Welcome to Bringing Design Closer, the podcast focussed on discussing Designs role in tackling  complex societal issues. Our goal is to have conversations that inspire and to help move the dial forward for organisations to become more human-centred in their approach to solving complex business and societal problems.

My name is Gerry Scullion, and I’m a service designer, and founder of This is HCD and CEO of This is Doing - we provide live online design and innovation classes, transformational design and innovation training for teams and organisations for people within the Design and change-making space.

Today on the show we have the wonderful Iria Lopez, a UK based service designer. I recently stumbled upon Iria’s work on LinkedIn where she was running a workshop. What struck me was the theme - Designing for loneliness. We speak about the importance of gaining greater context of why people congregate and attend extra-curricular events such as Design meet-ups etc. and that is of human-connection. The importance of being seen, and being heard and part of something. We chat about what we can do as change-makers to be more aware of this context and include it in our facilitation sessions that many of us do quite regularly - and that is to make space for it.

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/iria-lopez-51b1975/