Transforming public services

Putting people first

Policy-makers often complain that it is hard to mobilise people around the public services and sustainability agenda. And they’re right: telling people what to do seldom works. A more promising approach is to start with existing grassroots activity and then to create frameworks that enable these actions to develop. This was the approach that we took with Designs of the time (Dott 07) in north-east England. A national initiative of the Design Council, with the regional development agency One NorthEast.

Dott 07 was the first in a 10- year programme to improve people’s lives using design. Dott 07 involved a programme of community innovation projects that focused on public and community services, events and exhibitions.

Dott put people at the centre of the redesign of public services and the role of the designer was to facilitate collaborative activity among larger groups of people – not to dream up blue-sky solutions from scratch.

How we designed together

Dott developed a methodology for co- designing solutions:

In Phase 1, which we called the “Diagnose” phase, our team scopes the project and diagnoses the nature of the opportunity. This involves designers talking to and working with communities to understand a global issue in its local setting and to ensure that they understand the problem not the symptoms. Here, designers use research techniques such as interviewing and observing people.

Phase 2 of Dott 07, “Co-discover”, the research goes deeper than in Diagnose. Designers develop bespoke methods and tools (including anthropological and ethnographical techniques) appropriate to the project to ensure a high level of participation and ensure understanding of community drivers and the local relationship to the specific issue.

In phase 3, “Co-Design”, people are brought together to design and test new ideas. Ideas are informed by the insights gained in the first two stages and are locally focused ensuring a high level of community ownership and involvement.

In phase 4, “Co-develop”, the ideas and solutions are prototyped and communicated by the designers to the community through visualising the solutionor developing mock-ups. This ensures that the community understands what is being suggested and enables the designers to gain a sense of how people might respond to, understand and use aspects of the new service.

Phase 5, the solutions are delivered. As the new solutions are created and tested by the users, the services created are sustainable and value for money.

Getting the community moving

In a Dott 07 community innovation project called “Move Me”, we commissioned a design firm to create a car-share scheme for Scremerston First School, located three miles from Berwick in Northumberland. This was a small school, but it functioned as a busy transport hub for 42 children, 34 families and 10 members of staff including full and part-time teachers, cleaning, catering and janitorial staff.

In policy terms, the project looked at transport intensity, rural access and resource efficiency. In Dott terms, Move Me involved the exploration of practical ways to improve daily life for one community, in one place, and the co-design of a reliable and sustainable transport service. The aim was to improve access without adding more cars or building new roads. The design team investigated the community’s varied transport needs, including unmet ones, and proposed how these needs could be better served by combining existing services in smarter ways, rather than develop new high-tech solutions. It seemed that many difficulties were encountered by parents, teachers and children when they tried to get from A to B.

To further understand the challenges encountered by the community, the designers went back to the school carrying “travel activity packs” that contained paper and pencils. These packs were handed out to pupils who were asked to perform short diary-making tasks with the help of their parents on such topics as, “Me and my family – tell us about you and who you live with”. A number of common challenges were identified: infrequency of buses; the inflexibility of the current school bus run; the expense of taxis; confusing public transport timetables, as well as a huge variety of individual hassles that pupils pore over the details at Scremerston First School constrained access to SureStart classes, dental/medical appointments, shops and the library in the nearby town of Berwick. This one small school, it emerged, was the hub of an extremely complex mobility ecology. How could we possibly design a service to meet all these different needs?

The answer was, we couldn’t – or at least, not in the sense that one might design a chair. It would have made no sense for the designers to pore over survey results in a studio and try to design the perfect service, and then take it back to the school. On the contrary, the designers carried on working with the school community to develop ideas and prioritise which solutions they would work on further.

Working together means co-creation

Two actions resulted from this phase of Move Me. Firstly, the team worked with a local bus provider, Arriva, to improve access to existing bus services by re-designing the timetable that was displayed on a pole outside the school gate.

Secondly, the school community also committed to set up a car-sharing scheme. At this point the etiquette of lift-sharing emerged as an important social issue. Parents did not like the idea of their children taking lifts to school with strangers. In Scremerston this was not a problem as the pre- existing social ‘glue’ – parents already knowing each other well – answered questions about safety and security that would have been hard or impractical to answer using more formal approaches. This led the designers to question how to scale-up a trust-based service. The Move Me team kept things personal. They presented the scheme to community leaders in adjacent projects such as SureStart, and several community centres in Berwick, to grow the service.

Special effects

The value created in the project did not reside in its special effects: it resided in the fact that a community had been helped to become co-producers of a resource-efficient public service based on the use of assets that for the most part were pre-existing. Design created value in Dott 07 projects by discovering and enabling assets that already existed – for the most part in the form of people, their capabilities, and their connections.

We learned in Dott 07 that connecting people to new people, and helping them learn from each other’s other experience, is itself a form of innovation.

With its high public profile and over 223,000 participants, Dott 07 demonstrated in practice that design can be an agency of transformational change. A strong aspect of the Dott legacy is that many projects are carrying on into a new phase after Dott itself has left.

John Thackara is director of Doors of Perception
28SOLACEfoundationNovember 2008
Reproduced with thanks from Design Council.

This article featured in the SOLACE Foundation publication 'Innovation by design in public services'.
http://www.solace.org.uk/asp/news_sfi.asp