Institute of Ideas and hosted by the Royal College of Art. Over the Halloween weekend, you’ll be able to find debates covering subjects as diverse as education, genetics, poetry, music, recession, politics and human rights.
The panel that we are sponsoring, “Shaping social policy: designers and health”, will be debating a range of topics in relation to patient experience, service design, how design can help shape social policy, and changing behaviours around healthcare.
The reason we thought this was necessary was that we were noticing that design was starting to be taken more seriously in healthcare, especially within the NHS. We have always been advocates of design and communications thinking in the healthcare space having had a great deal of experience already across a range of brand, marketing consultancy, engagement and digital design projects in the NHS.
We have seen our efforts make a real difference, and we are proud of helping out a public service like the NHS be more effective with its investments. We would like to see more of the design and communications community joining us in the space - after all, there are plenty of opportunities for us all and so many challenges to tackle.
But recently we have seen a lot more briefs coming through to us and design consultancies talking about tackling much bigger issues around service re-design and changing large-scale behaviours, such as obesity and patient choice. We’re worried that those new to the space will take on more than they can handle, and give designers a bad name by focusing on large scale, grand utopias rather than pragmatic solutions that deliver tangible benefits quicker and in a more evolutionary way.
We felt that we needed some critical debate on the changing market and the potential direction or risks going forward – after all, our clients and our colleagues will be affected in the projects that arise.
Find out more about the debate here and get a feel of the different perspectives on the panel by checking out the latest Battle in Print article.
On the panel, will be Jason Mesut, Experience Director at The Team; Lynne Maher, director of Innovation at NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement; Maja Kecman, senior associate of patient safety group at the Royal College of Art’s Helen Hamlyn Centre; Alastair Donald, urban designer and postgraduate researcher, Min-Max-Cities Group, Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge; and Professor Joe Kerr, head of Department of Critical & Historical Studies at RCA. The debate will be chaired by Martyn Perks, a design consultant and provocative writer on technology, design and innovation.
Read more about our work in the NHS:
We have worked on the NHS brand identity, worked on a number of social marketing campaigns for the Department of Health, are working with the NHS institute to communicate to healthcare managers, mapping the patient experience, as well as delivering a range of other marketing and design consulting services across a range of Primary Care Trusts, healthcare and public sector organizations.
