Filed under: Masters in Design Innovation, Transformation Design, service design | Tags: audi, business, cocreation, codesign, community, coproduction, enterprise, human, people, social
Getgo Probe Tools
Well what an exciting week!
Getgoglasgow, which is the design collective of the two Masters courses at the Glasgow school of art (Design Innovation and European design) won the Audi Sustain our Nation competition and £10000 for the community we worked with.
We’ve been working with an area in Maryhill Glasgow called Wyndford to develop a sustainable social enterprise for their community. The project has been tough, with some great highs, and almighty lows.
For the group, it was a challenging project. This demanded a new role of the designer away from the solo author to the co-creator. We made it really clear at the beginning of the project to work with people rather than for them.
The winning project was Green Gorillaz, a way to bring back community spirit and the community voice, using offline and online message boards, linked up by residents. We created some seed groups which will house events and see knowledge transferred across generations. It stems from the closure of their primary schools last year, and a real loss of community. They had come together to fight the decision, so we knew there were passionate local champs. We wanted to harness this and turn that energy into something positive.
But credit should go to everyone involved in the project, there were three projects developed from the same process. We held co-creation workshops with residents and stakeholders to generate ideas to take forward, but made sure at all points we were transparent and open about our process, returning to the community regularly to work with them again and develop proposals.
If design education should learn anything from this, is that building relationships takes time, and if projects like this are to be handed to students, proper training in community work, sustainable thinking and an understanding of ethics should be taught. We’ve struggled with the competition and institute deadlines. For example, after handing in the first three projects, we had to wait to see whether any had made it through to the regional finals. At this point, we decided as a collective to carry all of them on anyway, even though none might be taken forward.
Anyway, we’re down at the RSA on the 17th February to represent a ‘developed’ concept (we’re working to make it real and it starts tomorrow with a football pitch party at 10am where we’ll be feeding back to the community), and hopefully we can win another £10000 for Wyndford.
In the words of John Gray yesterday,
“bloody good for u……bunnets in the air !……mon the weegies
“
Filed under: Masters in Design Innovation, Public Sector Design, Transformation Design | Tags: master public sector getgoglasgow dublin design transformation environment sustainable future
Designing for Dublin
This project, Design for Dublin, only came to my attention yesterday through the ‘Designing for the public sector’ group on Wenovski.
Brian Gough, a member of the team says,
“Designing Dublin was a pilot project that ran in conjunction with Dublin City council. For three very intense months, a team of 17 of us worked on a project called finding the hidden potential of place.
The focus of this project was Clongriffin, an unfinished building development in Dublin north. Leading the team was Vannesa Ahuactzin, whose background includes working with Bruce Mau on the project Massive Change. Through her, we were exposed to various tools normally associated with Design Thinking.”
Engaging Individuals in a design process
It’s worth having a good look through their project blog from start to finish to see how the project progressed. The idea was to grow a culture of learning, that could help ‘ provide a new generation of entrepreneurs with the tools to design inventive solutions to the new global challenges and encourage people to understand how they can contribute purposefully to the future of their country and to the world in the 21st Century.
Their website says,
“We believe that there is no perfect answer when defining this new learning system. We have decided to begin anywhere by running the Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn pilot. Our intention is to test Design Thinking as a tool to empower learning that generates solutions through proposals, ideation, prototyping, testing and iteration.”
The Irish times wrote an interesting take on it, and it’s probably what I find most interesting about the project is that the team was made up of half council members and half citizens,
“The outcome was Designing Dublin: learning to learn , a pilot project to show how it’s possible to bring together people from different backgrounds to work together intensively for three months – an experience that would be transformational for them and “could transform this country in the next five years”
It links up with some of the work I’ve been doing with getgoglasgow. We’ve been working in a community for the last couple of months to create sustainable solutions which allow people to grow and develop ideas themselves, meaning our solutions will last long into the future. In this way, we have become the designers of tools. One of the groups work is a project called listen up (2.36 into video) which is to create a set of tools allowing residents to have a better say in how funds are spent on new developments for their area;
“This specific Wyndford project will be used to prototype tools that involve the community in the co-creation process for the old school-site regeneration, to which a possible £3 million development fund will be allocated in April 2010. Following on from Wyndford, the tools will be reviewed and made available on an online platform that facilitates collaboration in further community consultation schemes, empowering communities to have a say in how their taxes are spent.”
