Design for social inclusion
Community-based design
Panel
Chair - Lord Best
Lord Best is a Trustee of the RSA. He is currently President of the Local Government Association, Chair of the Hanover Housing Group and until very recently of the House of Lords Audit Committee. He Chairs the Giving Forum and the Private Rented Sector Policy Forum. He is a Trustee of the Tree Council and the Phoenix Fund for Zimbabwe.
He is Deputy Chair of Westminster City Council’s Standard Committee and he is a Vice President of the TCPA and Patron of the Housing Associations Charitable Trust. He is also a member of the Audit Commission’s Housing and Regeneration Advisory Board.
Richard Best is a Chair of the Council of The Property Ombudsman and Chairs the OPM Public Interest General Council. He is a Hon Fellow RIBA, Hon Life Member Chartered Institute of Housing, Hon Doctor of Letters, Sheffield University.
In the past Richard Best has been Director of both the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, and the Chief Executive of the National Federation of Housing Associations (now NHF). He was a member of Ministerial Sounding Boards from 1999 – 2005 and Chairman of the Westminster Commission (2005/6). He was created a Life Peer in 2001.
Emily Campbell
Emily Campbell is the RSA's Director of Design. Prior to that she was the British Council Arts Group's first Head of Design & Architecture where she developed a wide international programme including the British Pavilion at the last two and the current (2006) Venice Biennales of Architecture, the first major international design exhibitions to tour India and China and a series of collaborative design workshops all over the world. Before the British Council she was a graphic designer at Pentagram in New York with major clients including Nickelodeon, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Princeton University.
Alice Casey
Alice is Lab Development Manager at NESTA, responsible for designing and delivering projects that test new models for supporting and scaling social innovation.
Alice is currently leading on the Big Green Challenge - NESTA’s £1m prize fund to incentivise and support community-led innovation in response to climate change. The challenge prize, which is one of the first for the not-for-profit sector, encourages new community-led responses to climate change, and explores the conditions needed to support these approaches.
She previously worked at Involve, managing a range of projects that explored how public involvement in decision making can improve policy responses and public services. She has a particular interest in digital media and writes about public participation at http://cased.wordpress.com. Alice is chair of the sustainability charity Otesha.
Mary Rose Cook
Mary Rose Cook is the co-founder of Uscreates, a creative agency that uses collaborative approaches to change public behaviours for a better society.
The company was in founded in 2005 in response an increasing awareness of the potential of design to change behaviors and tackle social issues. Through collaborative and user-centered approaches Uscreates has improved health behaviours for local health trusts, tackled anti-social behaviours for a local authorities and made improvements to services delivered by the third sector.
Before founding Uscreates, Mary Rose worked as a free-lance designer and design consultant working with clients such as BT, Faculty of Education at Cambridge University and Channel 4. Alongside her work, she set up a design collective Us&Us, with Zoë Stanton and designers &Made, working on interactive installations.
Mary Rose studied design at Goldsmiths College and produced work that won her the title of ‘New Designer of the Year’ in 2005. She has since returned to education to carry out research for a PhD which investigates the market which has been created for the design industry by the current practice of social sustainability. The research is due to be completed in 2010.
Aviv Katz
Aviv is a senior service design consultant who specialises in public sector innovation. He is currently working with the Innovation Unit in areas such as informal learning, employment and youth crime, building capacity and tools for innovation with partner organisations. He is also an associate of Engine, one of the world’s leading service design and innovation consultancies.
Having completed a product design degree at Kingston University, and an anthropology degree at UCL, Aviv gained experience designing consumer products, exhibitions and websites for clients such as NCR, the Science Museum, Pentland Group and Parker Pen. He later joined the Design Council, developing and running projects spanning business, innovation and design and was instrumental in the development of a national skills strategy for the design sector. Aviv has extensive experience working with public sector organisations as well as education and training bodies.
Andrea Siodmok
Andrea is the Programme Director of Dott Cornwall. Based in Newquay she was previously Chief Design Officer at the Design Council. Andrea is a trained designer who has led major national innovation programmes, taught design and has given over 100 speeches on design across five continents.