A Demos Open Secrets Event

Last Thursday the first event in Demos' Open Secrets Series about innovation in the public sector was held in a Southwark school. About 50 senior managers from public sector organisations (mainly schools and health services) came together to discuss how to engage users in the design of their services.

From Chocolate Floors ...

John Thackara, 'first perceptron' of Doors of Perception introduced the session by referring to a conversation he had had with a colleague who'd just held a rather lengthy series of consultation in building a new school. The most memorable 'user quote' from this process was: 'please can you make the floors out of chocolate.' The overall morale: consultation in the traditional sense (which Thackara termed 'the tick box method of consultation) is often not useful and doesn't affect the design process at all.

So the question is: how then, can we involve users in ways that can surface or create the real value that we know they can bring to a project? What information would we like to get from users - what is the value that is missing? And: what are the main difficulties in getting the knowledge out of users?

In other words: we know the value is there but not always reachable. One of the main obstacles is that a vision of how things could be is all too often proposed in too abstract a manner. The vision is the actual powerful tool - so we have to come up with better tools to create the vision together.

...To Co-Design, Co-Production and Co-Creation

Martin Bontoft, user researcher and design strategist at IDEO who is also involved in the Design Council's health services co-creation projects, explained the concept of 'co-creation'.

He started by pointing out that user experience design (UXD) is fine but that we have to ask ourselves what comes next. UXD is not going to deal with the large scale system changes that'll come in health and schools. Large scale systems that include the people who are actively engaged in the production of these services. Typical UXD methods such as sympathetic design and careful observation are good but they still produce 'postal designs'. These are fine when there is a one-to-one relationship with a product but it becomes very difficult when there are a large number of people that actively produce a service.

This is the case for 'co-design' where designers aim to actively engage as many stakeholders as possible in the discovery of what it actually is that they're going to design. Co-production is the next step where you take the raw designs and explore the consequences of these designs - involving users in the scale of change that they will have to navigate. Co-creation is then something that emerges when you have gone through the first two stages and when people start to run with it for themselves. (As Thackara said earlier: 'if you can communicate the vision and if people know the general direction then leaders don't have to tell them how to get there').

Traditional design has focused on products not people. With services, there are no products, there is only a context of use - it's about creating collaboration.

After the initial talks we broke out into groups to discuss the questions raised, mainly the "how can we do it?". Some suggestions that came out of these discussions included:

• develop better tools to communicate a vision
• train users to represent themselves more effectively (peer tutoring)
• open space technology
• user quote cards (take real user quotes, capture them individually on cards and then discuss - with users - for each how you could design for this particular issue)

The next event in this excellent series is on October 10: Scaling Up Innovation.

I regret I didn't bring my camera since the whole session was captured visually on a large wall space. Maybe somebody else has taken any photos and can post a link? (PS: thanks to Kirsten from Demos who provided me with the photo above.)