Doing Social Good - 18 May 2016

Verity Firth: Now, tonight’s lecture is the fourth in the 2016 UTSpeaks series, and the first of this year Shapeshifters events, which is a collaboration between the UTS Marketing and Communications Unit, and the Innovation and Creative Intelligence Centre here at UTS. 

Our students are tomorrow’s leaders; they’re entrepreneurs and critical thinkers, and we’re responding to the changing roles these graduates will play in the future with ground-breaking, trans-disciplinary courses and innovation in models of learning here at UTS. Engagement with our industry partners is integrated across research, our connected campus, the precinct partnerships and our pipeline of student talent, and we also have the innovation and creative intelligence strategy, and it’s been developed to celebrate these achievements and inspire new ideas and thinking. But most of all at UTS we believe that innovation and creative thinking has to be about more than just dollars and profit. 

The problems facing our world are indeed wicked, and more than anything we need to create innovative thinking, creative and innovative thinking, to address these problems. In fact, in my mind, innovation only becomes genuinely interesting when it’s about doing social good – making our world a better place. And as an increasingly older person, I also think that individual resilience over a lifetime is best achieved by having a professional purpose beyond the self. Having true meaning and purpose in your work is essential to fulfilment, and what better meaning is there than contributing to making or planet more economically, environmentally and socially just? So tonight’s presentations and the forums to follow are about doing just that. 

And I’m now going to introduce the first of our speakers for tonight. The first of our speakers is Dr Melissa Edwards. She teaches and conducts research in sustainability, management, complexity and social impact at the UTS Business School. Her trans-disciplinary work focuses on understanding how people organise, learn and adapt to enable sustainable transitions. She has co-developed and managed innovative courses, including a cross-disciplinary program that challenges students to solve wicked problems with sustainable and entrepreneurial solutions. She has co-edited and contributed to two books on design-led innovation processes, and runs courses on developing community projects. So I’d like to now welcome to the stage Melissa Edwards.

[Applause]

Melissa Edwards: Thank you Verity for that introduction. When I stand here this evening, I’m going to take a socially constructed and complex adaptive view of the systems within which we operate – of business, of innovation, and even how we think about creativity and its role in this space. I think that the systems within which we live are made by people, and they’re made for people. They’re systems of production and consumption that are facilitated by mechanisms of exchange. They have the capacity to exclude and to externalise. That is a fact, but I don’t think it has to be a truth. And part of the role myself and my colleagues have been taking in the business school and with our colleagues across the university is to try to inspire students to think differently – to rethink the role of business in this space of innovation and creativity for a restorative future. 

So we think that we can intentionally design systems that purposefully create value beyond the economic that are inclusive and that are restorative, that encourage and create societal wellbeing. There are many of these models at the macro level that actually exist today – things such as, you may have heard of conscious capitalism, the sharing economy, the circular economy, the we economy, the sustainable economy 2.0. These models exist, and they are values-based, and they offer us a vision, a way of thinking about these systems of exchange. I’m going to allude to one of these models tonight, particularly, that I’ve been working on with my colleagues, both at the Business School and ISF, which is the circular economy. But let me start out by giving you a little story about one of the entrepreneurs. 

We started this research by talking to people who were seeking to establish organisation models within this thing called the circular economy. And it’s the story of sustainable business innovation. Sustainable business model innovation for me and my colleagues is about challenging the fundamental value proposition of business – it’s about broadening it, extending it, to include a social purpose or to have an aim or objective for environmental restoration or regeneration. 

So this is the story of a local entrepreneur who wanted to recirculate goods in the economy longer, who wanted to make sure that objects that were beyond their useful life in one household could be exchanged with others in that same system who wanted those objects. He had the technological innovation available to do this – an online platform to enable this exchange – and he found that there was a real need. Used goods were in high demand. He also found a problem, and that problem was a problem of supply. It seemed there were more people who needed used objects than those that were able to provide them. Not those that were willing, but those that did share. And so when he investigated this a little bit further, he found that he had a really tough competitor. 

There was nobody else providing this same service in this space, which is the traditional way we think about competition in business, but he found that his competition was something else. It was this: his competition was the bin. It was the effective local council kerbside collection, and the fact that we don’t put a proper value on waste as landfill. So within our linear economy, we actually externalise the natural environment; we don’t put a proper value on waste. And this leads us into a very, a linear way of thinking whereby the value of natural resources is only that which we can take, create into something useful for a period of time and then dispose. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We know that there are systems of value creation that have, for a long time, enabled us to understand the true value of natural capital, and there are production and consumption systems that enable use to think about waste in different ways, and to put a value on waste. 

What this story tells us is of an entrepreneur who understands this very clearly, but is trying to find within an economic system others who value this in the same way. And so it’s a systemic problem that we have, and the example that he had is an example of a business model or an organisational model we might see operating within this thing called the circular economy. The circular economy, as I’ve just said, is a system model though, and it’s a system of exchange within circularity – within trying to put a value on waste, and with that, trying to capture that within production and consumption systems that we have. So the circular economy, according to the leading advocacy organisation, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, is a system that purposefully is restorative by design, so in being excited about this idea of the circular economy, I inadvertently became a designer, although I am not a designer. 

When we talk about design in business, we’re talking about that intentionality – the ability to rethink, to recreate and to reshape the value proposition, and the circular economy provides us with this model. It builds on a long legacy of other models that have had similar principles, such as the cradle to cradle, the performance economy, the industrial ecology models, the blue economy, and biomimicry. These ideas have, some of them, been around for 30 years and they have a legacy that lasts a lot longer. It’s informed by diverse disciplinary knowledge and it puts a value on waste, and provides opportunity for socially innovative ways of organising. But beyond being just an elegant model, and this is the model as devised by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, it actually does have economic value. 

