Inside the head of a designer

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.

Last night I had the absolute pleasure of travelling  to sunny Dundee.  I was privileged to be at Lauren Currie’s aka Redjotter’s master of design degree show.

Lauren has spent the last year exploring and discovering the expansive land of service design to attempt to make sense of it all and help explain what it is that service designers do.  Based in Scotland, it’s very nice to have someone who is doing similar work so close by.

The show was brilliantly simple: visuals of service elements, cards that showed day to day services we use, speech bubbles which contained questions about service design (which I am asked on a day to day basis when I say I am a service designer) and an interesting twitter twist.

In her own words she describes her show as,

“Making Service Sense attempts to communicate to students what people sometimes think and talk about when it come to Service Design.”

I think it goes even further than students and reaches out to the public and business.

The twitter bit was interesting, using the #makingservicesense category on twitter, Lauren put questions to her vast network of design professionals and thinkers and received almost instantaneous replies.  I’m intrigued about twitter, I love how an event can come to life using it and even though not there in person, others can still get involved.  To view the night’s feed (and believe me this is not the end of it) go to the #makeservicesense twitter page.

I think the diversity of what Lauren has covered is fantastic, not to mention the leg work that went into it.  She’s produced a book of all the conversations and experiences of the last 12 months into a lovely, very large, book.  Fingers crossed she will make it available to the service design world in the near future.  If you can’t wait, and you haven’t already, you should read her blog which is very comprehensive.

And I promise you, this is only just the beginning for makingservicesense, it’s only going to grow.

Last night I had the absolute pleasure of travelling  to sunny Dundee I was privellged to be at Lauren Currie’s aka Redjotter’s master of design degree show.

I really must learn to blog in small doses, instead I’ve done it again, saved it all up for a massive round up of all things service that have caught my attention in the last couple of weeks.

Most importantly, I’ve been working on mypolice and there’s a lot of thoughts over there too.  It’s been going phenomenally well and we’ve now got a list of police conferences to present at.  What’s been interesting is talking to police leaders and members of the Scottish government about design led innovation and using creativity to engage with the public and come up with new and relevant services.  I’ve been flying the service design flag a little and recently spoke up at a big policing event, to be met with great interest and acceptance of what service design might do for the police force in Scotland, and on my visit to London later next week, hopefully in the UK too.

I’m going to save myself a little for a larger post about policy making which I mentioned in my last post, but a couple of papers that caught my eye this week were,

A must read for anyone, is ‘A Brief History of Public Service Reform’, a paper from the 2020 Public Services Trust at the RSA.  The video above is a video newsletter from them for September.

“1 Be responsive to the existing and new sources of insecurity and disadvantage that citizens face today – including how these are distributed across the lifecycle, how they differ can by gender, ethnicity, class, and spatially, and how they can combine in ways that entrench and perpetuate disadvantage; and

2 Have at its heart the positive aspirations of citizens – for themselves and the lives they want to lead, for their families, and for their communities.”

Another paper which might run alongside this was brought to my attention by redjotter.  ‘The NHS: Local Control vs Local Varioation’ It brought together different age groups to discuss the level of involvement in choosing how public spending in the NHS is managed.  Worth a read and part of a major debate about the spending of public budgets nationwide vs localality needs.

Another paper which I read last week and finally remembered is ‘VISUALIZATIONS AS TOOLS FOR RESEARCH: SERVICE DESIGNERS ON VISUALIZATIONS’ looking at visualization as the tool of the designer, which made me start to think of the debate about passing on design tools and skills to ‘non’ designers.  Can anyone be a designer? Isn’t everyone a designer? Or are there traits and instincts which make some people better at (service) design thinking than others?

It runs alongside something Kate Andrews put up on twitter the other day, ‘You know more than you think you do’ from the RSA,with a quote that stood out at the end,

“that the most exciting thing about design right now is how it can make everyone more creative’ – Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO

This is something of great interest to me as my masters this year at the Glasgow School of Art will be undertaken in a collaboration with Skills Development Scotland, to help them understand and practice service design.  It is a task that in no way I think will be easy and will be a great study of whether the skills a good designer has can be taught to ‘non’ designers, as well as the tools and techniques attributed to the design process.  I think the biggest challenge is when I leave, will the knowledge still live on and be usable?  It’s something I’m going to try and make sure of.  Watch this space, I can feel a new blog coming on.

A really quick round up of a few other things are, Service design – a robust way to build brands, The Psychology of Creativity, promising practices in online engagement.

Something else that caught my eye was the new school buses in India, for kids who are not able of have dropped out of school.  Their idea is about ‘mission to admission’ to prepare these kids for a primary school.  Fantastic.

