This month’s issue of Fast Company features an article on a company called Participle, a non-profit focused on social change.  It is not just any company, however.  It is a team of designers.

I won’t repeat here what the article says, but the fascinating part about this company is that they are tackling age-old issues in a new way.  Whereas most social issues are dealt with from the top down (i.e. How do we fix Medicare?), Participle looks at them from the bottom up (i.e. What do seniors really desire and how can we provide that in the context of the “system”?).  They employ interdisciplinary teams of designers, economists, psychologists, policy experts and others to create solutions that really do work.

The design approach to problems goes way beyond the general perception of a bunch of people picking at a new gadget or pretty object.  This approach is flexible enough to be applied to almost any problem in very powerful ways.

If design can be used to improve some of the most challenging societal problems, it’s probably also true that many of our other problems can be much more manageable than we think if we use the right approach.