Thursday 30 May, 1830-2030 

The Darryl Forde Seminar Room
Department of Anthropology
University College London
14 Taviton Street
London    WC1H 0BT

Working within the context of peace and security, Derek will share reflections on using cultural research of a place, to design solutions for a place. In contrast to responses to policy challenges that adopt best practices, Derek and colleagues suggest using a strategic design approach that moves from knowledge to situated action in the field. Their framework for evidence-based programme design on reintegration, published by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in 2012, outlines a new approach to tackle complex international security issues, that moves from the identification of evidence, to the application of evidence in the design of activities that serve strategic goals in a local context.

http://thepolicylab.org/
@Policylabtweets

If you would like to attend Social Design Talk 11 please rsvp to joe.julier@policyconnect.org.uk

The concept of doing more with less through creating new ways of configuring, accessing and moving resources, is compelling in this age of scarcity, as Jeremy Till would have it. Indeed, this can be extended across goods and services, including the provision of public services. It is rich territory for debating social design.

So much of design, design criticism and history of design studies has been focused on objects for private consumption. Collaborative consumption, as I have briefly discussed elsewhere, challenges this model and forces us to think about how value is represented. Products and services within collaborative consumption are relatively unmediated by complicated financial calculations. Their use is mediated more through social relationships more than through the abstraction of value which, according to George Simmel, is money. In turn, these social relationships, however, depend a lot on trust.

There is a tendency to bundle up collaborative consumption as a panacea to resource constraint. Closer examination shows that each field of everyday life where this might be employed throws up its distinct problems. The design of a sharing system for private car ownership strikes right at the heart the tension between private and social practices.

If you’ve just followed the link to WhipCar, you will have found out that on 12 March 2013, sadly, it ceased operating. To listen to Ben Reason of Live|Work discuss their design labours for WhipCar was therefore an extra special treat. It is rare to hear open, reflective discussion of how things don’t go right.

Ben Reason explains WhipCar

WhipCar’s key technical advance was in establishing an insurance system that gave easier coverage for peer-to-peer car rental. Anyone who has been involved in car-sharing through informal networks across households will know that this has been a huge stumbling block. Once through this hurdle, a system like WhipCar allows car owners to release further value of their vehicles, which otherwise might sit outside their homes gathering cost. For users, it provides variety, good value and a sense of engaging in non-mainstream economies.

Car as underused asset

This last issue was also a trial, as Live|Work discovered. Much hinges on the importance of social relationships in non-mainstream exchange. After all, you are renting a car off its private owner — you probably have to shake their hand and look them in the eye before you speed off into the distance. At the same time, there is an expectation from both parties of the system working in a business-like way. You expect someone to be available to hand over keys. You hope that the car you have rented will be clean. It seemed that no amount of putting emphasis on people through the WhipCar website (by, for example, including featured participants’ photos and profiles) could make up for anxieties over levels of service. The service design challenge is very much on the before and after of car use, rather than on the cars themselves.

By contrast, Ben Reason also shared his experiences of designing for StreetCar before it became ZipCar. Here, these challenges are partially circumvented. You belong to a club, but you don’t have to worry too much about other members.

WhipCar bows out

The unfortunate demise of WhipCar contrasts obliquely with the global success of AirBnB. This service allows peer-to-peer room, apartment or house rental; but this service even extends to lighthouses, tepees and igloos. I think the clear advantage that AirBnB has is that it is built on a centuries-old tradition of renting private rooms to travellers. Equally it rides on travel and adventure (as does CouchSurfing) rather than the mundanities of getting from A to B. Travel and tourism carries an expectation of social interaction with strangers. Driving a car… less so.

If the tasks for the social designer seem ever daunting, then perhaps these were reinforced by Iain Borden‘s response. In it, he focused on the beguilingly simple question:  ‘Why do people like to drive?’

A brief, bullet-point list of some of Iain Borden’s ideas shows why private car ownership is so desirable.