So there have been some studies which have shown that the transition to the circular economy would enable us to have at least $1 trillion savings in the world economy immediately, and potentially much more in years to come; that these savings would flow from waste reduction and lower capital requirements for business. And by turning waste into wealth, some estimates suggest that $4.5 trillion in value can be added to the economy by 2030. So clearly there is economic value in a restorative system, and clearly we know we have the models and the technology available to enable us to transition to this circular economy. So we started asked questions about the social element – why is it that we don’t transition to these models if they exist? What is it about social innovation, the way that we currently organise, our patterns of social innovation, that keep us stuck in a linear system where we dispose of natural resources and we don’t put a proper value on the goods and services that we consume? 

So this is why we started to develop the case studies, and what we found in developing these that there are four little insights that I want to share with you, which I think in some ways challenge the status quo – the way that we think about doing business currently. The first one, as I said to you, is that competition can come from very strange places. It’s not necessarily other organisations that are like you; it comes from, in fact, entrenched ways of organising the competition as the status quo. And competition is also coming from ways of us thinking about and challenging our ways of doing and our accepted social norms and behaviours. 

One of the other things we found about these entrepreneurs and people organising in the circular economy is that when you’re pursuing a purpose, a social or environmental purpose, you yourself become a shapeshifter as you continuously try to develop a model that enables you achieve this social purpose. So we found examples of entrepreneurs who originally had capital investment from venture capitalists, and when they went for another round of investment, they found that the venture capitalists said ‘Why is it that you have so much invested in this wellbeing program for your employees? We think that you could get rid of that and that would be a huge cost saving.’ And so the entrepreneur said ‘Well, that’s really important to our model – that’s what we stand for. We’re a for-purpose organisation and that’s part of how we organise. And in fact they then changed their business model so that they could develop a representative board-like structure and receive funding from community and friends who would be able to invest money into the venture and shared their same values. 

So it seems there’s no common form to organising when you’re organising for purpose. The traditional lines between for-profit and not-for-profit seem to become blurred; it’s not so binary, and we’re seeing the emergence of lots of what’s called hybrid organisations operating in this space. You may have heard of some of them – B corps, social enterprises, collaborative consumption platforms in the sharing economy, and there’s been a notable resurgence of mutual and cooperatives that are designed by people for people. More traditional organisational forms are also enabling people to serve purpose, such as for-profit and not-for-profit organisations are also operating in this space. 

The third thing we found is that entrepreneurs in this space are always seeing tensions or problems as opportunities. So we found people were discussing this thing of tension a lot, and tension, to us, was when they came up against something in the system that was not enabling them to do what it was that they wanted to do in terms of serving their social purpose, and so they were then having to move beyond their own organisation; they became advocates for the purpose that they were trying to serve. And often we found that they would therefore start to work in partnership with larger organisations, or they would start to develop networks between one another in order to share information and resources to enable them to continue to pursue purpose. 

The B corp movement, for example, is a really good example for this They have a B Lab, which allows B corps to share information, and in the states they have a B Hive which is where B corps can even start to develop relationships around their procurement. So when they move beyond their own organisation and into the system informing these, they actually start to shapeshift and change the systems within which they operate – their local echo system, the set of stakeholder relationships, and they become advocates for their purpose. 

We had another example of this where an entrepreneur who had a restorative product – a nappy product that at the end of life could be composted and go back into the natural environment in a restorative way – and they were finding it very difficult to enter the traditional market, which is largely dominated by hugely successful brands. And so they started to develop a relationship, a partnership, with childcare centres and enter the market that way, and in doing so they also developed a partnership with another small-to-medium-sized enterprise who provide composing on-site solutions. And so in this way they created a circular model in a traditional childcare centre to enable their for-purpose product to thrive and survive within the economy. The fourth thing we found is that systemic innovation seems to happen in this place of collective innovation – a collective imagination, sorry – that it requires a whole set of stakeholders who may be operating in the same industry to come together and try to find ways to collaborate. 

So for example, if we take the premise of the circular economy, that the outputs from one organisation might become the inputs for another, then that means those two organisations must be talking to each other, and they must realise that opportunity in order to enable it to occur. So once again, we have technologies that exist to make this possible, but what we do not have, or we don’t engage regularly in, is the type of socially innovative collaborative processes where these opportunities can emerge. The Ellen Macarthur Foundation, who I mentioned earlier, who we work closely with, actually encourage this type of competition – sorry, cooperation – and they have what’s called the circular economy 100, which is organisations from across all industries who are able to share knowledge and information about their way in which they’re innovating in this circular economy space. 

UTS through the Business School and in partnership with ISF has been part of this network – we’re a network university with the Ellen Macarthur Foundation – and for the past two years we’ve taken part in what’s called their Disruptive Innovation Festival. So the Disruptive Innovation Festival is a bit like a music festival where the tents, the stages, are universities who are encouraging the types of open collaboration and knowledge sharing that is fundamental to us enabling this transition to a circular economy. 

Last year we collaborated with the Office of Environment and Heritage and decided to trial a concept of the tear-down, and so the tear-down traditionally looks like this, and the tear-down has been used in design and industrial design to re-design products so that they may be built for better disassembly at the end of life, or so that you can reimagine the components of a product to maybe use less materials in the actual making of that product. But as I said to you before, we’re not interested so much in the technology in this space, but rather the social networks and the relationships in the circular economy space. So we thought why not have a tear down of the system? Why not have a tear down of the network? And we decided to – and so it didn’t look anything like this; unfortunately when you’re working with people it tends to look more like this, PowerPoint slides. 