Finally, I’ve been working on blueprint of user journeys with Say Women, a charity which helps young women between the ages of 16-25 who have experienced rape, sexual assault and abuse.  I was there today interviewing Brenda Walker as part of the mypolice project (I’ll post about it over there later) and working with her to map out the young women’s journeys.  It reminded me of this, the mepss webtool flagged up by openp2pdesign on twitter.

‘Successful PSS innovation asks for a strategy that focuses on designing and selling an interconnected system of products and services. MEPSS (Methodology for PSS) helps you to think ‘outside the box’ and actively use visualisation, analysis and stakeholder management in your design process.’

I’ll think that will do for a round up, I must get back to blogging more often…

Last week I visited my gran in her nursing home.   Having been so busy this year with graduating and various other things going on,  I felt really bad that I hadn’t been to see her in a long time.  The reason she was put into a nursing home was because she can’t quite take care of herself and she needs 24 hour care now.

I can’t help but think, had her mind been kept more active and she had interacted with more people then her rapid deterioration over the last year or so wouldn’t have happened and I wouldn’t have had to listen to my gran say that ‘the tv has been her best friend for the last 3 years’.  That’s extremely hard to swallow when you love someone so much.

And so, I felt the need to post this, after being flagged up by dominic campbell on twitter, a document from Activeage about lonliness, when I read the line that

‘older people are using their televisions with 48% saying the television is their main form of company.’

On looking further into activeage who I believe are based in Aberdeen, I discovered a recent report entitled, ‘The employability of older people‘, current issues and debate.

What caught me in the report were a couple of bulletpoints which summed up their discussion.

• Policy makers need to understand the issues better and spread that to employers

• There are some examples pioneered by a few employers encouraging ‘older workers’ to stay on but these were said to be too infrequent

• We need to better understand what contributes to attitudes much more, by engaging with workers

• We don’t really know what people want – there is no overview of the population

• We don’t know enough about retirement and transitions to retirement

• The demographic debate is still immature

Part of me, in the way I have been trained and my experience, thinks, hang on a minute, isn’t there a few things I could be of help with, being a designer and all that listens to people?  When I visited my gran, I couldn’t help but pull out my phone and snap a couple of poorly designed experience factors and products.  The worst being a huge push button emergency alarm with a blue, yellow and red button, not quite sure my gran can get her hands round it, it sits next to her bed and not next to her seat and I couldn’t work out what each colour was, never mind my gran who’s vision isn’t what it used to be.

I’m not sure if an overview of the population is going to work.  I’ve just read a document by David Blunkett which links to my ongoing work with mypolice, and states that we cannot come up with solutions that suit every situation, it has to be a community level up approach in terms of understanding, creation and implementation.  One shoe never fits all, although it would be interesting to come up with some form of solution which could be tailored to varying situations.

This post comes on the back of watching panorama’s ‘Gimme Shelter’ on Monday night which followed the change in policy of wardens on sheltered housing arrangements.  Wardens now would be visiting more than 150 people a day, if you calculate that on an average day of 8 hours, that works out as 3.2 minutes per person, not including moving between each resident.

In the last couple of years, I have seen a large amount of different designers tackling these problems, with briefs coming from consultancies, councils, leading technology providers with activeage linking up a number of educational institutions and service providers.  There has been some great work and interesting services and products created to aid our current ageing population ‘problem’, too many to list here, but I reckon a google search will flag them up.

Going back to the bullet points, ‘policy makers need to understand the issues better’, I think this sums up our current problem.  Our policy makers and government organisations that create the services our public receive need to understand what the problems are for themselves.  I once read and I wish I could remember where, that designers must have experienced the research stage first hand in some format to fully understand the problem and make design decisions.

I don’t want to ramble, but I have.  I’m hoping this year to work on a project which will be using new technologies to improve health-care to elderly residents in rural locations.  For me, the technology must become transparent.  We could give every elderly resident a laptop and skype but if you’d listened to the radio 4 programme on the public, most notably the elderly generation who are not digitally engaged (removed now) you’d realise when you hear,

“Why should I press the start button to turn this thing off”

You’d realise how tough it is, especially in attitude towards learning new technology, almost defeatest.  Saying that my other gran is enjoying her new blu-ray dvd player and recording dvds, if only she wouldn’t lose the remote down the side of her chair all the time.

Activeage flagged up this, finerday , which interestingly was designed by a care home worker.  It is an easy to use online social network with big colourful buttons, large text and simple functions.  I think it is commendable, and a great tool for perhaps 60 year olds but I still feel we’re missing a huge gap.  I’d love to of been able to give this and a laptop to my grans, but I really don’t think they’re going to be comfortable logging onto a computer.

I’d like to see more work on the tv as a way of accessing services, so if anyone has got any material, post it here.  Or simply share your thoughts on this current topic.