• driving is often presented as a democratic right and therefore a way of exercising this;
• a car provides a sealed, social space (e.g. a chance to talk to your kids without interruption);
• a car provides a media space (radios, CD players, video games in the back etc.);
• driving puts you on the edge of transgression (e.g. how far over the speed limit can you go without getting a ticket);
• driving is also about anticipation (the car in front, arrival, your next car) — an analogy of being in the modern world;
• driving is cinematic (you pretend you’re in The Italian Job, looking through the windscreen is like cinematic viewing).

This is a powerful set of experiences. The list also highlights why designing a car club has probably got to extend to re-designing the entire experience of automobile use in order to provide persuasive alternatives to private ownership. This is particularly so if driving itself is taken to be an expression of modernity. But it doesn’t have to be. It can possibly be reframed as something else…

It seems that in the meantime, private car owners are prepared to put up with the dull parts of ownership (e.g. organizing insurance, servicing, mending) for this exhilaration of driving, if it really is exhilarating.

Driving a car, though, can also be dull (think M25). Comedian Eddie Izzard has recently observed on his Force Majeure tour, that there exist two very incompatible emotions, these being boredom and fear. Driving often engages both of these. Meanwhile, WhipCar tried to make things either side of driving more interesting, or, at least, more convenient while making car ownership more environmentally sustainable.

The approaches taken by Iain Borden and Ben Reason perhaps expose the commonalities and differences between their professional interests of, respectively, cultural studies and service design in car culture. They both start with the routine and ordinary. Cultural studies then looks for the more spectacular aspects that exist as experience within these. Service design attempts to create something richer and distinct out of them.

This leads to the very final words of the evening’s discussion. Speaking from the audience, and referring back to a debate I chaired that had taken place earlier in the week at the V&A, and on which he’d been a panelist, Adam Thorpe asked:  ‘Is service design done for a public, or should it be actively producing publics?’

This is the über question of design in general, these days I think. Do we find ways of refashioning what is already there? Or do we look to design to produce new practices and socio-material relationships?

It’s not about either/or, though. A crucial question in this and for social design in general is that of scale. WhipCar is also an upscaling and formalisation of informal systems that already exist. Groups of households sometimes share or lend cars. As a facility, WhipCar  streamlined this. As a business, WhipCar had to extend its reach to cover its margins.

Equally, perhaps social design can also engage in downscaling by, for instance, looking at ways by which collaborative consumption systems that don’t necessarily work on a large scale can be relocalised. Just as reuse can sometimes be designed into products, so it could be designed into services.

Guy Julier, 9 May 2013

Mary Rose Cook

Mary is founder and co-director of Uscreates, a social innovation agency whose work often involves engaging and working with ‘hard to reach’ communities. Through co-design workshops with such communities and other stakeholders, Uscreates devise design interventions which will improve and or generate radically different forms of services in the public sector.

In describing the ethical considerations and dilemmas which this user insight work prompted, it was clear that whether activities are categorised as either ‘social research’, or ‘design’, makes a difference in determining ethical responsibility.

Mary described how after working on a project in Bristol looking at teenage pregnancy, and conducting a lot of work in the field with young mums, the Uscreates team really felt they needed more guidance regarding their ethical responsibilities. However, when they looked for advice, the guidance they were given was that if their work involved making some kind of direct intervention, at any point, it was not classified as research and therefore did not require ethical sign off – only the adoption of broad brush ethical principles.

Interestingly, the guidance Uscreates received mirrors the key debates on ethics in the social sciences, where making a positive impact on participants is often the anchoring point the discussion, and the key issue assessing what constitutes ‘good ethical practice’. Thinking about ethics in the context of social design therefore raises the interesting dilemma; what does ethical practice mean when having a positive impact on participants is a given from the outset?

Reflecting on Mary’s talk, it seems that closing down the debate about whether to intervene early on fosters an approach which is much more attentive to the everyday practicalities of ethics, and also prompts a more critical assessment of the stated benefits of a (social) design brief.

