From Research to Action: Why Social Science Needs Design

Governments, universities and public institutions produce vast amounts of research on society’s most pressing challenges – from climate transition and housing shortages to public service reform and democratic trust. Yet despite this growing body of knowledge, progress often feels frustratingly slow. If we understand these problems so well, why is meaningful change still so difficult to achieve?

Part of the answer lies in a persistent gap between analysis and activation. Social science has traditionally focused on observing, interpreting and documenting systems. Reports are produced, recommendations formulated and evidence synthesised. Alongside this, important advances have been made in research impact, co-production and engaged scholarship.

Yet these approaches rarely lead to sustained experimentation in real-world settings. Impact work often remains retrospective, and co-production processes can be episodic, leaving limited space for ongoing cycles of learning and refinement. Even robust insights can struggle to take hold within institutions shaped by risk aversion, limited capacity and entrenched routines. As a result, the conditions required for sustained experimentation are often absent.

Complex societal challenges rarely respond to linear plans or static interventions. They require experimentation, adaptive learning and the ability to adjust as conditions evolve. This raises a more fundamental question: who takes responsibility for enabling this experimentation in practice?

This article draws on work at SPARK, where we have been exploring how social science can move beyond analysis to become an activation partner – helping to translate knowledge into real-world experiments, interventions and institutional change. This is not yet a settled model, but an evolving practice that warrants further exploration.

What design contributes

Design disciplines have long operated in contexts where ideas must be translated into tangible forms. Engineering works through cycles of building, testing and refinement. Architecture relies on critique and iteration, while human-centred design involves people directly in shaping both problems and solutions.

Across these traditions, design can be understood as a structured approach to learning through making, testing and refining interventions in real-world contexts. Knowledge develops iteratively through cycles of action and reflection rather than through linear implementation.

For social scientists, this implies a shift in role. The discipline has conventionally positioned itself as an analyst of systems, an evaluator of interventions and a critic of policy and power. Design-led practice introduces a complementary orientation in which social scientists become co-designers of interventions, facilitators of experimentation and partners in iterative learning.

This does not replace analytical work, but extends it into the settings where change actually unfolds. It shifts social science from informing change at a distance to participating in how change is developed in practice.

An illustration: Cathays Futures

One illustration comes from Cathays Futures, a SPARK-supported project that brought together residents, students and policymakers to explore the future of one of Cardiff’s most complex neighbourhoods. Rather than beginning with predetermined solutions, the process used workshops and co-design activities to define priorities collectively and imagine possible futures.

Lived experience and storytelling were central. Residents, students and workers shared personal accounts of daily life through conversations, informal recordings and creative exercises. These accounts revealed dynamics that formal institutional data often misses – such as how housing pressures intersect with student turnover, or how different groups experience public space.

This led to a reframing of local priorities and the development of new relationships between stakeholders that extended beyond the initial project. In this context, lived experience did not simply inform decisions; it actively shaped how problems were defined and what forms of action were considered possible.

From human-centred design to design justice

As design approaches have entered policy and public services, important critiques have emerged. Early forms of human‑centred design sometimes prioritised usability over justice, focusing on what works for users without fully addressing deeper structural inequalities.

Approaches such as design justice and liberatory design respond by emphasising power, identity and accountability: who is heard, who is marginalised and who benefits. SPARK’s Antiracist Living Lab offers a practical illustration of this shift, focusing on the university’s own systems and practices, using research expertise to examine how institutional processes can become actively anti‑racist. By generating evidence from within the university and working with staff and students most affected by racism, the Lab demonstrates how centring lived experience and power analysis can reshape not only the solutions developed but the conditions in which experimentation takes place.

Here social science brings essential strengths, enabling forms of experimentation that not only generate solutions but also interrogate the underlying systems through which inequality is reproduced. In this framing, equity becomes a design parameter within experimentation rather than an afterthought.

Creating the conditions for experimentation

If design provides methods for experimentation, a further question follows: where and how does this experimentation take place?

Living Labs offer one response. These are structured, real-world environments that bring together communities, practitioners and researchers to test and refine interventions in context. They are not only physical spaces, but organised settings for sustained collaboration and learning.

