Paul Rodgers Design Priority Area Leadership Fellowship

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My vision, throughout this fellowship and in line with the AHRC Design initiative "Design for Change", is to achieve real and long-lasting transformation and impact, to enact alternative, positive, and help achieve real developments within the culture of design research that will equip it for the challenges of the future. This requires more than traditional quantitative and qualitative research. It requires evidence to become informed and intuition to inspire us in imagining and creating new and better possibilities. My aim is to achieve change that will make real differences to the lives of individuals, groups, communities and society as a whole. Working collaboratively with researchers in other disciplinary areas, I will take the lead in identifying opportunities for collaboration, trends in research, and organising events on behalf of the AHRC and work to shape preferred realities and positive future visions around key challenges (e.g. sustainability, health, security, care, poverty) where design thought and action is key. For example, this may involve the co-design and co-development of novel products that will lift people out of poverty. It might include the design of innovative services in care that will improve the health and well being of families across the country. It may comprise the design and development of new policies that will reduce further harm to our planet. My vision will be inclusive in its scope and encourage projects that adopt and utilize an mélange of different types of design research including experimental, practice-based, and hybrid approaches and methods. This will show the various cultures of design research that coexist and celebrate this pluralism in what is rapidly becoming a very healthy and mature field of research. The fellowship role will allow me to encourage and enhance projects under the "Design for Change" banner to utilize research approaches and methods that fit their purpose. "Design for Change" will borrow methods and approaches that fit from the physical sciences, the social sciences, and the arts and humanities if and when the situation arises. Adopting a pluralistic approach will allow for a flexible and open-minded exploration across the breadth of design and other disciplines and will support bringing these cross-disciplinary methodologies and communities together to strengthen the Design research base. By building purposeful relationships design researchers (working with other disciplines, professionals and citizens) will enhance their own and others' abilities to challenge existing economic, social, environmental, and political models. This will help us to understand and strengthen the inter-relations between design research and design practice (i.e. design consultancies / agencies and design teaching), and end-users. Creating, for instance, more sustainable product design, services, and processes, whilst rethinking how policy might work better. Collaboration alone, however, will not be enough. We require shifts in our cultures of co-design, co-innovation, and co-production, collectively deciding and socially organizing the future world that we will all be proud to share. My belief is that design is the best tool that we have for making sense of the complex, multi-faceted world we all inhabit. Design in the way that it can holistically explore, critique, and define what needs to be done, synthesize and propose future scenarios, and present, visualize, and communicate those ideas to others can be at the forefront of shaping preferred realities and future experiences. The objective being to develop mechanisms for enhanced co-design, co-innovation, and co-production, collectively deciding and shaping preferred situations.