Inside the head of a designer

I saw this a couple of years ago actually and remember thinking what a telling portrait it was of Alzheimer’s and how touched I was by it. A few months ago I wrote a post about my gran and this reminded me of her, some of the signs like wanting to go out all the time and the way she holds her hands was exactly like this. So I thought I’d share it with you.

The video is by Mike Chalmers who had some other fantastic shorts, not to mention some amazing photography, and it’s rather cool to see someone produce such great work that you went to school with.

Coproduction and citizenship: Two words that have been echoed round and round and round and round in the last few weeks at every conference I’ve been to and recent paper I’ve read.

There’s been a couple of interesting publications released recently, and in good timing for me as with a piece of writing due myself in the New Year, it’s given me (even more) food for thought.

First up is a joint piece between Nef and Nesta: ‘The Challenge of Co Production‘.  Here David Boyle and Michael Harris define it as,

“Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change.”

What’s been interesting here is to think about this in the context of being a designer and facilitating this process.  I’m writing over the holiday period about the ethical approach of the designer as an active practitioner in co-design and co-production.  When undertaking a project along the lines of co-production we must be very careful to remember the impact we are making to people’s lives, and not to parachute in as designers and skip off again.  It could be said that the ethos of co-production would prevent this from happening, and as part of the project, support networks must be set up, sustainability runs as a key theme in the work, and the job is to transform and empower people to become part of the initiative being co-produced and take the reigns of it.

“Co-production has the capacity to transform public services: Co-production has to be potentially transformative, not just for the individuals involved, but also for the professionals who are struggling to put it into practice and for the system as a whole. Public service workers will need to change the way they think about their role and how they operate and the people they have come to know as ‘users’, ‘patients’ or ‘clients’ who will now become their equal partners; they need to change their attitudes, priorities and training. They need to move from fixers to facilitators.”

The second piece was released from the Young Foundation, Public Services and Civil Society Working Together,

The initial think piece, looks at various themes of how we can build a civil society in the UK to support and work with our local services.  It looks at some of the barriers including understanding personal responsibility and how we might motivate people through incentives, or focusing on a campaign on a hyperlocal level, so people have ‘minimal’ effort to get involved.

The report comes slightly after a Demos paper, Service Nation, which took the idea of a compulsory Youth Civic Service to a group of young people from different backgrounds to talk about the idea.

“Serving your community should be woven into every stage of life…”

What do you think about a civic service?  Why do we want civic service? What would effective civic service look like? Would civic service be compulsory or voluntary? And how can civic service schemes be funded in a tough fiscal climate? Is a civic service the right way to tackle our current social problems and lack of community?

snook: transforming people

For 30 days and 30 nights, myself and Lauren took sometime out of the world of social media to house our umbrella company snook.  Our focus remains on mypolice, but we think it fits under Snook perfectly.  Over the course of the ‘detox’ we wrote letters to each other, helping us to define what it is we want to be doing in Scotland, and what our various influences are.  The time out also gave me a fantastic insight into what is productive for me when it comes to social media..since doing it, I’ve found myself away from the laptop more and more.  I did however miss my blog and will never underestimate it’s power, on a personal level for both documentation and reflection.

So back to Snook.

We are part of a new movement; a shift in ways of seeing and ways of being.  We’re all about transforming people and changing the world.  You might as well start big and as you mean to go on.

Coming in as an outsider

The launch of Snook follows a short publication I just wrote for the Glasgow School of Art recently.  Hopefully, I’ll be getting it up online soon (I’ve got to check if I can make it public).  It details the work I’m doing with Skills Development Scotland and how we can hand over design thinking tools to frontline staff to allow them to put customers at the heart of their service output and innovate at a grassroots level.  (Here’s a wee snippet)

“If you are too good at adjusting to the current system you may never realise the system needs changing.” (De Bono, Simplicity)

It is imperative the staff are taught to question the way they offer services. A new way of seeing and being must be instilled to make people want to ask more questions and be more empathetic.

As John Berger discusses: ‘A large part of seeing depends on habit and convention’  This would suggest that the environment must allow this attitude and mindset to prosper. In essence, it can be assumed that design can show a new way of seeing and being. Whether frontline staff can become independent designers is questionable, and is not the definitive goal of the SDS Service Innovation team. In the coming year it will be interesting to see the change design thinking can make if not so much in the development of new services but in the empowerment and motivation of staff to change the way they operate and make small incremental changes at a grassroots level.