And we bought together key stakeholders in the glass industry and the idea of this tear-down workshop was to get those stakeholders in the room to map out the system of flows, of glass within the greater Sydney region, and to try to think of ways in which they could redesign those flows so that they wouldn’t be glass stockpiles; so that glass wouldn’t have to be recycled, or only recycled as a last resort; so that it might be re-used or re-circulated, or perhaps even refurbished in place where it belongs. Some discussions even went to the point of where the glass itself is manufactured and perhaps thinking about redesigning the pigmentation, for example, in glass – I’m not an expert on glass but these were the conversations that were being had. 

From our point of view, what was most important about this concept was that it got the stakeholders in the room, and when they started discussing outside of their boxes, outside of their offices, outside of their boardrooms, they were able to see there were problems in the system of relationships that existed between them, and they could start to imagine collective solutions within that particular industry. 

Up until this point, I’ve been mostly focused on the environmental aspect – the materials within the circular economy, the technologies that enable us to be socially innovative and to organise in new ways, but in a sense, I haven’t also been discussing the social aspect of the circular economy, and in fact, social impact and social inclusion is the final frontier in the circular economy and in the research in the circular economy. So part of the work that I’ve also been doing in the Business School with my colleagues and with some other colleagues in FASS, arts and social sciences, is to think about these other forms of value and ways that we can think about value creation that is social inclusive. 

A restorative system also values wellbeing, inclusion, belonging, connection, civility and equity, and this can happen in these new social arrangements. There are – sorry – there are cultural and social aspects that can be inclusively valued in this innovation agenda – value created by individuals and organisations that have actually been undervalued in the narrow economic framework in the way that we currently frame the innovation agenda. You see, here it becomes important who actually determines the innovation agenda – whose voices are in the room? How a form of social change, as Verity mentioned, might actually be enabled and valued within a flourishing economy; an economy for all. 

In the same way the circular economy seeks to value waste, the work we do in this social inclusion and social impact space seeks to understand how we can articulate and value excluded forms of social value. Can we value civility? Can we value belonging? Can we value cultural and artistic expressions? Some of these forms of value creation maybe aesthetic, they may be visceral, they may be psychic – these are qualitative values. They are contextual and they are cultural – a sense of wellbeing when somebody feels included, like they belong; when an Indigenous entrepreneur has their traditions valued; empowerment when being included in decision-making; being resilient. Such forms of value creation, I would argue, are somewhat beyond financialisation. They’re beyond economic indicators. So here we’re involved in some exploratory work to develop qualitative indicators to put a value on what it means to be valued, to feel valued. 

These ideas are not ours alone – they’ve been part of global studies. For example, the OECD Better Life Index has been seeking to create these qualitative values for over a decade, and most recently I have noted, working in a business school, that a famous esteemed professor of Harvard Business School, Michael Porter, who is well known for his famous work around market competition and industries, has recently been testing a social progress indicator that seeks to understand actualisation qualitatively without transforming it into some form of economic measure. So these are forms of change, and innovation and social innovation can enable these forms of change. It needs to be part of the discussion. What do I do? I’m not an entrepreneur – I’m an educator, I’m an academic, and I sit within a business school, and so what I do is I work collaboratively with my colleagues, both in the business school and across UTS. 

In the Business School we have a working party – a sustainability working party – bringing together academics from all the business disciplines and we are trying to actively create frameworks and models and theories that we can embed within business curriculum to create and enable a generation of shapeshifters who will be able to reimagine the economy. And we do this through embedding a set of values around responsible judgement and decision-making across all of the business degrees – it’s at the foundation of the entry into the business program, and it’s carried through those courses, and we also have a sustainable business aspect that’s carried through those courses as well. 

So I believe that through this type of work that we do in the education sector, we can go somewhat towards making these imagined models closer to reality and I hope that with working with entrepreneurs and professionals in all types of organisations, we can achieve this dream, and I invite you to join us in this exploration. Thank you.

[Applause]

Verity Firth: Thank you very much Melissa. That’s got us all thinking. Our next speaker is Rodger Watson. Now, Rodger is the Deputy Director of the Designing Out Crime research centre here at UTS. With expertise in psychology and criminology, Rodger Watson conducts research and problem solving in the public service. He has overseen designing out crime projects and programs in collaboration with a range of local and international partners to solve problems with new product design, policy development and educational programs. Rodger’s work in the Design Innovation research centre has spanned the realms of crime, financial sustainability in local government, and government support of the mentally ill. Before joining UTS, Rodger was a senior policy and projects officer with the NSW Department of Justice. Please welcome Rodger to the stage.

[Applause]

Rodger Watson: Thank you Verity for that introduction. Tonight I want to talk a bit about my story, but mostly focus on the story of my team and my collaborators. As Verity said, before I came to UTS, I worked at the Department of Justice and Attorney General. In 2008, they put out a call to all universities in New South Wales to establish a Designing Out Crime research centre. UTS won, and they won because they picked out some key words in the application process. They focused not on crime, but on design. Not on using redesigning the environment to reduce, as many criminology school would do, but using design as a way of solving complex problems. UTS won that tender, and that was in 2008; we’ve been going strong since. 

Key to our model is always partnering with government or with community on a problem. So we don’t come up with solutions by ourselves, and then disseminate them; we work with government using design, using the methodologies that we develop with our partners to help them create new solutions. It’s been a bit of a journey. We, I think, are shapeshifters, and we’ve created a bit of a dialogue around shapeshifting within criminology, and I want to talk a bit about that. 

But first, a bit about my personal story. So this is me a long time ago. I think I was about six, living on a farm in regional New South Wales. This photo was taken about a year before life got really complex for me and my family. My family, my mother suffers from a severe, chronic, persistent mental illness, and this photo was taken just before she started going into hospital quite regularly for treatment. So I was very happy then; photos taken a bit later, not so happy and not for a while. There were other big things that happened to us – my mum’s a single mum; I’m the eldest of five. Two years after that photo was taken, my little brother Ian passed away from cot death, so when I went into adulthood, I knew that I wanted to work to create the common good, and to use all of my energy to make the world a better place. 