Addressing the everyday practicalities, Mary outlined several ethical hotspots which Uscreates encountered. These included;

• The ethical responsibility to the research participant/informant/user and the need to dedicate time and space to thinking about how the research might affect participants, and what steps need to be taken to manage this impact.
• The need to extend considerations about well-being to researchers as well. What were the implications for those conducting the research, what needed to be done to ensure they were kept safe and provided with the support needed to deal with emotionally difficult issues? This seemed to be particularly important in a commercial environments where researchers are less able to manage the terms of research interactions and process themselves.
• The importance of constructing an exit plan which fits with both the design brief, contract, and the completion of the project. Working on a Chlamydia awareness campaign Uscreates found that, as the result of significant structural changes in the organisation which commissioned the work, the volunteers who had co-designed the process were left without the support needed to continue the project. Uscreates felt that, given the time and effort the volunteers had put into to project, they could not simply stop working on it because the contract had ended, and consequently had to continue running the project until they could find someone within the new structure who would agree to take it on.

In addition to these specific ethical hotspots Mary also raised some broader questions about ethics in a social design context. Firstly she questioned whether, if co-design is truly a collaborative process, we should consider paying those volunteers who participate in co-design workshops. Mary admitted she had no clear answer to this difficult question, other than to say giving thought to how those who put energy and time into the co-design process was important. It was also pointed out that, although perhaps volunteers should be paid, or rewarded in some way, this can jar with the client demands which are often underpinned by the government discourse on the big society and volunteerism.

Mary also emphasised that even though Uscreates were dedicating time to thinking about ethics they weren’t looking for strict guidelines, or procedure, as offered by organisations like the BSA (British Sociological Association) or AAA (American Anthropological Association). They felt the kind of tick box mentality these guidelines can engender might restrict innovation in the research process, and distract from the important issues – these concerns were echoed by Adam Drazin later on.

In drawing her talk to a close Mary described how the process of talking about ethics has led Uscreates to respond to the briefs they receive differently. Now briefs were placed under more scrutiny, and refined in negotiation with the client to be more realistic and Uscreates asked themselves where the felt comfortable spending public money more frequently too.

Adam Drazin

Adam started by emphasising that ethics needs to be viewed as a process which is both reflexive and reactive, as something which emerges and is situated in the relationships between people, and with materials. As such, we might call all ethics ethics in practice.

Adam then highlighted that we can see ethics as something which is present in the means and the ends. Ethics can be focused on the delivery of an ethical outcome or ends, either in a service, product or the facilitation of certain behaviours, and it can also be embedded in the means, the research or generative process itself.

Like Mary, Adam also pointed out that ethical consideration needs to be given, not only to the relationship between ethnographer and informant, or designer and user, but also to the relationship between collaborators on a project.

Building on the issue of collaboration Adam highlighted how differently design and social sciences research approach the issue of ethics. Adam noted that in books on social research you will find an individual chapter dedicated to the question of ethics, it is a clearly named issue, and a clearly defined object of academic interrogation. In contrast, within books on design, ethics manifests itself in the concerns about the values that design, and design methods, should embody. This difference could be summarised as one between a distanced, intellectualised approach and a practice imbued with ethics so closely you could miss their presence altogether.

As an explicit object of anthropological work, the encounter with an ethical dilemma therefore also becomes key to proving your ability as a researcher; how you negotiate an ethical dilemma is a way of demonstrating your sensitivity to the values of your informants, the quality of your engagement and your sense of responsibility. As Adam put it, it is a “badge of honour”.

Building on this Adam argued that part of developing meaningful research relationships – an ethical means – might also involve a situated negotiation with important ethical principles, most notably informed consent. What should you do if presenting yourself overtly as a researcher in the first interaction causes damage to the engagement, and how can you resolve this whilst still following the principle of informed consent? Furthermore how do we define informed consent? As anthropologists and other social scientists develop long term engagements with people’s lives the boundaries between what should and shouldn’t be shared become more blurred, and the expectations of the informant may change.

Adam argued that the difficulty anthropology has in managing the material lives of its informants is also important to consider. If the material interaction is the area where cues for improved interaction, or particular issues are addressed by proxy, how should it be accounted for in ethics?