You can find out more about the work we’ve been doing from our blog or follow us on twitter
Filed under: Masters in Design Innovation, Public Sector Design, Transformation Design, service design | Tags: codesign servicedesign design designer participation democracy history
Co-Design: Stanley King
I’ve been wanting to blog about this for a good couple of months, a diamond find in my library at the Glasgow School of Art. The book Co-design: A process of Design Participation discusses the early work of Stanley King and the Co-design group providing an in depth and concise description to the work of community architects and the workshops they facilitated from the 1970s.
The book is so concise in it’s description it provides task by task instructions to organising, facilitating and disseminating workshops, I think this is a must read for designers who undertake design workshops. I was listening to a podcast from the Emergence 07 conference, where Oliver King of Engine was holding an open discussion about the changing role of the designer, largely focusing on the concept of designer as facilitator. Something that stood out for me was a participant’s opinion on design education;
“…facilitation is not taught in universities and not every designer is a good facilitator”
For me, design education needs to change to accomodate the changing role of the designer. Texts like this clearly demonstrate the complex nature of this type of work, covering organisation, skills, mindset, generative tools and more that is needed to successfully conduct a workshop. In context of the architects here, drawing people’s ideas in real time, there is a clear skill and process to doing this, covered in chapters like, ‘Anatomy of a Co-design drawing’.
Activity timeline (after Le Corbusier)
There is also a fantastic diagram and images from the 70s showing the co-design group using an Activity Time Line (after Le Cobusier) where the artists indicates the helix of a rising and setting sun and marks off the hours of the day and the night. The participating audience then shout out tasks they would do during the time period, which is marked onto the diagram. They then group off and choose an activity to work on with an artist, and start building ideas based around it. Reminds me alot of journey mapping, just in a 24 hour community sense sort of way.
How to organise and facilitate a co-design workshop
Why do I think this book is so important? It shows there is so much more to the co-design workshop than meets the eye, and whilst, we do only learn through practice, I think methods like this, which are so common in our current design practice should be taught in a more in depth and pragmatic way, with a focus on the mindset ideally put on for this process.
Below are two excerpts from an initial think piece I’ve been working on about design education, the changing role of the designer and the challenges this poses to design students;
Texts like Co-design[1] are comprehensive in their descriptions of how to facilitate correctly in the context of workshops, and are incredibly detailed about the way a facilitator draws people’s ideas, how to deal with overpowering participants and how to correctly note take, to name but a few considerations. These details are important and without proper training in this domain, results of a workshop can be tainted.
“The public needs a language that can give its creativity a focus and help individuals turn their intuition and knowledge into a workable idea. That language must also be able to bridge the gap between the vision of the common resident and the technical thinking and jargon of the architects”[2]
This role of facilitation is about relinquishing control, and the tools of designer, namely their ability to give ideas form through drawing or model making must be carefully considered. Designers can be incredibly influential in what they choose to make tangible, by making something real, it can sway the whole group’s opinion one way without considering other possibilities. Therefore the designer must act impartial, and drive the group through the creative process rather than own it.
[1] King S, Conley M, Latimer B and Ferrari D, Co-design: A process of design to participation
[2] McDowell LN cited from King S, Conley M, Latimer B and Ferrari D, Co-design: A process of design to participation, p45
the above was in response to this;
Introduction
“The move towards co-design, where the designer takes on the role of facilitator as well as form-giver, gives even greater weight to the significance of how user research and engagement is taught on design courses. Practising co-designers do not simply see people as research subjects, but as active participants in the design process, whose time and contributions need to be recognised and honoured. Conducting this kind of participative user research and inquiry on social issues presented students with a new set of challenges, both practical and ethical.” [1]
In the last twenty years the role of the designer has changed from solo author to co-creator. In a move away from the modernist conception of designer as individual expert, design thinkers have adopted a participatory approach, involving users directly in the development of new products/services/systems throughout the design process.
