Designing a better South Africa:

How co-operation and co-creation can make us into the designers of the solutions to our challenges:

According to Gavin Mageni we need to create a paradigm shift from research and development to research for development. In order for this paradigm shift to take place he comes forth with a simple solution: make each person their own designer in their relative democracy.

Mageni explains that design has moved from aesthetics to process to purpose. We no longer just look at the beauty of an object, but rather its use and now: its usability. Then we take it a step further and look at the reason for its creation (purpose) and how to fulfil that need.

This means we need to find the purpose of policy and planning. We need to ask ourselves “what is the teleology of public policy and planning?”

When one comes to ask these types of teleological questions, one gets a “because”, and in this case it is: the final because, the material because, the efficient or moving because, and the formal because.

Thus the purpose: to create socio-economic, socio-political and socio-cultural change via empowerment of the individual citizen and his or her relative democracy. We are all designers and we can each democratise our own world. How? Via co-operation and co-creation: the bringing of different role players in to jointly produce a mutually valued outcome.

By doing this we allow change to be placed in the hands of the people that need it most. The question is, how does one achieve this? The solution is that change can be induced via co-operation and co-creation. One needs to facilitate these concepts in order for them to be plausible in the nature of the public sector where they can be made relevant to socio-economic, socio-political and socio-cultural issues. This can assist in policy creation and planning, and most importantly application, a place where South Africa struggles most as we have the potential within our policies to evoke the change we need, but we struggle to apply them successfully.

This can be especially useful in a developing nation where there are so many socio-economic challenges that government can’t always take the stand in facilitating change, but rather via empowering everyone as their own designer in their relative democracy, and thus change can be created by the people for the people. No better custom fit can be made.

However, a problem arises. What platform can be created where this change can follow the correct channels? SABS’s Design & Innovation Entrepreneurship Centre proposes a solution via offering facilities to develop ideas and provide these innovators with the skills needed to allow their ideas to become a reality. If the SABS can achieve this, surely government can also promote it on a local level via Municipalities as structures and drive a programme as part of an active citizenship programme. Is that not what government needs in its attempt to move from a representative democracy to a participatory democracy?

Now, sustainable development: any development undertaken must do so whilst complying to a process where developmental goals can be achieved whilst not burdening future generations. How can we ensure that the designer within each of us complies with sustainability in a world so dependent on natural resources?

We instead focus on solving problems whilst creating solutions to challenges we face. Let’s take the socio-cultural sector: the potential is endless, and the best is that other problems can be solved in the process of developing this sector including economic benefits, creation of jobs, creation of a much richer history that is indigenous to our country, the management of the resources of this sector to ensure sustainability, etc. In one potential solution to a main problem, many side challenges could be moving towards being solved whilst we remain humble and accept that we are a developing country still the process of finding the path to development.

In the volatile socio-political sector, by being designers we can create many innovative plans to tackle issues at the core: at grassroots level democracy.

The socio-economic sector especially needs attention, but also offers the largest plethora of areas one can make a difference as a designer-citizen. Starting at the grassroots level of democracy and evoking change in your own community and allowing that change to spread. This can assist in matters much larger than those directly around you, but rather make a difference to a statistic much bigger than your community. Job creation via innovation has been an area of growth thanks to SME’s investing in their own people. Via this Corporate Social Investment (CSI) change can be made that creates a world of a difference in millions of lives, and fortunately that is a place the private sector is moving into. Where the private and the public sectors can meet to accept that their problems regarding development are one in the same and that they need to integrate in order to design solutions. This is once again where the co-operation and co-creation comes in: to share their knowledge of their sectors and innovate.

Over and above the specific sectors one can focus on, the spheres (political, social, and economical) are not static, and thus volatile but also full of potential. Where change is made in one area, change is seen in other’s. This dynamic environment allows for growth in many ways, and as a designer we are each and all responsible to bring about growth and change in these spheres. Democracy starts at the citizen, and it is time South African citizens step up to bring about solutions to our own problems.

Heinz Schoeman-Struwig
@inHeinzsight on Twitter and Instagram.