Dott Cornwall's projects can be seen as embodying the new approaches that David Cameron and Nick Clegg have called for in order to help the public sector 'deliver more for less'.

Three key themes emerged from the day:

Policy
How does what Dott Cornwall is doing on the ground connect to wider national policy initiatives such ideas around the 'Big Society'?

Practice
What are designers doing as part of Dott, and how are they working with other disciplines?

Problem solving
What are the challenges of working in new ways, and how are the project teams learning from these challenges?

What's the connection between Dott and the Big Society?

Since all the project teams last met there had been a change of government. In this context, Andrea Siodmok outlined some of the ways in which Dott Cornwall is relevant and responsive to the policies of the new coalition government, and the ways that it is demonstrating the role innovation can play in meeting the UK's social and economic challenges.

Much of the Design Council's work, Andrea explained, can be seen as 'policy made real': its projects are often practical demonstrations of the way in which design thinking and design practice can be used to ensure the successful implementation of innovation for businesses, the public sector and communities, producing tangible results and using methods and processes that can be replicated and scaled.

The Big Society will aim to 'give citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want.'

David Cameron

Dott Cornwall, then, can be seen as 'the Big Society made real'. David Cameron has described the  Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government's plans for 'building the Big Society' as series of initiatives which, together, will aim to 'give citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want.' To do so, he has argued, will mean drawing on 'the skills and expertise of people across the country as we respond to the social, political and economic challenges Britain faces.'

Could Dott Cornwall be one of the earliest demonstrations of the principles behind the Big Society programme? Certainly the ten projects draw on the skills and expertise of professional designers. And bringing those designers together with local users and stakeholders, to work together and follow a creative, collaborative design process, means that the projects also draw on the expertise that is inherent within communities. Andrea Siodmok likened this to being closer to acupuncture – in its ability to tap into the energy points in a community – than the traditionally more 'orthopaedic' methods for embedding change in public sector services.

It takes national issues and pilots solutions to them at a local level, involving local people not only in defining the challenges they face but also by engaging them throughout the creative process.

As such, Dott Cornwall's projects can be seen as embodying the new approaches that David Cameron and Nick Clegg have called for in order to help the public sector 'deliver more for less'. They have asked people to 'be innovative, be radical, challenge the way things are done', and this is at the heart of what international experts including Ezio Manzini and John Thackara have described as Dott Cornwall's uniqueness. More than simply the on-the-ground or local delivery of national policy, Dott Cornwall works in a way that is both top-down and bottom-up. It's informed by national policy, such as the Big Society, but it also feeds into it by demonstrating the effectiveness of particular design-led approaches. It takes national issues and pilots solutions to them at a local level, involving local people not only in defining the challenges they face but also by engaging them throughout the creative process.

This practice of involving people through all phases of the creative process means that Dott Cornwall's projects provide additional benefits, by embedding skills within individuals and community groups, and building capacity for change for the communities in which the Dott Cornwall projects are operating.

What are designers doing in Dott Cornwall?

The Summer Review event saw designers and other members of the project teams demonstrate one of the most valuable attributes of a design-led approach: coming together to share experience and learn from each other. It's notable how ready the teams were to acknowledge where the activities they had tried had been less successful, and how quick all teams were to help others build on and improve their methods and processes.

By the end of the day, the design teams had articulated and captured more than 30 practical design methods.

While these have all been developed or adapted with the teams' specific projects and communities in mind, some common approaches and shared contexts are already emerging. An initial grouping of methods might show these design tools being used in the following ways:

• Engaging communities
• Raising awareness
• Mapping and visualising
• Designing together
• Testing and refining

Engaging communities

All the Dott Cornwall projects begin with a process of diagnosis, where issues are identified, information is gathered and assumptions are tested. Key to this is gathering first-hand opinions and experiences from the people that the project is going to engage. That means talking to those who would be involved in delivering a service as well as those who would use it, trying to understand what unmet needs there are in a community, and finding out what local people really think about the issues that affect them.

