CSR is seen by many as a self-regulation mechanism whereby businesses identify their impact on society and ensure that they comply with social standards, e.g. human rights. CSR is increasingly regarded as a crucial aspect of economic competitiveness, which can encourage product/service uptake on aspects beyond functionality and price sensitivity. While CSR takes an important role in brands, design has the potential to be a critical aspect of CSR, broadening activities from corporate sponsorship and certification to the incorporation of CSR principles throughout product/service development. The widely-held belief that buying ethical products is a more effective way of tackling global poverty than giving to charity reflects strong commercial benefits, by ensuring sufficient social values in product offerings, enabling businesses to respond to CSR imperatives. However, most businesses do not yet use design effectively in CSR practices, which they interpret as supporting charities, and invest in design only with apparent benefits, e.g. promotional design. Moreover, the social return of design is implicitly quantified, and existing financial appraising tools for Return on Investment and social impact assessment are unsuitable for measuring social values generated through design. As a result, companies find it difficult to consider design as one of the tools to address CSR requirements and integrate social values into their mainstream products and services. The situation is worse for SMEs, which are less able to access and use good design, thereby limiting their potential for growth and innovation while larger firms are twice as likely to see design as integral to their operations. There is an urgent need to develop a toolkit for measuring social return of design, which will complement existing tools by explicitly identifying the social impact of non-financial investments in order to (i) make UK companies effective users of design in CSR practices and (ii) help to make UK companies leading ethical enterprises in the global market. The key question, then, is how to objectively quantify social values created by design. We believe developing the toolkit will enable design disciplines to trace social values created through design during the new product/service development process, similar to the calculation of the carbon footprint throughout the product lifecycle. As a pilot study of the research idea, this project aims to understand the social value of design, especially in CSR practices, and explore contextual issues, value and means of measuring social impact of design, providing an underpinning theory and underlying knowledge to develop the tool for measuring the social values of design. The project will deliver following objectives: OB 1. To review existing theories of the social value of design, with particular reference to the social impact of CSR practices. OB 2. To identify the role(s) of design in relation to social value/responsibility and the critical notion of design value. OB 3. To examine current social impact assessment tools to understand the limitations of existing approaches. OB 4. To explore the potential opportunities and benefits of developing the impact measurement tool. Potential stakeholders include research partners from non-profit design organisations, design academics, design professionals, and SMEs invited to participate in the project. In-depth desktop research and two interdisciplinary workshops will be conducted to achieve the objectives. An open knowledge-sharing platform and open discussion forum will be created, as an online repository of ongoing research results and debates, and the two workshops will serve as dissemination and knowledge-sharing strategies. The developed knowledge will also be disseminated by support of the not-for-profit organisations' networks, creating journal/conference papers and introducing it to design students at Brunel and CMU for educational purposes.

Individuals experience significantly more stress from the fear of crime than from any direct experience of it. Sources such as Health Canada maintain that the physical environment (e.g. unused and empty spaces, poorly lit areas, areas obscured with trees and shrubs) contributes to these experiences. As an example, on university campuses, opportunities for attackers to hide can increase student fears. It is extremely challenging, however, to design public spaces that fully alleviate the public's concerns over their safety. This is due to a number of reasons: (i) even the best design processes cannot fully anticipate a user group's needs; (ii) usage patterns by the public are not fully known until the public space has been in use for some time; (iii) usage patterns naturally change over time as the role of the space in the community evolves. As a consequence, despite notable attempts at considering safety in the design of public environments - e.g., Vivacity 2020 - a priori design will never be able to fully satisfy the public's needs.This proposal argues that users of a public space know the space best. It further contends that, at present, only a small proportion of users' views are taken into account during design. Design processes typically include public consultations before construction and post-occupancy evaluation surveys. However, relatively speaking, very few users provide input into these processes. On the other hand, all users have opinions about the spaces in which they live and work. As an example, a worker may mentally note that a pedestrian crossing is required at a busy intersection, but the pressures of modern life mean that s/he is unlikely ever to feed back this comment to the local council. This kind of knowledge - which people possess but may not realize its importance to others - is termed tacit knowledge. The VoiceYourView project aims to mobilise the tacit knowledge of a community to transform public spaces to be safer and more inclusive. The VoiceYourView concept is best illustrated by example. Imagine a park in central England. Mary is 72 years old and walks her dog every day. On her route, at dusk, she hesitates as she walks past a large shrub, fearing what is behind. Judy is 26. Her jogging route takes her into areas of the park that are poorly lit and she is afraid. Paul is 43 and takes his children to the park but is concerned that the bandstand is becoming a magnet for teenage drinking parties. Today, Mary, Judy and Paul each have limited ways of communicating their tacit knowledge to the appropriate people. They would need to compose a letter - which is unlikely given the time stresses on their daily lives. The goal of VoiceYourView is to provide Mary, Judy and Paul with a way to record their feedback in real-time at the moment it occurs to them in the park rather than having to wait until it is forgotten about. In this way, VoiceYourView will collect real-time information that can then be structured, stored in an online repository, and exchanged with appropriate stakeholders: other users, local community groups, local authorities, etc. The hypothesis is that, by so doing, VoiceYourView will lead to public space designs that are more attuned to the needs of their users and, in particular, do a better job at alleviating their safety concerns.We will design inclusive input devices for the collection of tacit knowledge in public spaces and will implement a repository that will use techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) to filter, structure and classify this knowledge. We will conduct a series of trials in key public areas - including Derry city walls and Coventry underpass - to drive and evaluate VoiceYourView research. We will undertake basic research to understand how VoiceYourView requirements are impacted by existing crime trends and how VoiceYourView fits into and influences existing design processes. VoiceYourView is a partnership between five universities and associated partners and will take place over a three year period.