I’m on a journey to discover how this can be done and if we can ‘turn everyone into a designer’.  My instinct tell me know, but we can hand over certain skills and tools which will allow people to perhaps think differently, or take a second look at something.  My thinking is, that we are in danger of tokenising design tools and methodologies, and for me, being a designer is more about the mindset, ways of seeing and being, rather than the toolkit.

So here’s to Snook and a bright 2010.

It’s only until we remove ourselves from the current situation, that we understand what we’re looking for under the surface.

“The highest form of creativity depends on a rhythmic movement between engagement and disengagement, thinking and letting go, activity and rest.  Both sides of the equation are necessary, but neither is sufficient by itself”

-Betty Edwards

At any moment any one of us can become “possessed” by the unconscious in a way such that a more powerful energy than our conscious ego moves and animates us. To quote Jung, “…it easily happens to any one of us that we do not act through our own volition. Then I cannot say I do, but it is done through me; something takes possession of me, the very action can take possession of me.”

- ‘Are we possessed?’ – Paul Levy

I’ve been spending lots of time in the ‘real world’ recently working on several different projects.  It’s really taken up much of my time so here’s just a small summary of what I’ve been doing;

Mypolice is really picking up pace.  In only 4 months we’ve gone from winning Social Innovation Camp to presenting at policing conferences and receiving attention from home and abroad.  All I can say is watch this space, myself and Lauren Currie are working on bringing mypolice to an area near you and have all sorts of exciting places to be along that journey.

If you’re about for mypublicservices, come say hello.  We’re also going to be at the RSA’s  NPIA Symposium ( National Policing Improvement Agency…who we presented for last month at policing 2.0).  Thirdly we might be at Young people as victims of crime, a conference run by public policy exchange.   Multiple trips to London ahead…

Secondly, I’ve been ever so slightly busy with the Masters in Design Innovation at the Glasgow School of Art.  We’ve been tasked in the first term (until the end of Jan 2010) to develop a social enterprise as part of the sustainournation competition being run by Audi.  Now, I have my issues with this competition, not because of it’s intent but the way it could potentially be handled.  On behalf of my class mates, I think we’re doing a rather good job.  The first thing we sat down to do was communicate a standard set  of ethics on this project.  If there is anything I don’t want to be, it’s a parachuting designer who runs off at the end of the project after instilling hope into a community that WE could make something happen.  So we’ve taken a coproductive route, making sure that we are facilitating a process and ensuring the tools and ideas we work with them to create are sustainable.  You can find out more about what we;ve been doing at our getgo ning.

I’ll be writing up a report on the project entitled the ethics of co-design, another watch this space, and thanks to Tom from Sense Worldwide for sending me their Spirit of cocreation white paper.

To end this section, there is some interesting debate going over on wenovski, about how ’social design’ can learn from ’service design’ techniques and the whole co-creation aspect…get involved.

Thirdly, as part of my masters and up until September 2010, I have been working with Skills Development Scotland;

‘As Scotland’s new skills body, we bring together four partner organisations with a shared vision to drive forward real, positive and sustained change in Scotland’s skills performance. Through this merger Scotland now has a dynamic, forward-looking organisation which will deliver comprehensive information, advice and guidance for careers and learning as well as extensive support for skills development.’

I’m really pleased to be part of the service innovation team.  We’re looking at how the process and skills of service design can be implemented into their organisation to help lead through difficult change, but ultimately deliver better services and put staff and customers at the heart of the organisation.

It’s a tough ride, change is never easy, and in a month’s time I’ll be summing up my experience so far of working with the team.  It’s difficult for me to come into a different environment, I take for granted the way I work, it’s often exploratory and unstructured at times and I think this is perhaps what the difficult part is for outsiders to grasp.  On the other side though, I feel that our team has an amazing set of different strengths, it’s just about finding out how to harness these and work together as a team.

We worked with live|work last week to help work the team through how service design could be implemented into the organisation and I felt it really helped to set out a feasible blueprint of how this massive task could be tackled.