Within SPARK, our Cathays Futures Labs and the Antiracist Living Lab illustrate how these organised settings create the conditions for experimentation, grounding it in the social, cultural and institutional realities in which it operates.

The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) uses the term activation partners for organisations that help translate ideas into real-world experimentation. To date, this concept has largely been applied to technological innovation. However, many societal challenges cannot be addressed through technology alone. They also involve behaviour, relationships, institutions and lived experience.

Humanitarian innovation provides a useful parallel. Work supported by Elrha’s

Humanitarian Innovation Fund has applied user-centred design in crisis settings, bringing together humanitarian organisations, researchers and affected communities to develop, test and scale new approaches to complex challenges. As a programme that supports innovation across the full cycle – from early ideas through to adoption – while generating practical learning about what works, for whom and under what conditions, it demonstrates how design-led experimentation, combined with rigorous social and contextual analysis, can operate even in highly constrained and uncertain environments – a role that social scientists are increasingly well placed to support.

Taken together, these examples point towards an expanded role for social science: helping to create the conditions in which experimentation can occur, while recognising that how this works in practice is still being learned.

An iterative cycle of activation

One way to understand this role is through an iterative innovation cycle:

Recognition → Search → Adaptation → Invention → Pilot → Scale

Challenges are identified through engagement with affected communities. Existing ideas are explored and adapted to context before new approaches are developed, tested and, where appropriate, scaled. In practice, this process rarely unfolds linearly; projects move back and forth between stages as new insights emerge.

Social science contributes across this cycle: identifying what is known, supporting context-sensitive adaptation, designing and evaluating experiments, and ensuring that scaling reflects social and institutional realities rather than assuming uniform replication. Innovation, in this sense, is not only technical but deeply social, relational and contingent.

A similar approach can be seen in design experimentation in education, where interventions are treated as prototypes to be developed and refined within real classroom settings rather than evaluated only after implementation. This allows researchers and practitioners to learn not only whether an approach works, but how it works in practice, for whom and under what conditions, as it evolves. In this context, experimentation becomes a means of generating both practical improvement and transferable insight

Practical shifts for researchers

For researchers interested in working in this way, several practical shifts can help:

• Co-create the problem frame with affected communities
• Treat interventions as prototypes, refining them through practice
• Use structured learning cycles with built-in reflection points
• Combine design with mixed-methods evaluation
• Document decisions and learning so insights travel across contexts

These practices enable social scientists to maintain analytical rigour while engaging more directly with the complexity of real-world systems.

Capabilities of social scientists as activation partners

Taken together, these shifts point towards a broader set of capabilities. Social scientists acting in this role need to understand and frame complex systems, analyse institutional contexts and map stakeholder dynamics, while also bringing lived experience and participatory approaches into innovation processes. They play a role in convening diverse actors and facilitating collaboration, as well as in designing and supporting real-world experiments.

Crucially, they also contribute to generating and embedding learning – evaluating what works, identifying mechanisms of change, translating evidence into practice and supporting institutions to learn over time. In doing so, they help connect insights across projects and contexts, enabling more cumulative forms of knowledge.

Towards an activation-oriented social science

Design, in this context, is not simply a set of tools but a stance grounded in experimentation, collaboration and reflection. When combined with the analytical strengths of social science, it creates the possibility for knowledge to develop through practice as well as through study.

This does not yet constitute a settled model. The effectiveness of social scientists acting as activation partners – and the conditions under which this role adds value – remain open questions that require further testing and refinement.

However, the direction of travel is becoming clearer. If the social sciences of the twentieth century specialised in understanding society, the challenges of the twenty-first may require something more: a more active role in enabling change, working alongside others to translate knowledge into experiments, prototypes and evolving solutions developed in context.

These are not additional tasks layered onto existing roles, but part of a shift towards social scientists taking responsibility for how knowledge is used, tested and adapted in practice.

March 2026

Written by: Chris Taylor, Anna Skeels and Hayley Trowbridge (SPARK)