So I studied psychology. Psychology helped me, I guess, understand what I’d been through, but also helped me move into the public service. So my first job in the public service was at the Victims Compensation Tribunal, working with victims of crime – serious crime: sexual assault, domestic violence, families of homicide victim support. And I used psychology really to help people on a daily basis. It was intensely rewarding. It was also intensely challenging and draining, and as a young professional, I probably didn’t have the skills to deal with it. I looked to scale up my own ability to make a difference, and moved into the department’s crime prevention division, so working with councils, with other government agencies and with communities in order to solve local crime problems. I realised that psychology wasn’t necessarily the skillset that I needed. It was useful, but I needed another discipline set, so I did another degree up the road at Sydney – did a Masters of Criminology, and that gave me the discipline set that I needed to be a practitioner. 

But after a few years I became a little frustrated with the discipline itself and its application here and globally. Criminology wasn’t giving me the tools I needed to help people solve problems. So when the opportunity arose to come here in 2010, I jumped at it, and I landed in with a very fresh team – most of us started together in 2010 – and I was inspired by our shared values and the way that we all wanted to work together to make a difference. So amongst my team, there were architects, another psychologist, historian, computer scientist, and others – industrial design. And we were really just put together in order to translate design theory into the crime prevention sector. 

Earlier this year, we published this book, Designing for the Common Good. I’m a co-author – yay – and it’s the story of our journey. It’s the story of our journey together. It’s how we set out, it’s 20 case studies of real projects that we’ve done with government partners, reflections of things that we’ve learnt along the way, and sharing some of the methodologies that we’ve developed. But going back to innovation, so design, okay, people understand design, but what relationship does design have to innovation, and when talking about innovation, I like to draw on a few different models. 

So this model some of you will recognise; it’s from the Harvard Business Review from a couple of years ago. It’s the 70-20-10 model, so top performing companies were surveyed, their innovation approach was taken to pieces and analysed, and the authors of this paper found that of those companies, they invested 70 per cent of their innovation portfolio in doing what they already do better, so incremental innovation – just doing what they do better; 20 per cent on adapting new working principles; and 10 per cent on radical change changing their values around something. Interestingly, the return on investment is inverse, so it’s a nice safe 10 per cent for the 70 per cent on improving what they’re already doing, 20 per cent on improving working principles, and 70 per cent towards the radical end of the spectrum. 

Our work is very much situated at the radical end of the spectrum. We work with organisations to redefine their values, redefine the common good. Belonging comes up regularly in our work when we’re working with community and stakeholders as something to aspire to – something to design, to create. It also maps against another model, which is a bit older – as old as me. It’s the triple loop learning by [name], so an organisation learns to play by the rules and adjusts their actions to fit into the rules. If they have a second loop of learning, they can adapt their principles and change the way they are doing something. If they have a third loop of learning, then there’s the possibility they can change the whole reason for their existence and affect radical change within their organisation. 

Our founding director, Professor Kees Dorst, last year published a book called Frame Innovation, and in that he uses an [inaudible] logic to explain the way design can be used to innovate. So we start with the why, because the why is the value that we want to create, either in an organisation, or in a network of organisations, identifying the common good – the common shared values – and setting that as the aspirational values is where we start. And then we think back to, okay, who is good at achieving those aspirational values, and borrow the working principles from them. So that’s the how. And then, and only then, really go to solutions – the what. 

This is his book, published by MIT Press. It’s a good read. And it really sets the theoretical underpinning of what we do. It was published last year. We started working together in 2010; there wasn’t a defined model when we started – it was a work in progress. So together my team and I and Kees have turned that theoretical model into practice with our partners, and I want to share a couple of examples with you to make it a bit concrete. But first I want to talk a bit about the team and when we started. 

So I was sort of – I came over here on secondment to the centre, and I’ve been in leadership roles before, but I’d never managed an architect, an industrial designer, a historian, a computer scientist. How on earth was I going to be able to do that? I had no background knowledge of their discipline area, so I didn’t – I guess I did do a bit of micromanaging to begin with, but I soon got over that. I shapeshifted. So what we did – we did what we did, okay? We collaborated, we had a very flat structure, and we worked together for about a year and a half on projects – lots of projects – with real-life partners, and then we looked back at what we’d done, and we pulled out a whole bunch of tools and methods. 

That’s a method card – that’s Vinnie the cat, he’s my cat – he’s not around anymore, unfortunately. But on the front of the card is a photo, something personal to us. And on the back of the card is the case study that we used that method in, why we used it, how we used it, who the internal expert or experts are, and when in the case study to use it. And the cards, designed by one of our team, an industrial designer, can be linked together, so when a partner comes to us and says ‘Hey, we want to use design!’ We go ‘Okay, do you know what that is? Great, let’s go. Here are the tools we’ll use in a design process’ and we’ll very quickly build what is not a linear process – it goes off on tangents, and it’s a little uncomfortable, but having these physical design objects is great to be able to show them. 

They also fly, but I’m not going to throw them into the audience, because I’ve done that before and they’re a bit unpredictable, and I did hit someone there once. So I mentioned before that I think we’re shapeshifters, our team, and we started off really doing design for our partners. So we’d be given a brief, and there’d be an application of our process, and we’d give them a product. We moved really towards doing with pretty quickly – building their capability but also sharing the thoughts behind what we were doing, and that’s where we got our greatest opportunities to develop the model and methodologies, and now we’re moving more towards showing how, and I’ll get to that a bit later. 