Following on from a drink with James and Jeremy from Live|Work and some great advice, I’ve got the team working under the acronym of JFDI.  I’ll leave the f out, but basically it stands for ‘just do it’.  The team are heading out to different centres tomorrow to interview staff and find out about their day to day jobs, and what aspects of what they do could be changed to improve services.  It’s a start…

There isn’t a concrete brief, but I’m looking forward to finding out how the team responds to this.  We’re working towards building some character profiles and on return, finding patterns in the research that generate insights to take forward into the SDS blueprint for designing better services for Scotland.  Another watch this space…

Lastly, I’ve been working a bit on studiounbound.  The next one is taking place in Dundee on Monday, and being held by Kate Pickering and Lauren Currie with myself and Kate Andrews joining in from Skype.  We’ve been holding some interesting talk recently and the limits of studiounbound could be expanding.  I’m giving a talk to SDS on Wednesday about the use of social media as something important in our tool boxes for networking, generating debate, learning and documenting our work as they progress on an unknown journey into service design.  I find this a great move forward for SDS and reminds me of Sophia Parker talking about a young design student Ruth in her publication, Social Animals: A call for change in design education.

“Despite these valuable skills, the truth is that Ruth can’t put into words half of what it is she can offer public servants like those she is working with… drawing entrepreneurially on her design education, and trying hard to translate things she learnt about product and industrial design into this new setting of the public sector…

If Ruth sometimes feels a bit lost in her situation, it is equally true that the public servants of the local council often struggle to know what to ask for Ruth’s help on. … They can see she is desperate to work on some of the more strategic issues around youth offending, but equally know that her lack of professional qualifications in the field make it very difficult to imagine asking her to play a key role in the system redesign work.”

This got me thinking about the opportunities of having both design students online and other disciplines who are interested in design thinking on the same platforms.  For students there could be an opportunity to look beyond what might lie ahead after graduation than just consultancy and spanking new portfolio, and for the public sector (and private), an idea of what young talent is doing and might be able to offer.  A two way bargain…

Anyway, just some thoughts for now. And some delicious links, and flickr.

If you want to get in touch with me, email me sarah@mypolice.org always interested in a chat around other people’s work!

I was sent this in an email this week and caught my attention.  There has often been times when I’ve been in different places in the world and thought, that’s a great idea I wonder if that would work at home in the UK?

So I’m introducing Idea-porting.

“ideAporting is a collaborative online platform where users can share ideas, services and innovations that could be imported, exported or both between countries worldwide.

For example, a recent article in The Independent newspaper reported that there is a new scheme for the city of Ghent in Belgium to go vegetarian one day a week. Would this work in the UK? How could it be promoted? Conversely, are there any innovative concepts from the UK that could be successfully implemented in another country? If so, what cultural issues would need to be taken into consideration?”

The site hosts ideas such as a playpark for elderly people (see above) and the Brixton pound for a market place to help counteract the effects of the recession.

Would be great to see an idea cross borders and find out what might need to change culturally for it to work in another country.  Just recently social innovation camp jumped borders to Bratislava, find out what happened here.

I’ll be watching this to see what happens once they really get going.  You can follow them on twitter @ideaporting

Well summer just came and went.  It’s not like I really had a holiday, I sweated it out over (and still over) mypolice.  I feel very humbled to be part of that rollercoaster but will be handing the bulk over to Lauren Currie for the forseeable future until my new course calms down a little.

And so here I am.  New studio, not so new art school, but exciting new course.  I have began a postgraduate masters at the Glasgow School of Art in Design Innovation which focuses on transformation/environmental and service design and am being sponsored by Skills Development Scotland, so will be working with them also.

I’m looking this year at how service design and largely ‘design thinking’ can be integrated into Skills Development Scotland (and in a wider context, other public sector organisations) as a way of project managing and creating and evaluating new and existing services.  I will be releasing a larger article soon on my thoughts so far about designing for the public sector so I’ll hold back my thoughts on this.

Our first project is going to be with the Audi foundation.  From now until January we will be looking at ‘new’ social/community projects.  You can find out more about the projects here at the Sustain our nation site.

I say we, I’ve been lucky to meet a very diverse bunch of people who all have very different backgrounds, I think in total there are 9 of us, and from a few different places around the world.

The project splits into 5 different topics which we can use to somehow (the project is largely open at the moment) to organise ourselves.