Dott Review

Designs of the time, Cornwall (Dott Cornwall) worked for eighteen months with local citizens, professionals, experts and designers to co-create solutions to local issues that in turn may have a national or international significance.

Through experimenting with a series of practical projects, Dott co-developed sustainable solutions to social and economic challenges.

The aim was to increase the capacity for innovation within a region by building skills, knowledge and awareness of the Dott approach. If you like, Dott  set in motion a powerful engine for development and for addressing local issues through the lens of innovation. Practically this means catalysing change by operating on three levels as follows:

1. Practice: Ten practical projects demonstrating new thinking in action.
2. Capacity: Developing local knowledge and skills and effective legacy.
3. Policy: Developing new insights that can inform national policies.

These ‘framework conditions’ were designed to maximise the potential innovative capacity of a range of different people in an area. Put simply, Designs of the time enabled local people to develop their own visions and scenarios. Our most valuable legacy is that people have developed new ideas, acquired skills and delivered bold and visionary projects.

As the world becomes more complex and prone to rapid change, dispersion of innovation to citizens, users and the public at large will be vital in enabling mixed economies to generate relevant and new opportunities and to cope with unforeseen challenges.  This makes innovation an imperative rather than an option, where new ideas will need to be tested and implemented effectively.  There are lots of compelling reasons why empowering citizens and communities to innovate makes good sense.  Set against a backdrop of escalating costs of socio-economic change, there is a growing sense that the problems of climate change, population growth, health and food security are too big to be tackled by governments alone and that they will require our collective creativity.  Firstly, dispersing the ‘capacity for innovation’ to a broader group of people is potentially empowering and efficient in developing new solutions.  Secondly, in an extension to ‘user centred’ design, participatory approaches accept that ‘end users’ are uniquely placed to judge the quality of existing services and to make informed decisions about potential improvements.  Thirdly, based on the premise of a highly educated yet underutilised creativity within the workforce, it can add value and meaning to individuals’ lives enabling them to be part of something bigger that resonates with their value systems and supports community cohesion.

We believe there are clear parallels in our work to the concept of Big Society.  Since it was created five years ago, Dott has been working nationally to develop new ways to devolve responsibilities to communities and citizens.  However, we have found to be successful we must ensure we provide citizens with power, information, knowledge and skills to solve the problems they face.  Based on experience in Dott07 and Dott Cornwall, key to the success of Big Society will reside in two factors; firstly motivating and building citizens’ confidence and secondly by providing the skills and knowledge to take action.  We believe Design can make this process of transformational change both exciting and practical. 

Indications are that this will involve two key drivers:
- Increased participation from the public in services, from top down delivery to co-creation.
- Radical innovation to generate entirely new models of service provision and commissioning.

Our process typically followed the following stages: Diagnose phase, Co-discovery, Co-design, Co-delivery and Legacy.  And whilst citizens were central to our activities, creating collaborations between local people and experts, working with world class designers has enabled communities to achieve greater degrees of professionalism in the management and outcomes of their activities.  During our work on the ground we gave significant consideration to the role and importance of leadership in the mix.  We were able to identify the qualities  in our designers which fit with the collaborative leadership models.  Key to developing local capacity to innovate has been to develop the skills of professional designers ‘on the ground’ in areas of collaboration, co-design, service development and multiple stakeholder management. 

However, the challenge of ‘democratising design’ was still polarising people at points during the project, most obviously designers. We found that a vocal core community were and still are interested in new ways of working, and another much larger group who initially were relatively uninterested, regarding the methodologies as a departure from design practice without a proven business model.  This meant that Dott had  to do more work in identifying which designers have an aptitude for this way of working and in developing new business models to support their practice. 

We sought to codify some of the characteristics of the ways we worked to help communicate the value of our projects.  This we named the ‘Dott ethos’ which was based on an action research methodology.  The following ten points emerged from working across projects and start to point to the conditions that have led to good outcomes on the ground:

1. Be a humanist: Focus your effort on what is desirable as well as what is technically possible.
2. Stay positive: Everyone is creative, and our collective creativity is greater than the sum of the parts.
3. Unite over a common quest: Find a question everyone cares about and has a passion to solve.
4. Think big: Great design can and does change the world.
5. Start small: Build ideas and solutions with people not for people.
6. Get out: Design in the real world; it is an infinite source of inspiration, opportunity and fun.
7. Splice things up: New ideas emerge at the intersections between disciplines, subject knowledge and experience.
8. Get it wrong: In the current climate it is more important to fail fast than succeed slowly.
9. Design doesn’t stop: Create platforms for participation rather than fixed solutions, as these will be more flexible to changing needs and evolve in real time.
10. Show value as well as have values: Good design doesn’t need to cost, more it needs to do more.

In this review we have chosen a few case studies that exemplify the Dott process in the areas of community cohesion, skills & employment and energy generation.  Of particular value has been the opportunity to test out collaborative processes in one of the most deprived communities in Cornwall.

Dott concluded its programme in Cornwall in March 2011, and will shortly be publishing full evaluation and conclusions from the initiative. 

Dr Andrea Siodmok
Programme Director, Dott Cornwall