Using Design For Peace Keeping
This report of the Strategic Design and Public Policy Conference held between June 9-1 2010 was produced by the Saïd Business School, the Center for Local Strategies Research and the United Natios Institute for Disarmament Research. The workshop was co-organised by Lucy Kimbell, Clark Fellow of Design Leadership; Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; Dr. Derek Miller, Senior researcher and project co-manager, Security Needs Assessment Protocol Project, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research; Prof. Gerry Philipsen, Professor of Communication, and Director of the Center for Local Strategies Research, University of Washington; and Lisa Rudnick, Senior researcher and project co-manager, Security Needs Assessment Protocol Project, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.
a) those working within UN and other organisations on issues of peace and security and concerned with how to make it more effective;
b) people working in management and design especially service design; and,
c) people working in cultural research
The agenda for Strategic Design and Public Policy established at Glen Cove provides an organizing platform from which to consider and advance new activities that may lead to the improved design of peace and security initiatives around the world. It opens a massive and profoundly complex field of endeavors in which the ethical, practical, intellectual, and political landscapes are still partly beyond imagining.
Cultural research, for example, maintains a very tentative and ambivalent relationship with public policy generally, and with all matters of security and military engagement specifically.
Design aspires to both deeper research and more policy relevance, and is forcefully moving in that direction, but it remains insufficiently developed compared to other fields when it comes to ethics, research design and methods, and adapting its premises to new contexts of safety, security, and moral impact.
Public policy, for its part, will have to reflexively consider and navigate the complex shoals of political representation vs. community-led innovation, and begin to consider what relationship the civil servant does, or can have, to the design of public activities.
None of these problems are new. However, when seen from the perspective of a shared agenda, new and emergent challenges come to the forefront that will need to be grappled with if opportunities are to be properly developed in a responsible manner.
Something important is happening. It is hoped that this event helps like-minded people take a further step towards its fulfillment for the common good.