Alongside these issues Adam emphasised the potential of collaboration as a way to expand and enrich the ethical debate and in turn improve practice. Adam raised the possibility of the social researcher or anthropologist acting as a critic and analyst within a multidisciplinary team. In this arrangement researchers can recognise they are not best placed to intervene but can work in a collaborative team with people who can (designers), and then take responsibility for drawing attention to instances where interventions might ‘violate systems of value’ of user-informants. Equally, designers can hold ethnographers to account, interrogating the kinds of materials they produce, questioning whether publishing a policy report or in an academic journal is the most ethical course of action, once fieldwork has been completed.

Speaker
Ben Reason, Director, LiveWork

Respondent
Prof. Iain Borden, The Bartlett UCL

Venue
Lecture Theatre, E003
Central St Martins College of Art & Design
1 Granary Square, London, N1C 4AA

About the talk
Ben Reason from service design agency LiveWork will be discussing the design aspects of collaborative consumption from the point of view of the various car-sharing projects he has worked on (Street Car, VW Quicar, and the unfortunately now closed WhipCar). Clearly there are interesting behaviour change challenges embedded in making these new business models work, as well as questions about the sustainability of collaborative consumption business models. The talk will reflect on the role of design in encouraging new forms of interaction and consumption.

Ben Reason Biography.
Iain Borden Biography.

If you would like to attend talk 10
Please rsvp to joe.julier@policyconnect.org.uk / 0207 202 8588

It was not without irony that Lynne Maher was addressing us one week into her (early) retirement from the role of Director for Innovation and Design at the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. Yet another shake up of NHS organizational structures has meant that it has lost one of its leading modernizers just when you’d think she was needed most. Lynne Maher has spent 35 years in the NHS, having trained as a nurse aged 17; so she knows this complex, fascinating but also, at times, frustrating organisation inside out. Undoubtedly she will not be short of offers from other countries for her expertise. But a key issue for now is preserving and disseminating the learnings from her labours.

During the seven years that Lynne Maher has been employing innovation methods in reviewing and reworking various corners of NHS delivery, service design thinking has become a key element of her approach. In particular, her work has focused on changing the episodic experience of care to one of flow. Time and time again in her talk, Lynne showed how the disconnection between various actors and sectors within the NHS was resulting in wasteful practices. Solutions are often disarmingly simple. Stroke patients need toilet rolls on both sides of the cubicle (with one side of your body paralysed, you run the risk of falling off the toilet as you reach across). Hospital porters need quick and easy access to wheelchairs (otherwise they waste much time looking for them). In all of the examples given there are material interventions which establish connections between previously separated domains within healthcare.

At the heart of work carried out by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement is experience-based design. Healthcare design has tended to focus on performance, which incorporates evidence-based decision making on utility (how well does something carry out its task) and engineering which involves how reliable something is. (Within performance focused design, I think that the work of Professor Roger Ulrich, who was a senior advisor to the NHS in 2005-6, is particularly noteworthy.) The third domain of design that has, until recent years, received less attention is that of the aesthetics of experience. How does it ‘feel’ to engage with a healthcare service? While putting a toilet roll on both sides of the cubicle addresses a very practical need of stroke patients, this is also a ‘physical, sensual, cognitive, emotional, kinetic and aesthetic’ factor (Bate and Robert 2006).

For my money, this attention to aesthetics in its broadest sense isn’t fluffy. It isn’t just about making hospitals pretty. It is about placing greater emphasis on the material and human encounters of the setting. In this, design is not regarded just as form-giving to discreet elements; rather, the ‘fit’ of elements and the narrative of the visit or stay has to be orchestrated. Lynne Maher explained how she asked the question ‘what are the analogies in customer services to draw from’. All use service design, consciously or not, was the answer. And in focusing on the user experience, she discerned that patients wanted to talk about the emotional journey that is undertaken through healthcare. Q.E.D., paying attention to this journey and shaping it to be efficient and experientially sound is paramount.

In providing an expert response, Yashu Reddy of Healthbox, asked the important question of how you engender the levels of innovation in the NHS that one finds among SMEs. Several similar questions tumbled out of the plenary discussion. How do you disseminate innovations? What is the opportunity for building capability in the NHS around these issues? How do you transfer thinking? And so on.