If any of you are familiar with public transport, this was one of the first products to come out of our centre. It’s a rubbish bin, and it’s pretty good. We designed it with the counter-terrorism police. You might remember that there were no rubbish bins on Sydney train platforms or the transport network, and there were no bins because the authorities were rightfully worried about bombs. So they asked us to design a bombproof bin. Well, actually, first they asked us to find a bomb-proof bin in the world, and they had a big folder full of examples, and okay, that’s not really what we do, but let’s work with this – let’s develop it up. And we got to a point where we designed this product with the counter-terrorism robot so that it can very quickly detect whether there’s a bomb in there and gain access to it. It’s now on sale by a private manufacturer; we went into a deal with them. And it’s an incredibly good product which solved the problem, not of bombs on train stations, but the absence of bins on train stations, and gave them a confidence and the ability to reintroduce just a basic infrastructure. So that was really the designing for. 

A bit of a highlight for me here at UTS has been engaging back with the office that I first started at in the public service. So we did a project with victim services, and their brief was we want to redesign the criminal justice system and put the victim at the centre. So the methodology that we have developed, it’s basically a networked problem-solving tool. It’s not done in house; it’s done with community; it’s done with many stakeholders who can have influence over the problem, or who can be involved in creating the solution. In this project, we had representatives from across the justice system – criminal justice system – as well as outside – victims’ advocates, we had police, court staff; we had a number of different perspectives involved. And we worked with them to identify that common value, and one of the common values that came out that really gelled everyone together was dignity. 

So in a court proceeding, the victim presently, and certainly at that point, was afforded no status at all – they were just another member of the community, whereas the offender has a special seat, they’re addressed by the magistrate, they’re probably given a lift to and from prison if they’re not on bail, they’re given some food. So landing on that through quite a big process, the notion of dignity, we thought well, what if we just treat the victim with as much dignity as the offender? How would that change things? 

Six solution suites were developed – this is just the top line; the report’s on our website if you want to have a bit of a closer look at it. And I’ll just focus on direction one and six, because I think I’m running a bit slow. So improving the court experience for victims – so let’s think about how do we make their experience a bit more comfortable? Can we acknowledge them if they’re in the courtroom? Can we give them a special seat to sit in if they want that? Can we give them a room at the courthouse so that they can go to and not run into the offender or the offender’s family? How do we make their experience better? Can we help them with transport to and from the court? Can we help cover childcare if that’s required? 

So these are the questions that came out of that process, and a whole bunch of initiatives were developed. This was one year on, when we touched in. The actual detail of it is cabinet in confidence, but this is what we were told: we were told that a whole bunch of stuff that came out of that process is being implemented, so I was really happy with that. Really, really happy. I was also happy that 12 months later, people who’d taken part in that one-day workshop – the process was a bit longer, but one-day workshop – were still energised by it. Still energised by the different way of thinking they were exposed to. And that made me think back to my public service days, about how hard it is to get change done, and how this process can be used to create that change. So we really reframed it from a criminal justice system to a justice system, and designed from there. 

Another project that was led by Rowan Lullum, who isn’t here tonight but who I spoke with earlier today, and a large team at our centre, members of whom are here, were engaged by Corrective Services to look at adult education facilities. And they were given a really inspiring brief by Corrective Services. There was a new commissioner in, and he wanted to create big change by rehabilitation. So we embarked on our process – we took a bit of a snapshot of what the existing education facilities were. That’s not a classroom; that’s just a room, right? So that was a starting point. 

We engaged with different members of corrective services. The commissioner had not only inherited that old physical infrastructure, he’d also inherited the soft infrastructure of department areas that were often in conflict. So we drew representatives together to be part of the process, part of the design process, part of the creative process. It was built by minimum security prisoners in the Hunter, all enrolled in trade qualifications, put on a truck, hoisted over the wall up at the mid north coast correctional facility – there were no escapes that day – installed and landscaped by prisoners doing trade qualifications. The furniture was designed by a PhD student here at UTS and the architecture was done by a UTS person as well, and really, what we created there was we moved from teaching in prison to an education pathway. So the physical infrastructure was really important, but the impact of this project was profound. There’s been about five cohorts go through that intensive learning centre to learn numeracy and literacy – they’re graduating at 80 per cent as opposed of 30 per cent from the rest of the prison population.

[Applause]

Thanks. But the impact – okay, you can assess impact success on a few levels. One of the ways I like to assess success is by repeat business. So Corrective Services engaged us in a conversation about taking it to the next level. Okay, so we’ve got literacy and numeracy; how can we now look at the trade qualifications and linking that in with the education. How can we look at our prison industries – the work experience that prisoners can get while they’re in prisons – and link that in with the internal trade qualifications, and finally, how can we go to the outside world so that the work experience that prisoners get inside is relevant? So if you’ve got a warehouse job in prison, it’s relevant work experience for when you get out. So that’s the repeat business we’re talking about, and could have quite a really big impact. So in writing the book and in talking with our stakeholders over the years, we feel that the role of government is changing, and it’s changing from the owner of solutions to a collaborator. 

This is a quote from one of our industry advisory board members: ‘We are being asked to innovate, and we need new ways of working.’ I was in the public service, I was never taught problem solving. I did psychology, I did criminology, I was never taught problem solving. I was never really taught collaboration. So these were the things that we picked up in our partnerships with government. We’ve moved from doing for to doing with, and are moving to showing how. We’ll continue to do all three of those things, and we’ll do them through collaborative projects, long partnerships – the Department of Justice has been a funding partner of Designing Out Crime since 2008 – and we’ll do it through postgraduate degrees. 

Just a couple of last things: this is project that we’re hoping to get up, so earlier this year, I spoke with Traffic, an international organisation that works on wildlife trafficking, and shared with them what we’ve done. And I asked them ‘Will you be on our international advisory board?’ 

And they said ‘Yes.’ 

