Current economic scenarios offer business opportunities for designers who are prepared to adopt new entrepreneurial skills and new ways of working.

Clare’s research explores and promotes new design approaches, roles and partnership models to meet the challenges of sustainability through the support or creation of social enterprise.

The responsible design of objects and services is important, but designers need to learn to work with other professions, considering infrastructure and collaborating with communities. The new role of design must encompass the design of innovative products and services through partnerships that can impact on lifestyles and behaviour.

HiRise Gardens is a design-led social enterprise that tests this thinking, taking on two seemingly disparate issues:

• Biodegradable waste. In landfill biodegradable waste causes methane, a greenhouse gas that is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. In fact, landfill sites are responsible for an estimated 3% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. Although about 50% of some inner city boroughs are comprised of flats, many councils still struggle to carry out waste separation in anything but single dwellings.
• Homelessness. About 20,000 people live in temporary accommodation for homeless people in London. Specialised organisations help homeless people reintegrate into mainstream society through securing permanent accommodation as well as meaningful and dignified employment. But because of the acute social needs of many of their service users, of the 79% who want to return to work, only 7% actually manage to do so.

HiRise Gardens addresses both these issues. It offers local authorities a blueprint system for localised composting of biodegradable waste on housing estates. A community composting machine is installed on each estate and managed by local formerly homeless residents. As well as dealing with the collection and management of biodegradable waste from the estate and beyond using branded bikes with trailers, they will also learn gardening and landscaping skills, using the compost to cultivate fruit and vegetable plants on communal areas of the estate.

Co-design processes will be used to find ways of getting maximum buy-in from staff and residents in the whole process. Workshops with staff and residents will help create waste separation and collection systems best suited to their needs, and will generate ideas for the design of new green spaces on the estate to improve their sense of community.