This can largely be seen in the emergence of the Service Design discipline throughout the last decade,[2] which has been highlighted and catapulted into the hands of students, business and governments worldwide by the internet’s coverage and sharing of methodologies[3].
Service design leans heavily on the principles and methods of participatory design, a practice with roots in the Scandinavian workplace and trade unions. The discipline is predominately co-creative, user-centric and adopts a holistic approach to design, including insights from, and direct engagement throughout the design process with a range of stakeholders and user groups in the development of new service offerings.
“…there are professions more harmful than industrial design – but only a few” [4]
“The time has come to review Papanek… from a new perspective, which reduces the distance between market-based and socially oriented initiatives”. [5]
Victor Papanek in 1971, suggested that designers take stock of what they’re doing, suggesting that designers who engaged with the market should spend one tenth of their time or money towards socially responsible projects. Nicola Morelli argued in 2007 that Papanek provides a ‘triple bottom line’ for considering new design proposals, merging towards a basic definition of sustainability and a new model for the design process that considers environmental, social and economic impact. (figure 1)
In recent developments, encouraged perhaps by some of these older texts asking us to take responsibility for what we design[6] and a recognition by the public sector and government in design thinking[7], several of the world’s leading design and service design consultancies have began to tackle complex social issues[8], moving away from the business and management foundations the discipline was built on. This area of work has been spearheaded by initiatives such as Dott 07[9] and Public services by design[10]. Publications like, Wouldn’t it be great if?[11], highlight design as being able to,
“…help us in the public services to be more innovative. We need to be conscious that today’s problems are just not going to be addressed by yesterday’s ideas and yesterday’s solutions” [12]
It seems a natural progression for the design community and in particular the service design discipline to move into this territory due to its user-centred nature and holistic approach to problem solving. In recent years, new branches of design thinking have stretched the field further, like transformation[13] and social design with supporting initiatives like red appearing[14]. This all comes at a particularly convenient time with a rising focus in the hyperlocal and community driven delivery of services by government and an emphasis on ‘citizen and community engagement.’[15]
“If thirty years in politics – as a local councillor, MP and cabinet minister – have taught me one thing, it is that government and public services depend on a partnership with citizens to make things work.”[16]
In light of this emerging domain and a steady influx of socially motivated projects being introduced into design courses at undergraduate level, [17] design educators must reflect on the changing role of the designer and the new landscapes they are operating in, developing new frameworks to accommodate the need for new mindsets and skills.
This initial think piece will reference throughout a recent project undertaken by the students of a new postgraduate Masters course, Design Innovation at the Glasgow School of Art. It will highlight issues that will need to be taken into consideration surrounding this type of participatory work, in particular the effect of designers engagement with people and a consideration of a new design philosophy that focuses on promoting a sustainable approach to community and participatory design work.
[1] The RSA Website, Six challenges for design education http://www.thersa.org/about-us/media/press-releases/six-challenges-for-design-education [04/01/10]
[2] The discipline has emerged in response to a global shift towards a service based economy
Vargo, S. L. and Lusch, R. F., Service-Dominant Logic: Continuing the Evolution: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 1-10
[3] Service Design Tools, Homepage, http://servicedesigntools.org [04/01/10]
[4] Papanek V, Design for the real world, p14 cited from Thackara J, In the bubble: Designing in a complex world, p7
[5] Sustain our Nation Site, Approaches and exemplars, http://www.sustainournation.org/toolkit-resources/approaches-and-exemplars/ [04/01/10] citing Nicola Morelli (2007)
[6] “The context of industrial mechanisation has changed, but 100 years later and in our times, the sociologist Richard Sennett presses for debate about the consequences of what we make” Parker S, Social Animals: tomorrow’s designers in today’s world, p 21 citing R Sennet, The Craftsman
[7] Partners can be noted in the publication by the Design Council, Public Services by design, A new route to public sector innovation, p15
[8] Burns C, Cottam H, Vanstone C, Winhall J, RED Paper 02: Transformation Design
[9] Dott 07 (Designs of the time 2007), a year of community projects, events and exhibitions based in North East England, explored what life in a sustainable region could be like – and how design could help us get there.