‘Would you like to do projects together?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘Would you be interested in building capacity in the sector?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

This is the first project that we’re hoping to get up. It’s in partnership with the Department of Customs in Vietnam, with Traffic in Vietnam, which is led by a woman called Madeleine Willemson, who’s also a UTS alumni. Save the Rhino International are gathering funds to fund that project – if you’d like to donate, there’s a link on screen; take a photo. But it’s a project that we’ll do in Vietnam with the customs department. There’s going to be massive issues there, and we’re going to have to shapeshift once again in order to do what we do. 

Two last things: if you’d like to know more bout what we do, of course there’s a couple of books – Designing for the Common Good is on sale at Kinokunya and the Co-op Bookshop and online. But on your seat you’ll find a flier, and later this year, we’ll be launching the UTS Graduate Certificate in Public Sector Innovation, and it’s based on the work that we’ve been doing since 2008. Every project we’ve done has been with government, we’ve refined and developed our methodologies and theories and tools and been publishing them, and this graduate certificate will operate on a model inspired by the Agency for Clinical Innovation in New South Wales, who takes their practitioners and puts them on an innovation program. 

So we’re asking for sponsors within government to sponsor someone to come on the course with a problem, and they’ll learn the methodologies and tools that we’ve developed, apply it to the problem and take a solution suite back to their sector. So if you’re interested, we’d love to work together. And that’s all I had to say. Thank you.

[Applause]

Verity Firth: Thanks very much for that Rodger. And now from collaborations with government, we now go to Agency. Murray Bunton is the Executive Director of Agency. Since founding his company in 2004, working out of a garage with two Ikea desks and a reasonably legal copy of Photoshop, he has been on a mission to bring social good into the digital age. With more than 10 years of experience working with leading humanitarian organisations, Murray has grown a one-person design studio into a creative team of 20 spanning two countries. Murray embodies the Agency’s raison d’etre, helping clients discover the right idea, actionable strategy with clarity of design and voice to communicate well. We’re very privileged to have him join us here this evening, and he will be our final speaker before the panel and questions. So thank you very much Murray.

[Applause]

Murray Bunton: Thank you very much – thanks Verity. Thanks everyone for having me, thank you to UTS. It’s a pleasure being here at UTSpeaks, or UTS Peaks, if you will. I’m the third and final speaker and I can guarantee you UTS has peaked, and we’re definitely on a downward spiral from here, I’m afraid. I’m going to talk about design and business, and I know what you’re thinking – you’re neither a designer nor an expert in business, and that’s true. While I started my design business I was working here in the student centre, studying a completely different degree at a completely different university, so I feel remarkably under qualified. 

What I want to show though is hopefully 10 years from our learnings, what we’ve learned in this sphere of business and particularly running a design business – I don’t know if you’ve ever started a design shop before or if you work in graphic design, that’s the kind of shapeshifting we do; literally just shifting shapes – triangles and circles – on a page making animated gifts. That’s pretty much the sum total of our work, thanks so much for hearing me talk! Thank you very much.

[Laughter]

Murray Bunton: We’re a company called Agency. We know, meta. And we believe in giving agency, giving that instrumentality, that capacity-add to organisations we really believe in. We’re a team of 20 and we get to work with some of the best people we know – people who are advocates for human development and human rights, people who work on the forefront we think of social change. We just design the gifs, but we get to have a front seat in some of these amazing campaigns that they run. 

I want to show you a couple of examples, but then I want to wax a little bit philosophical about business and how we can design a better version of it. I want to share just a couple of campaigns to give you, I guess, a bit of a sense of what we do in our everyday and what’s been our lived experience over the last 10 years. This is the campaign which we’re running at the moment for the United Nations. 

I’m not sure if any of you are aware, but on Monday in Turkey a conference is starting called the World Humanitarian Summit. We have a broken international system when it comes to emergency response – when it comes to the calamity that is the international disaster scene at the moment. We are living through the worst crisis since the end of World War II when it comes to internationally displaced people, and yet none of us are really aware of that – I certainly wasn’t, that this conference exists. It’s happening on Monday, and we’ve been tasked with a campaign to try and bring some awareness to this in a last-ditch effort, but also to compel people to care about the millions of displaced people, the 125 million people who experience crisis right now. It’s an online campaign. We’re trying to get people to a site called impossiblechoices.com. It’s a shameless plug – you can go to impossible choices and what we’ve done is we’ve taken refugee stories from people fleeing conflicts in Syria, in Libya and in Yemen. Some of the unknown conflicts around the world that we don’t hear about as much as Syria or the others – you can go and face in a three-minutes-of-crisis challenge what it’s like to make some of those decisions. All the decisions are real; all the decisions are drawn from human stories. We don’t have time to go through it now, but what is this about? What is it for? 

We’re designers and this needs to have a purpose – this isn’t just an art project. Our purpose actually happens on Monday morning. Our purpose happens with this video on actually a very similar screen – we have a six by three metre screen in Istanbul in front of an escalator, and would you believe, that’s what this campaign is all about – trying to project this video to say that people from 87 countries have made one million impossible choices in solidarity with the 125 million people in crisis. Why all this effort for one video in front of an escalator in Istanbul? Because it’s the escalator in front of the conference for the World Humanitarian Summit where world leaders will be going down. We have a few seconds to grab their attention with our message, to say ‘This is the time to act.’ 

It’s interesting working in advocacy when you’ve only got a six-second window really with someone going down an escalator, no doubt surrounded by aides and much better things to watch than a huge screen. We hope this is slightly compelling for them. I told you we make gifs – we really do. One of the campaigns we run is the campaign for Australian aid, in partnership with a number of charities across Australia. It’s something really close to our heart. When Tony Abbott got elected, there was a drastic cut of $11.4 billion out of the forward estimates for international development. We’re trying to reinforce that this is Australian aid – it’s a part of who we are, what we do, and this was a fun campaign. 