One might focus on patient journey and experience of the service. But innovations in themselves have to be integrated across the service providers. There has to be shared and agreed ownership of potential changes in procedures and settings. This is why, as Lynne explained, it is productive to involve all levels of NHS employees in the design process, from management through to frontline deliverers.

Much of the challenge is, however, in giving permission for change. It seems to me that actors are often involved in a stand-off with noone willing to concede to what they really want. The culture of the NHS is, for good reasons, risk-averse. This is why planned risk where the learnings are monitored and reviewed can be opened out, Lynne argued.

Anyone who has had any dealings with the NHS find it both a comforting and frustrating experience. The comfort has invariably been in the dedication, care, attention and concern of its employees. The frustration has sometimes been in the waiting, the repetition or the miscommunications. (My personal aggravation was, once, while going through a pre-operation set of examinations, I was asked exactly the same questions by three different hospital staff through the afternoon. Eventually on the third go I pointed out to the junior doctor that all the answers to the questions he was putting to me were already recorded in the notes that had been handed on to him. (He couldn’t read the handwriting, though.) The comfort was that the surgeon and staff were dedicated and brilliant.) These can often be designed out as Lynne Maher’s talk amply demonstrated.

Ultimately, though, — and I’m going off-discussion here – I personally think that if we are to have a sparkling healthcare system that is beautiful, compelling and high functioning in every way, we need it to be reflexive. In this, I mean that its machinations and structures have to be readable and understandable. It has to know itself, be self-critical and analytical of how its procedures and settings — and their design — function. Design itself should be reflexive, otherwise, confusion or bedazzlement reign. Subsequently, both experts and users can contribute to it and feel ownership of it. The NHS is, after all, ours.

Location: The Darryl Forde Seminar Room, Department of Anthropology, 14 Taviton Street, UCL

Speakers: Dr Adam Drazin, Co-ordinator MA Culture, Materials & Design, Dept of Anthropology, UCL, Mary Rose Cook, Co-founder and managing director, Uscreates

This session will focus on practical ethics in the context of research and design in relation to public/collective/social issues. As the series up until now has shown, there are lots of designers, managers and entrepreneurs doing research and engaging users and stakeholders in participatory processes, but with sometimes limited consideration of ethical issues. Adam and Mary will share perspectives from their work on ways of thinking about these issues, and highlight some projects which bring them to life.

Adam Drazin biography

Mary Rose Cook biography

If you would like to attend SDT 9 please rsvp to joe.julier@policyconnect.org.uk/ 0207 202 8586

Lynne Maher discusses her experience developing the EBD approach at the NHS Institute for Innovation and spreading its practice more widely within the NHS. Lynne will also consider the limits and possibilities of design-based approaches within healthcare improvement and innovation.

If you would like to attend SDT 8 please rsvp to joe.julier@policyconnect.org.uk/ 0207 202 8588

He began by introducing the idea that consumption is becoming an increasingly important sphere for engaging in political and ethical issues. With some large corporations holding greater economic and cultural influence than many countries and state institutions, and engagement in the democratic process declining, consumerism and brands need to be taken more seriously as a tool for social good. Add to this the increasing environmental pressures of rapidly growing demand in emerging economies and climate change, and it is clear there is a real need for a step change in the relationship between consumers and corporations.

What role should the creative industries play in this process?

Steven argued that design has an important role, not only because it was partly responsible for generating current unsustainable consumption patterns in the first place, but also because it occupies a powerful space as the conduit between consumers and corporations.

Steven also highlighted that the pressure for design agencies to engage in more sustainable practices was coming from below; in the changing priorities of design graduates – where there is increasing demand for more meaningful socially engaged work, and in the growing awareness of ethical issues amongst consumers.

However, rather than it simply being a moral case Steven argued that, in the current climate, a sustainable approach is fast becoming the best business case too. Designers can make this commercial case by producing more sustainable and efficient products and services and highlighting the value of these in protecting companies against volatile raw material prices. If we recognise that citizens now look towards brands for leadership, it is also clear that the creative industries, through their work in advertising and branding, can take the lead by pushing companies and public opinion towards collaborative sustainable solutions.

How can creatives put this perspective in practice and what can be done to lessen negative impacts of standard commercial briefs?

