Hilary Cottam on redesigning the welfare state

Hilary Cottam. Portrait: Brigitte Lacombe. Bespoke typography: Studio Frith

AR: How did you integrate design into the practical experiments you conducted at the social enterprise Participle, which you ran for a decade as a prototyping lab?As the Black feminist Audre Lorde said: ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ We needed a different way to work, and design brought three things.

AR: What will the methodology of this project be? It’s incredibly ambitious, though that hasn’t frightened you before.There are two main parts, which are interconnected. One is the thinking part, so I’ve been thinking and collaborating with lots of people. The most important thing is that it’s called the fifth social revolution, because it’s tied to the idea that we’re in a fifth technology revolution.

What’s important about technology is that it changes everything. It changes what we see as common sense, the patterns of how we live, how we parent, how we sleep, how we work. There’s really nothing that isn’t in that transformation process. One of the things that has been very clear in this pandemic is that people have seen the need to rethink capitalism. We’ve seen very strong calls to rethink capitalism, but much less attention on the need to rethink a social settlement.

AR: Combating inequality and injustice has always been absolutely fundamental to your work, and this is a time when George Floyd’s tragic murder has ignited such powerful responses all over the world. What will be the role of the fifth social revolution in combating inequality in general, and systemic racism in particular?That’s such an important question. One thing is that our current systems can’t see some of those structural inequalities.

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