We got to run a campaign called interruptjoe.com, where we basically tried to get as many people as possible interrupting Joe as the budget was being written, saying ‘Please, for the love of our neighbours and our dignity as Australians, let’s not cut by the biggest amount possible to make us the least generous we’ve ever been possible our commitment to international development.’ We tried – 15,000 people sent him a personal email, and they ccd their local member. It was a fun campaign; we had scooters running around his house in his electorate, just trying to get his attention in those final hours of what was obviously a very successful budget. Sorry, I didn’t mean to throw a punch there. 

So what we try to do at Agency is social change by design, and what I mean by that is graphic design – literally graphic design. And we try and achieve these social outcomes through our partners, but often times our best efforts are trumped by real, genuine human story. Despite all of our Photoshop skills and the 20 people we have, by far one of the most compelling images I’ve seen on our desks is one which landed from an unknown source. It was a drawing by a child in Manus saying ‘All people are killing themselves on Manus.’ This was from a time when children, child detainees, were housed next to – separated just by a thin fence – from a male-only detainee centre where people were hanging themselves. You see a noose attached to a cloud which says ‘God help us.’ I put this in because I think the emotion we try to communicate in our work about the dire human need is best expressed actually by individuals going through that tragedy. I put this up merely as a reminder that this is happening right now in a centre which is illegal, in a process which is almost certainly illegal here in Australia too, which is definitely immoral, which is being down in our name. But when I meet designers, I meet people who are passionate about these causes. 

People going through design school, even this one, have a deep social conscience because the projects we choose when we design, we always want to do that Amnesty poster, we always want to work on that Greenpeace campaign. We have no shortage of people who want to work on the kind of projects we’re really privileged to work on. That’s amazing. But that forms, for most graphic designers, your passion project. It’s your one per cent of the time, it’s portfolio pieces for sure, it’s the things you can volunteer on the weekend but that’s not real life, because vast majority of our lives as graphic designers is spent here, selling things which look like Mars or Snickers, which really, if you think about it, is just really one company called Mars, which really, if you think about it, is really just a couple of companies who are responsible for almost everything on our shelves. That’s what we do as graphic designers – we sell shit like this all the time.

[Applause] 

Murray Bunton: I would like – I want to quote Milton Glaser. Milton Glaser is one of the best graphic designers in the world, designed the I Love New York logo, designed the Brooklyn Brewery Company logo, which if you love Brooklyn, is an amazing beer. And yet, he said this: ‘The general perception I have is that design can function in culture and has a social role that cannot be only about selling goods. That is a product of our time, is it not?’ That one of the world’s pre-eminent graphic designers has to state that maybe design has some other purpose, not just selling stuff. Oh my gosh, how far have we come? We have been co-opted as an industry. It used to be called graphic design, commercial art, and I think that’s a lot more real as a term for what it is. We’re artists, people who work, and we’ve been co-opted by corporations to sell things. 

Now, we’ll get into whether I’m a raving Marxist in a second. However, I’ve got a good answer for you on that one. How else do you work? This is the economy we’re in, and if you’re a designer, those are your options. Sell stuff or starve. There was a document in the 1960s by a group of designers, graphic designers, who believed that things could be different, that design definitely – graphic design especially – had a purpose beyond that. It’s called the First Things First Manifesto – someone sent this to me in that garage, a client we still work with today, and it changed my trajectory. It changed our company’s lives. ‘We’ve been bombarded’, it says, ‘with the work of those who flogged their skill to sell such things as cat food, stomach powders, detergent, hair restorers, striped toothpaste, aftershave lotion, before shave lotion. The amount of money which pours into these ads – we are proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of the more lasting, the more useful forms of communication.’ 

For a graphic designer, this is a breath of fresh air. And we looked around us five years ago and looked at the clients we had. We were working for Disney at the time – we thought ‘Hey, this is a good company, right? They entertain people around the world. At the same time, are they just fostering Americanised values and a misogynistic culture which believes there’s only one way of living in the world on our children?’ I’m not sure. You can think what you like, but generally you can’t – I can’t really judge. Is that a good thing or not? Is it a bad thing? We were also working for Pfizer. Pfizer with a history of human trials in West Africa – Pfizer with a very litigious history in the way they prosecute intellectual property law. I had a real issue with that. And yet, they make drugs which help people get better all over the world. Incredible good, which has come out of that company. And then British American Tobacco. You know, on the one hand they make a carcinogenic product which is killing us, and yet on the other – well, you know, on the one hand! 

Some of these clients were easy for us to decide. We didn’t work for a tobacco company because we thought maybe that’s a given, but we generally were confused about the rest of them, but that’s when it struck us that we didn’t have to be the moral arbiters of our clients. We’re just graphic designers, and that’s fine. Pfizer is doing brilliant things in the world and you can debate all you like the TRIPS Agreement in Geneva and what it’s doing to intellectual property law, and I would love to debate that with you afterwards. But we don’t have to have that conversation in our company if we don’t want. We decided instead of saying what is good and what is bad in the world, and trying to evaluate every single company and every single option, we said ‘Why don’t we just choose a focus?’ And that was a real breakthrough for us. 

Five years ago we decided to say ‘We’re only going to work on certain projects. I don’t care who you are – non-profit or for-profit. I don’t care what your structure is – charitable or social business. I don’t care what side of politics you’re from – left or right. If your project aligns with our values, we’re really interested.’ So we set out five values, and they formed this statement: ‘We want to work towards a world without poverty, that champions human rights, with justice and social equality in a sustainable economy.’ Those five bolded values guide now every project we take on, and our business changed overnight. Over the course of the year, we’d gone for four staff to 12. Over the course of a year, our clients had completely refreshed. We knew that the 30 per cent of the projects which we did which might have fit into this category of work now took up 100 per cent of our time. We were inspired at that time by someone called Mohammed Yunus who spoke at Sydney in a Sydney peace prize event about five yeas ago. He said any social problem could be solved by a social business. What’s a social business? A non-profit business. To follow on from now, I’m proposing a new business model that Yunus has propelled for the last 30 years. So we went to our lawyers and said ‘Great – we would like to become a social business.’ And they said ‘What is one of those? We have no idea what you’re talking about.’ But you can do that – you can say ‘This is our model.’ We became a non-profit company. 

