Are We Using the Full Power of Design to Serve Life?
Designer Lynne Elvins challenges the creative industry to move beyond commercial briefs and use the full transformative capacity of design for human and planetary flourishing.
Why we picked this
A useful provocation for anyone who works in the creative industries: what would it actually mean to use design's full potential, rather than its commercial fraction?
Design has a way of being praised for its transformative potential in the morning and used to sell insurance products by afternoon. Lynne Elvins has spent her career thinking about the gap between those two uses — what design could do if its practitioners operated from a different set of incentives, with a different understanding of what success looks like.
This RSA talk takes on the question directly: what needs to change if we want to use the full power of design to serve more than budgets? Elvins explores how designers can go beyond commercial constraints to serve human wellbeing and planetary health, drawing on decades of work in the creative industries and the RSA’s Design for Life mission.
The talk is free and available online as well as in person at RSA House. It’s a short afternoon event — the kind of midday provocation that sends you back to your desk with a different question than the one you arrived with.