Cited from Design of the times website, What was Dott07, http://www.dott07.com/go/what-is-dott [04/01/10]
[10]Public Services by Design is a new programme to inspire and enable design innovation in public services. It helps public sector managers build awareness and understanding of how design can help in the process of developing and delivering better public services.
Cited from Design Council Website, Public Services by Design page, http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/Design-Council/1/What-we-do/Our-activities/Public-services-by-design/ [04/01/10]
[11] Design Council and Thackara J, Wouldn’t it be great if
[12] Birchard M (Sir), Public Services by Design, p5
[13] Burns C, Cottam H, Vanstone C, Winhall J, RED Paper 02: Transformation Design
[14] RED was set up in 2004 by the Design Council to tackle social and economic issues through design led innovation, RED website, homepage, http://www.designcouncil.info/RED/ [04/01/10]
[15] Blunkett D (MP), A People’s Police Force
[16] Blunkett D (MP), Touching the State
[17] The RSA Design Directions programme is a competition aimed at undergraduate and recent graduates from design courses around the UK cited from Campbell E, You know more than you think you do: design as resourcefulness & self reliance
Filed under: Masters in Design Innovation, Public Sector Design, Transformation Design | Tags: transformation design servicedesign thinking ramsay gordon question thinker public sector change
Ramsay as design thinker
Last night I realised the reason I don’t own a tv is the fact that I be likely to waste hours in a trance watching ‘rubbish’. I also never really have time to, but in a rare ‘evening off’ I found myself plonked in front of the tv and accidentally happening upon Gordon Ramsay’s ‘F Word’.
What caught my attention (apart from the fact I enjoy culinary topics) was some of Gordon Ramsay’s comments to restaurant owners during his visits to judge them for ‘local’ restaurant of the year. Ramsay for me was just hitting the nail on the head. He comments to staff,
“It’s not just the food, it’s the service”
Ramsay was talking about the service and the experience throughout, not just the ‘goods’, something that Pine and Gilmore discuss and separate in their book, The Experience Economy, which Jeff Howard articulately discusses here, (saving me repeating his thoughts, and a must read for service designers)
Recently inspired from a publication to search out T.S Eliot’s poem, Choruses from the Rock , the last line from this excerpt stood out for me.
When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?
Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
And so, in my mind, Ramsay was the stranger, and reflects elements of a design thinkist. He states to staff,
“I’ll be upstairs and downstairs”
This echoes the frontstage and backstage fundamentals of service design. He interacts with everyone, frontline staff (waiters), backstage staff (chefs) and the customers, gaining opinions from all sides to build a holistic picture of the restaurant, focusing on the product, the service, the experience.
The comments that really stopped me were Ramsay erratically stating what the ordering system was and trying to comprehend why it was so difficult for an order to be passed from the waiters to the chefs,
“I can tell straight away the ordering system is far too complicated”
“If he’s entering the computer, and they’re entering the order, and he makes a mistakes…then it’s already going through two people…then it’s printed out downstairs…they take the order, then it is in another waiters hand…”
In an old post Lauren Currie wrote,
“David described Jamie Oliver as a design thinkist…an opinion I completely agree with. The way he engages with people, integrates himself into their lifestyle etc. is admirable.”
And so I saw Ramsay as a bit of a design thinkist. I sadly marvelled at his almost erratic behaviour trying to understand why no one was questioning the ordering system of the restaurant or why the chefs weren’t questioning why the plates were coming back with half eaten food or sauce on the plates.
“Do the customers say anything when we clear this away. Is anyone telling the chef?…does anyone give constructive feedback to the chef downstairs. Why is this not eaten, and why is the sauce still there, surely you would want to know!”