To close, and in response to this question, Steven offered five key principles for a socially responsible approach to design, these were;

• An ethical foundation which respects people and their rights – being human centred
• Embracing complexity – understanding people in their context and aligning our work with their value sets
• Transcending disciplines – making a greater impact by moving design higher up the supply chain and developing the insight and business acumen needed to do this
• Going lightly – being more environmentally sensitive in the specification of materials but also in how we make design and creative interventions further up decision making chain
• Promote humanity – acknowledging the role of advertising in skewing societal values and being attentive to this dilemma when engaged in this work

Response

Following Steven’s thought provoking introduction to the Collaborative Change project we heard several challenging questions, first from Charles Leadbeater as respondent, and then from the floor.

These included;

1. What is innovation and co-production for? If we are looking to produce new forms of engagement which are more ‘ethical’ or ‘sustainable’ is there a risk that innovation is simply becoming a means of differentiation in exhausted markets. Is there a risk that the focus on innovation will lead to a baroque proliferation services, tools and products and might this, in the end, become less efficient and less impactful than standardised processes?
2. Consumption is increasingly being defined in terms of systems rather in the purchase of individual products. This means value is created through sharing and businesses develop new models where scale is essential for success (for example Facebook or Amazon). This challenges the parallel made between consumption and voting as we find ourselves tied into systems. The flip side of this change is that corporations require mass social buy in, offering the opportunity for collective social movements to emerge. On this issue it was also highlighted that new forms of consumption often emerge from social movements, such as in the case of organic foods, and thus we have to ask whether distinction between consumption as bad and social movements as good is indeed helpful or accurate.
3. Thirdly it was suggested that in order to address the idea of design for social good, and ‘the other 90%’ we might take a more global perspective, relocating the argument to account for those living in developing countries. Rather than thinking about how to make consumption a more ethical affair in the UK and other post-industrial countries, how can the creative industries attend to the extreme need still found in other places?
4. Following this Charles Leadbeater highlighted the importance of the ‘frugal innovator’. Frugal innovation involves developing solutions which are simple, shared, reusable and recyclable, but also tailored to the situated issues and barriers to development found in that specific community, whether it is in Nigeria or Colombia, Pakistan or Mexico. In these locations Charles argued brands are currently not an important aspect of the consumer market. It is not something people are prepared to pay for. This means designers, as we recognise them, have to rethink what they know. This perhaps calls for a greater sense of humility about their skills and knowledge and further reflection how they might engage in innovation at a global level.
5. In the discussion a question around the extent we could really expect large corporations to adopt an ethical approach, when this might be in direct tension with the ability to make profit, arose. Whilst it was accepted that looking to make positive change does inevitably involve engaging in the commercial environment there was some notable discomfort at this prospect. Does design have the institutional strength to divert companies towards more sustainable outcomes?

This was the central question that sparked a new approach to tackling local challenges in Cornwall. The answer: to work with the public in more creative ways.

Andrea Siodmok is Chief Designer for service design and innovation at Cornwall Council, an unusual role in the social and service design world, but one intended to help design public services with citizens’ future needs in mind. Having led a Design Council programme on developing local services and increasing social productivity in Cornwall (Dott Cornwall), Andrea joined the Council in 2011 to help embed design-led innovation in the local authority itself.

Cornwall is facing some serious challenges. Beautiful tourist filled beaches sit cheek-by-jowl with areas of isolation and deprivation. The population is ageing and there isn’t sufficient money from traditional sources to meet future needs without reform.  Some of the old traditional industries have disappeared. Environmental challenges are looming on the horizon.

Needless to say, Cornwall is not alone in facing these sorts of challenges, local authorities in many other parts of the UK are grappling with similar problems. The extreme nature of these problems requires radicalism in response, but where do you turn for radical ideas? Cornwall’s answer was to build design capacity, starting with hiring a designer. And her answer was, among other things, to open up the problems the council traditionally would manage on its own to the wider public.

Although Andrea has been working on projects across the Council – helping inject design expertise in different directorates where needed – this talk focussed on one particular project, called Shaped By Us.  Part of the ‘Creative Councils’ programme, the project aims to identify and solve public challenges by harnessing the ideas and resourcefulness of the community – public, private, and third sector, and citizens.