But as anyone who has ever filled in a questionnaire knows, some traditional methods of finding out what people think are less effective than they could be. In fact, the From Cornwall with Love team described the limited success of a questionnaire they used early in their project – it provided the team with a useful snapshot of some of the issues but there was little value in it for the respondents many of whom, the team noted, were well-versed in answering questionnaires.

nstead, the From Cornwall with Love team used other methods to engage with local producers and consumers, finding that taping interviews at festivals, farmers' market and craft fairs was more successful – an informal approach which helped to engage with producers and makers more effectively. The New Work team also found that getting out onto the streets to talk to people was effective in helping to gather people's opinions and understand the background issues – particularly if they were aiming to reach people who had not been engaged by previous initiatives such as those run through job centres. A key insight from the Cornwall Works 50+ team was about asking the right questions: the team found that asking questions purely about 'work' meant people talked about earning money as a means to an end. Instead they asked people to write their dream job onto a chalk board and be photographed holding it. This opened up a conversation about people's aspirations and the surprisingly attainable qualities they valued about work, such as being outdoors or doing something to help others.

More than one team identified that one of the best ways to gather insights from people was to make the process fun – the From Cornwall with Love team turned questionnaires into fairground games, and the Serious Play team engaged groups of children in workshops that saw them building models and creating characters from objects they found in the woods. The Designing Communities team, who set up a 'Kids' design corner' at a Pengegon Community event, found that adults were more willing to share their opinions on the proposed community centre when they were engaged in craft activities with their children.

Many of the teams found that filming people was an extremely useful method for engaging groups and capturing their opinions. The Designing Communities team, for example, had great success filming local basketball and football teams and posting the videos on YouTube. Another approach, used by both the New Work team and the Cornwall Works 50+ team, was to engage a wider network of community reporters. This involves finding people who are already active in – and trusted by – their social and community networks, and training them in interviewing, filming and recording skills. In this way, stories and experiences from traditionally hard-to-reach groups can be fed into the project, anonymously if need be – and at the same time individuals in communities can publicise Dott Cornwall projects by word of mouth at the same time as they are developing new skills.

From Cornwall With Love's mirrored dinner.

Raising awareness

Reaching the right people is always a challenge for community projects, and because of this many of the design teams had to find efficient and cost effective ways of generating awareness of the work they are doing. For some teams, this meant using something to make the project visual and visible. The New Work team took a camper van on a tour of five town centres and supermarkets, while the Cornwall Works 50+ team put a Christmas tree in the centre of Redruth – both of these provided a focal point which drew people's attention to the projects, encouraging them to approach the teams to find out what was going on. Events can also combine awareness raising, information gathering and spectacle. The From Cornwall with Love team staged a Mirrored Dinner, served simultaneously in London and Cornwall with the participants able to see each other via video screen. This enabled two geographically separate groups to share a conversation over dinner. The team gathered useful insights from all participants, and, as a direct result of the event Forman & Field, which hosted the London end of the dinner, will now offer a 'From Cornwall With Love' hamper as part of its mail order gourmet foods business.

One shared insight from a number of teams was the value of working with established brands or existing events. Both the Designing Communities team and the From Cornwall with Love team found that taking space or running events at community parties and festivals meant they could engage people more easily, while the New Work and Cornwall Works 50+ teams have had success reaching people through a wide range of established brands and local businesses, from solicitors to a local brewery. The New Work team especially commented on how hard these business contacts can be to make but, once made, how effective they can be, enabling projects to make use of these businesses' networks and capitalise on the trust they have built up with consumers.

Designers, stakeholders and end-users at a Co-design session for the Designing Communities project.

Mapping and visualising

Some Dott Cornwall projects are similar in that they are working in a space where there are existing services and initiatives – so for a number of teams an important use of designers' visualising skills was in mapping the groups, individuals and schemes already working in the community. The New Work team, for example, constructed an Enablers Matrix which mapped existing support for people seeking new jobs, from a user's perspective, and visualised it in a form that was more accessible than a traditional spreadsheet. The Designing Communities team brought service providers together and asked them to use local maps and Post-it notes to visualise what services were available in the area for different groups, such as parents with children under five, teenagers or people with poorer heath.

More traditional design visualisations and mappings, such as storyboards and service blueprints, have also been used – teams had found that as well as helping to 'get into the nitty gritty' of service provision or event planning these were also very effective in communicating concepts from user's perspective and in helping to get buy-in and consensus from stakeholders.

School children Co-designing through the Serious play project.

Designing together

While co-design projects share a similar approach in bringing stakeholders, service providers and users together to collaborate in the design process, the specific methods they use can be as diverse as the groups they work with. Individual Dott Cornwall projects have been using a wide range of methods to enable this form of creative collaboration. The Serious Play team had children modelling their ideas for play equipment using everything from pipes and levers to buckets and broom handles in a Scrapheap Challenge, while the Designing Communities team had great success getting residents of the Pengegon estate to model their new community centre using the medium of cake.