We had some great inspiration – Yunus pioneered microfinance in Bangladesh in the 1970s with this incredible business model, and they said ‘That’s what we’re about – we’re for purpose, not for profit. We’re using the model of business. Do we have to be profitable? Yes. Does anyone get paid out of profit? No. Not shareholders, not directors, not even through bonuses through the company.’ You might thing ‘How do you make money?’ I used to work in the charity sector and it’s like ‘You work at a non-profit – how do you get paid?’ You’re like ‘Revenue minus expenses is profit, and wages are expenses. That’s not a hard question to answer. I get paid out of expenses.’ You can still make a reasonable life for yourself and not have to focus on profit. That’s what a social business is. And yet, we thought this was a radical new concept. It’s not IN the early 19^th century as the mills were taking over, as the industrial revolution was taking hold, mills – Verity said are really interesting thing at the beginning – she used kind of almost religious language to describe the state of social ills in the world. In a great hymn called Jerusalem, the author says ‘These dark, satanic mills’ that employed children, that violated every labour code that we probably have today. This was a blight on the landscape of England, and yet at the same time, a very similar debate was happening. 

Today we debate whether robots are going to take all of our jobs by 2020, or just most of our jobs. Back then, it was the machine – these mills were taking people’s jobs and we were now servants of the machine. Robert Owen, one of the founders of the concept of the collective, said ‘Actually, what if people were at the top of that chain? What if the employees were owning the factory?’ And just before you make another Marxist judgement about me, I’d want to suggest that our economy is profit by design. When you start a business, you inherit a constitution – the replaceable rules. If you start up a proprietary limited business here in this country, it’s the same thing. In the US, if you start a company, you have a legal obligation, a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to maximise profit. That’s the way of the road; that’s the status quo. That’s the way we’ve set it up. 

A B corp in the United States only exists so that you can’t be sued for not maximising profit. It’s an incredible thing we have to do, to stop, to try and focus on something other than make as much money as possible. Milton Freidman – I’m only having quotes by guys called Milton today; that’s apparently the thing. Milton Freidman said there was one and only one social responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits. That’s it. That’s what he says, and of course that comes from the Adams Smith tradition, which says if you do that, social benefit will flow. And I think they’re actually right. We live in a world of rising inequality, it’s true. We do. And we live in a world where over the last years since the 1980s, when the pay gap between a CEO and their average worker was something like 70 or 80 times. Now that figure stands at something like 300 times. We live in a world where one per cent of the world’s population – Oxfam just released at the beginning of this year – now owns more wealth than everyone else, than the 99 per cent, and despite all of our great revolutions in science and industry, we cannot seem to build an economy which gets more equal at the same time. 

The status quo of business, though, I find, is unquestionable. But I want to take a jab at both sides of politics on this, because I think we have a really polarised view of what it is to be a business. If I say to my left-leaning friends that I believe business is a good thing, they’ll expose a litany of ills. And fair enough. There are a litany of ills with the model, and yet business is a tool which has empowered so many people, which gives people an opportunity for a fundamental human right, a basic economic freedom. That economic opportunity is a human right. And I’m sure many rights campaigners in the room wouldn’t think of it in that framework. But also I go to my friends on the right of politics and suggest that maybe business might have a few tweaks that need to be made, and they’ll go back to a Richard Branson quote which says ‘The only thing – the best thing for alleviating poverty is business.’ And there’s things wrong with both analyses. 

I’m going to demonstrate how judgemental our views are with a little experiment. Are you ready? I want you to analyse the following quote. Allow me to demonstrate: I want you to analyse the following quote by Karl Marx. Like analyse it; see what you think about this quote: ‘Wherever there was great property, great wealth, there is great inequity in equality. The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence, the depravity, the absolute poverty of the many.’ So wherever there’s a lot of a collection of wealth, there’s going to be inequality by default. Think of the thought process which is going on in your head right now, and you’re probably doing one of maybe two predictable responses. I’ll let you judge what those predictable responses are, because I’ve got a little bit of a revelation for you. That quote is not from Karl Marx; that quote is from Adam Smith. Adam Smith believes that where there is great property there is de facto in a limited world going to be great inequality – that’s just how a limited economy works. And the funny thing is, that is not even Karl Marx. That’s my great grandfather who just happens to have a beard.

[Laughter]

Murray Bunton: So I would challenge us on the basic premise of what we think business is. I propose a more rational view – that business does have great assets, that business has really empowered incredible sections of our economy, but it could be designed a little better. Yunus doesn’t call for the abolition of capitalism; the opposite, he calls for its reform. We have so much we can learn from the hundreds of years of history we have from letting people buy the products they want; rather than controlling our economy, actually designing better products and letting people do that in freedom and in liberty. But you can design a business for purpose. You can say there is something else that I want to do with my company, which isn’t maximising profits. Designers are the kind of people who I think know that – designers are the people who believe there is more in life than simply enriching ourselves at the expense of the world. They’re people who believe that there’s great humanitarian outcomes, and that a life lived doing that is great work. So I want to leave you maybe with an encouragement, that if you look at your career, if you look at the 86,000 hours you work, or if you’ve been co-opted by the advertising industry, the 130,000 hours that you’re going to work, my simple plea to you would be let’s make them all count. Thank you.

[Applause]