Can a designer improve social care?

We sit down with Naomi Owolabi, founder of Grene, to discuss how she’s using design to solve one of social care’s biggest challenges.

“There’s a saying in social care: if you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen.” This is how Naomi describes the problem that Grene, the fledgling London-based startup she founded, is trying to solve.

Every day, millions of social workers wake up, go to work, and support some of the most vulnerable members of society. Some will conduct assessments and provide emotional comfort to relatives, others will conduct home visits and administer treatment. While no two days are the same, there is one thing that’s impossible to get away from: paperwork. Regardless of what happens each day, government regulations require that every important interaction, decision, and deliverable, is written down and stored.

The challenge

In the United Kingdom, adult social care is regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and each provider is issued a CQC rating ranging from “Outstanding” to “Inadequate.” For a care provider hoping to win contracts and recruit staff, retaining a high CQC rating is vital. The inspection process relies on onerous record-keeping that can easily become a serious burden on social care workers and can make a manager’s already difficult job untenable. In Naomi’s words, “some of the best in the industry eventually have no choice but to leave” because of the added workload of paperwork.

Grene, which is based out of the Hard Problems coworking space, solves this problem by generating required documentation automatically, acting as a “second pair of hands.” To illustrate Grene’s capability, Naomi describes the process of onboarding a new service user, which often involves quickly completing and submitting more than 10 separate documents. “On each document, you need the service user’s name, date of birth, and address. With Grene, you connect the pen profile that you get from the local authority, and it automatically populates the documents with that data. What would have taken 30 minutes to do is done immediately.”

Tech where there was no tech before

According to the Department of Health and Social Care, more than a quarter of care providers do not use technology as part of their provision, which has made getting Grene into users’ hands difficult. Naomi puts this reticence down to the fact that many social care businesses operate on razor-thin margins, but she also acknowledges the industry’s skepticism of technology: “Most people building tech for social care have never really worked in the industry,” she says. “There’s a lot of suspicion, and you’re working with people who would rather keep things as they are.” As someone who spent years as a service manager herself, Naomi understands the people she’s selling to and considers her ability to bridge that cultural gap a powerful competitive advantage.

Design as a differentiator

Before her stint in adult social care, Naomi worked in design and always showed an interest in solving social problems. “My bachelor’s was in architecture, and I was obsessed with homelessness,” she recalls. Once she’d graduated, she transitioned into digital product design and spent some time as a freelancer. (Fittingly, her first project as a product designer was for a homelessness charity.) Her move into social care came through a friend, and she quickly realized that the work suited her. “If you’re able to make a difference to someone’s life, what you get out of the work is immeasurable,” she remarks. “One of the most challenging cases I had to handle was someone who had been estranged from her mother. This person was nonverbal, and there was no way to explain what was happening to her. It was absolute chaos. She was brought into our service at the peak of this dysregulated behavior and, six months later, she was settled, happy, and engaging with the community. I just thought, ‘I want to do this for as long as possible.’”

Grene is the product of both of Naomi’s identities. Spending time as a service manager helped her develop a deep conviction in the power of high-quality social care, and her formal design training meant she was able to bring a fresh perspective to the way the industry operated. “I think [Grene] started as a way for us to do more with less and less time,” she says. “The first thing I did was to try to digitize all of those compliance forms, because that way it was easier for me to collect data and understand what was going on.” Through this efficiency drive, it became clear that there were many operational, back-office optimizations that could be made.

“Proximity to the problem is your biggest asset. I’m not building from the outside looking in — I’m staying close, staying sharp, and making sure every decision is informed by what’s actually happening on the ground.”

The opportunity

Today, Grene’s software provides service managers with a centralized hub for documentation, as well as a mobile app that uses a chat interface and ambient intelligence to capture conversations and retain a log of outstanding and completed tasks. She considers this type of compliance infrastructure “a kind of Trojan horse,” recognizing that she needs to deliver a product that customers are prepared to pay for if she’s going to go on to solve many of the other problems in the sector. “I learned really quickly that rather than trying to convince them to do X and Y, it’s usually best to find something they’re already paying for.”

With the costs of social care set to balloon across Europe and the United States, there is a real opportunity for companies like Grene to make an impact. In England, adult social care contributed £77.8 billion to the economy in 2024-25, and the sector currently employs more than 1.5 million people. “Social care is very overlooked,” Naomi observes, but “‘moving fast and breaking things’ is not going to work.” Instead, progress depends on patience, trust, and a continued desire to solve hard problems. Fortunately for us, Naomi seems to be just getting started.