The team started with the councillors, asking them to identify one challenge they would like to tackle. This same question was then posed to council staff, and answers were placed on a wall of post-its – which were left in public view. The responses ranged from Cornwall-wide to local, from annoyances to problems of democracy: ‘how do we stop seagulls attacking rubbish?’, ‘how do we keep young people in local villages?’, ‘how do we stop inappropriate coastal developments?’.

The team shared these questions with local people to build ideas and potential solutions. Some were printed on posters and banners in places where people gathered: in one instance they suspended them on helium balloons in the city centre.  A project website invited further contributions, getting users to add their own challenges: what problem would you like to see solved? Teams – in many cases made up of people who had never before met – coalesced around some of the challenges posted online, and pitched for funding (from the Council and partners) at a community innovation awards ceremony: a sort of angel’s den.

This kind of shift in engagement may be seen as risky. Financially, the risk has been offset by support from Nesta and the LGA through the creative councils programme. But politically, whilst working with the public on new solutions may genuinely lead to better outcomes for all, when everyone knows money is tight it risks looking like devolution through necessity rather than mutual consent. However, in this case the project’s independent political position has helped build public trust and prevent it becoming associated with any particular ideology or vested interest. The materiality of the engagement has been crucial in this, partly for setting a different tone: this was not business as usual. The engagement with citizens was more ethnographic and ‘designerly’, steering away from traditional clipboards and questionnaires. The original wall of post-its was arranged as giant map of Cornwall. The helium balloons were bizarre and curious. Two huge white armchairs positioned outside Asda invited people to sit down and talk. A ‘talkeoke’ at the Royal Cornwall Show triggered conversations between strangers.

The approach – open and citizen-centred – intentionally sought to build bridges across the public, private and third sector, and the media response was incredibly positive. The Dott evaluation showed the public loved it too – seemingly not too disheartened by the fact that not every idea was progressed.

But so much for the engagement. What have the outcomes been? Out of hundreds of ideas that were produced, five key themes were established and developed further. And out of these, three have been helped with business plans, a team, and initial funding, including Wadebridge Renewable Energy Network, Shop by Layby and St Austell Market House. There were also those that failed to galvanise enough support – or were victims of recession – and fell by the wayside, as might be expected.  Perhaps the most interesting outcome – in terms of what other regions can take away from this project – is that the Shaped By Us website now has national ambitions. The team have secured external investment to help it become a hub for crowd-sourcing ideas across the UK. A crowd-funding function is also in the pipeline, hoping to attract investors willing to kick-start community entrepreneurs.

Social design practice in local government is relatively new for everyone: designers and policymakers. Andrea’s concluding thoughts on what design can do in that context was as follows:

• It can help the council to talk to people and engage them before coming up with a solution.
• It can get people to co-own the problem, which prepares them to be part of the solution.
• It can be risky, using prototyping early in projects to inform decisions.
• It can reduce the cost by being radically better.

Unlike (perhaps) some other design practices, social design has to be humble. It involves asking naïve questions, and helping people working together to build better ideas. And it manifests itself in very subtle ways sometimes, recognising that material touchpoints speak socially. The coat hanger that you can’t remove from the hotel room suggests you aren’t to be trusted. CCTV cameras are not typically associated with growing social capital.

To do social design well requires an intensity of knowledge and experience. It may look easy, and sometimes playful, but it is clear, for example, that decisions around modes of engagement were very finely judged – or perhaps intuited. And in order to strengthen and mainstream this working method within the council, the team have needed to understand what it displaces, and how to both integrate and develop a mainstream approach to innovation.  They call this ‘Thinking Room’- making good ideas happen. This has allowed the Council to accumulate hundreds of tools for co-design, and has helped Andrea to spread acceptance of the design method, and not least the idea that is encapsulated in ‘smart failure’. Whilst early experiments may fail, the insights gleaned from trying things out can ultimately lead to more certain success.

See Andrea’s presentation here:

http://www.slideshare.net/asiodmok/embedding-design-in-local-government-15097700