Interview With an Entrepreneur: Mary Rose Cook

A growing number of designers are applying their talents to creating social change. But when many people think of design they imagine objects like chairs or houses. Design as user-engagement, approach and process can be more difficult to grasp. Mary Rose Cook co-founded design consultancy Uscreates with fellow designer Zoë Stanton. They set up the organisation because they recognised that designers could play a significant role in tackling social problems. Zenobia Talati talks to her.

Name: Mary Rose Cook

Age: 25

Job Title: Co-Director and social entrepreneur

Organisation: Uscreates

Mary says she often avoids using the word ‘design’ when she describes her work because “people get confused.” She says “you can end up losing people who think you are talking about graphics or communications and not the design process.” The public sector is now opening up engagement with designers on a serious level and it is beginning to understand the real value that designers can add. But the longstanding divide between the Arts and Sciences, although somewhat artificial, can still be difficult to bridge.

Sadly the creative industries can be seen as an ‘add-on’ to a technology focussed healthcare service. But actually design in healthcare often has very little to do with pretty pictures on a hospital wall and there is a wealth of evidence to show how arts projects can reduce stress, feelings of isolation and recovery times from illness for example. It is also evident that the best services are designed and improved by having the people who use them engaged in the design process.

Mary and Zoë set up Uscreates in 2006 because they believed designers should be involved with all stages of a project from research and idea phases through to development and implementation. Mary says that designers are often brought in at the later stages because this is where people traditionally recognise their role.

“There is often work for designers which is related to the aesthetics, communication or the technical side; about how we are actually going to make this thing work. But it’s really difficult when we are brought in at that stage because we have no say over what has happened. They are literally telling you what to do. So you have little power if you don’t think that is the best way to be doing it.”

Mary says that Uscreates does get opportunities to work with projects from the start. For example, with financial backing from NESTA, Uscreates worked with Breckland Council in Norfolk looking at how to improve eating habits in the workplace. Before coming up with any ideas or assumptions about what the healthy eating initiatives should be, there was lots of observational work and engagement with staff to identify the problems.

This process reflects Uscreates creative and user-driven approach. Mary says she does some ethnographic research and also gives probes to people, for example questionnaires using camera recorders or a dictaphone to answer questions throughout a day.

Mary says that Breckland council was challenging because the office had no free provision of tea or coffee, let alone fruit. It is based on an industrial estate in rural Norfolk, with only a supermarket a few minutes away. A sandwich delivery man came in at 9am every day for just ten minutes so people had to make sure they didn’t miss him. If people brought in lunch it would usually be a sandwich, so most people were stuck in a sandwich rut. Many people did not take breaks and ate lunch at their desks.

Uscreates evaluated how the employees engaged with new ideas and tailored initiatives with them. For example they introduced a fruit bowl with a pot for collecting money next to it as a prototype for an honesty fruit bowl system. Mary says that although people were using the fruit bowl, they had concerns. She says the feedback was that the fruit bowl was too small, it was on one person’s desk and the money wasn’t perceived to be secure. So they designed a new model that was like a large poster on a wall with wire baskets coming out of it to hold larger quantities of fruit. They attached a secure money box at the bottom and teamed up with the local sandwich delivery organisation which now delivers the fruit daily, paid for by the money in the box.

Although a fairly simple shift, people engaged much better with the ‘fruit bowl’ they helped design and fruit consumption increased dramatically. Other interventions included a lunch delivery service with lunchboxes that provided three portions of fruit and veg, with content advice provided by a nutritionist at Newcastle University. Specialised menus, packaging and flyers were also designed and an express delivery service was set-up so people could order over the phone and get their lunch delivered to their desk. There was also a chef demonstration day and recipe cards were made to inspire employees.

Uscreates has been involved with a host of projects across the country, especially around health and education. For example they are working with the University of East London on Well London, a 5 year programme to transform the health of the city’s poorest communities. One way that they engaged people was by using a touring Community Café that moved around target areas and provided a facilitated environment for residents to discuss and record their opinions.

Another project was commissioned by the London Borough of Brent. They asked Uscreates to come up with a way to engage young people to address the boroughs problems with graffiti and tagging. To the council’s astonishment, Uscreates worked with professional street artists to actually teach young people street art. This successfully developed their creativity and skills in a controlled way.

As well as setting up and running an innovative social design company, Mary is also doing a PhD investigating how and why designers are getting involved in social innovation and public service design and how they have adapted and structured the market so they can fit within it.

Mary won an award for New Designer of the Year when she finished college and has always wanted to be involved in an art-based career. However, consciousness about waste, consumer lifestyle and social sustainability shaped the direction that she has moved towards.

“In our final year studying design at Goldsmiths College Zoë and I talked about setting up something but we didn’t have a hugely clear idea about what that would be. We were bored of designing for design’s sake: there was enough tables, chairs and teapots,” she says.

“It is interesting to consider why we suddenly took this route. Even a year before we never would have thought we’d be working with the public sector, with hospitals, PCTs and local government to try and tackle social problems. And I want to know why this is happening, because there are other companies doing it as well.”

The role of designers in tackling social problems looks set to explode and the design landscape as well as the health landscape will also change. The designer’s ‘outsider’ perspective can be very important in delivering effective and surprising solutions, “our approach is to look at a situation and see it through a second pair of eyes, we research it in a different way, take up interesting paths and use our lateral thinking to find solutions,” Mary says. But this process involves the willingness of public sector organisations to be open-minded, “when we start out with a project we often don’t know what the outcomes are going to be at all and that’s how we want it to be.”

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