As part of my Masters in Design Innovation I’ve been doing work in the public sector, looking at how design skills and ways of thinking can be transferred to front line staff to think about the user experience and innovate at a grassroots level. I began with quite an open mind about this being possible, and I still believe it is, Ramsay has reignited my beliefs a little. I do believe however that design is a vocational profession and I believe that the way Ramsay excelled at noticing details is because he was in environment he knows well, and is top of his game in. In addition though he was taking on the role of investigator, and this is something to take stock of. In the book Simplicity, Edward De Bono says,
“If you are too good at adjusting to the current system you may never realise the system needs changing.”
Staff learning to customer journey map
And so if we take the task of passing the skills and tools of service design to ‘non’ designers, perhaps to think of it like the role of investigator is the way forward. By giving people new skills and tools to think in the ‘customer’s’ shoes and like a designer, they will be able to see ways the front line service can be changed. This does however require a level of autonomy to be allowed to do this. I will categorically say that currently in the public sector this is very difficult and comes down to many things like the risk averse mentality and management structures.
There is hope though. And something I want to believe is discussed in Thackara’s opening to his book, In the Bubble: Designing for a complex world.
“Everyone designs,” wrote scientist Herb Simon, “who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations, into preferred ones.” For Victor Papanek, too, “design is basic to all human activities – the placing and patterning of any act towards a desired goal constitutes a design process.” Designing is what human beings do.”
I am troubled that it takes a certain type of person and mindset to think and question scenarios like a designer and soon I hope to publish a recent piece of writing on this topic which elaborates on my thoughts. In no way am I set in any way on my opinions, the next nine months or so I will be investigating this through practical work with frontline staff in the public sector with a clear goal on a sustainable implementation, so when designer’s are out the picture, staff have the relevant support and skills to use the designer’s toolkit and thinking. In essence, it will have to be a transformative process, and if you haven’t already, pick up Tim Brown’s ‘Change by Design’ I suggest you do.
“The designer is no longer defining a finished result, but is creating the conditions for, or catalysing an emergent system that will change and re-configure after they have left the scene”
Those who know me personally may remind me that I did state not everyone can be a designer but at the very least I’d like to think that others can harness aspects of design thinking to start asking questions about the services they deliver and designers can start to work on ways of sustainably changing cultures in new domains.
My mind is entirely open again. Cheers Ramsay!
I would be interested to get thoughts on the subject of ‘Everyone as designer’ and from people who have worked on similar projects to hand over design skills.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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!
“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.”
Filed under: studiounbound | Tags: studiounbound designers design graduate social networking media twitter networking
Are you a design student or graduate finding it hard to access or find your place in industry? Well, with over 185,500 design practitioners in the UK alone that’s not surprising! Not just for graduates, tomorrow night, GSA will be hosting studiounbound, and everyone is invited.
‘Founded in 2009 by University of Dundee Master of Design graduate Lauren Currie, and design writer, consultant and ‘networker extraordinaire’ Kate Andrews, the Studio Unbound is an initiative aiming to introduce students, graduates and educators to the creative power of social media.’
You can view the first studiounbound which took place at Duncan of Jordanstone art college in Dundee, February 2009 below. Studio Unbound II sees Lauren Currie and myself presenting at the Glasgow School of Art with Kate Andrews joining in via skype.
more about “The power of social networking“, posted with vodpod
As a bit of extra reading you should check out designigniteschange, which challenges students to use design thinking to explore and create solutions for pressing social issues, bringing together creative professionals, high schools, colleges, universtities, mentoring networks and more to help aid this process.
Jonathan Baldwin from Dundee also posted an interesting topic on twitter the other day asking why designers should blog or use twitter. This is something we will be discussing at studiounbound II, and also playing on one of Jonathon’s results from @Qin_Han about social media becoming a distraction.
‘”Get connected to the real world & real people, although like any social app, it can be distracting if not used properly…”
See you tomorrow, 6pm, Bourdon Lecture Theatre at the Glasgow School of Art or join us on twitter with the tag #studiounbound and follow us live!