Other methods were ways of using structures to channel inspiration. The Cornwall Works 50+ team used a deck of cards listing other industries to inspire them to think about what they could learn from other services; the Designing Communities team asked groups to illustrate how a community centre could be used differently at different times of day by filling in a diary template, and the Serious Play team encouraged children to generate new ideas for three-part play systems by making them put three elements together randomly, like a fruit machine or a game of Consequences.

Testing and refining

Many of the teams were at the stage of prototyping and testing their products and services and gathering feedback from users and providers in order to refine their concepts, and more than one team emphasised the importance of live testing. For the Cornwall Works 50+ team this meant trialling their High Street Huer concept for a week, and testing its effectiveness against a defined series of measures. The service, which trains local businesspeople - such as a cafe owner, hairdresser or chemist – to signpost people looking for work to appropriate 'back to work' services, was run for a week in order to capture feedback and evaluate and learn from any failures. The Serious Play team, who took play equipment prototypes to the Royal Cornwall Show and observed how they were used by children of different ages, made the point that some sort of physical prototype should be created as early as possible in the process, even if it bears no resemblance to how the finished project might look or work.

For all teams, gathering feedback was vital for the ongoing process of iteration and development.

What are the challenges of working in new ways, and how are the project teams learning from these challenges?

Every innovative project has its challenges and failures, and one of the key elements of Dott Cornwall is the process of sharing these and learning from them. Some points that the teams shared included:

Social media is not necessarily the answer
Facebook, Twitter and other web based media are very low cost ways of reaching large numbers of people to generate awareness and gather information, but will only work if your audience has access to the web and uses these services regularly.

Sometimes the great strategies just don't work
The New Work team felt it had hit on a great idea to reach the target audience by going out with a sandwich van service that caters to 1500 people a day. But at the time of the Summer Review, few of the audience reached this way were contacting the team, despite the team refining the wording of the material they were distributing.

Quick and dirty is often best
The Cornwall Works 50+ team shared the insight that their Armchair of Advice concept involved an object that took six weeks to build. Its original purpose was to gather data but by the time it was finished the team felt they had enough data to work with and the project had moved on. Although the armchair was useful to make the project visible, the team recommended using objects that were 'less precious' and quicker to make.

Reaching people and engaging people is not the same thing
More than one team described a tension between meeting set targets for the numbers of people their project reached and getting in-depth insights from individuals. Others mentioned the difficulty of converting interested people into active workshop participants. The Eco Design Challenge team found that some people who were willing to come to a workshop to get a free Flip video camera were less willing or able to create content with it as intended.

Raising awareness with stakeholders is a success
Some teams mentioned that initiatives which had been less successful generating user feedback – such as social media – had been successful in raising the profile of the project with stakeholders. Similarly, while the Cornwall Works 50+ team's 'Prototyping Pack', which it sent to stakeholders, was not used extensively it did help to make participants feel trusted and part of the project.

Refine ways of gathering feedback
Some methods for getting feedback, such as giving out stamped postcards, were less successful than others. The Serious Play team also found they had to refine feedback mechanisms aimed at children in order to help the children give the right level of information.

Stay focused
The From Cornwall With Love team gave a great insight into the perils of idea generation when they commented how easy it was to 'blow projects wide open again' in an team workshop intended to focus a project and define its strategy.

While these insights came from the individual project teams, Dott Cornwall as an innovative programme is of course subject to similar challenges. Some of the lessons identified by participants at the Summer Review include:

• The need to formalise a framework for interns from UCF working with Dott Cornwall, in order to clarify what is expected of both the interns and the senior producers, and perhaps make participation in Dott Cornwall as assessed element of the undergraduate degree

• The need to help stakeholders understand Dott Cornwall and its aims and methods, and ensure there are Dott champions within Cornwall Council

• An awareness of the need to provide hard evidence of the value of Dott projects in monetary terms, which has to be coupled with embedded processes for gathering this data

• Clarification of the ways in which bodies like the Cornwall Design Forum works with Dott

• The opportunity for Dott or the Design Council to turn its learnings about community engagement and public service design projects into materials for design educators.

If  the Summer Review successfully captured the breadth of activity going on within Dott Cornwall, it also showed the flexibility of the programme's process and methodology. Above all, it demonstrated a willingness to share, learn and adapt on behalf of everyone involved.