Social Care Emergency: Seeking future designers
Please join the RSA and Scottish Care for this exciting event in Glasgow
Wed, 1 Nov 2023 09:30 – 12:30 GMT
The Lantern, Hamish Wood Building
Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road,Glasgow G4 0BA
The RSA and Scottish Care invite you to collaborate on designing a better tomorrow.
In 2018 Scottish Care worked with the European school of innovation and design at Glasgow School of Art to explore the future of social care. The methodology incorporated Megatrends cards developed by Finish sustainable future organization Sitra and led to the creation of revolutionary new roles in social care such as the Care Technologist. More information on the first phase of this programme in 2018 can be found here.
Taking a future-orientated and ‘pop-up design’ approach (Teal and French 2016) Scottish Care hopes to engage participants in an informal space, enabling creative conversations about the potential of the future based upon the fundamental question “What If?”. This will result in outcomes based upon an understanding of what objects, technologies and ideas will be important and which actors will make up social care and support, shaping the direction for how it will look and feel in 25 years.
People will have grown up in different technological, economic, and social climates, with different family structures, friendships, and relationships. People will hold different opinions on what it means to ’live well’ These differences are very important to consider and may result in multiple futures to map in answer to the question ‘What next?’.
It’s now 2023 and a shifting global landscape has led to a social care emergency, but we are not defeated. Sitra has released an updated set of Megatrends offering us the opportunity to revisit this design methodology in search of a better tomorrow.
We invite you to join us in a human-led design process for all our futures.
We want this work to have legacy in the way that the 2018 version did, to change how and what care and support we access as we age. This time we want to go wider and see tying in with the RSA Design for Life three focus areas as a real opportunity to do this. Building capabilities: we will work from an active citizenship model, bringing together people from beyond the traditional boundaries of the health and social care system because futures thinking that enables us to live healthy lives for longer affects every one of us. Growing hubs: we will build knowledge networks of imagination in the social care space to enable design-led thinking with legacy by enabling space for creative conversations. Developing Infrastructure: we will work in the open, hosting the tools for design and the outputs from the work on our website. We will consider and make recommendations for addressing the implementation gap aiming to create the conditions for lasting and regenerative change. You can find out more about the RSA’s Design for Life mission here.
