By Richard Haigh, CEO The Key
A few years ago I was invited to one of the offices of a national charity. They had just made a chunky investment into launching a large digital and design team. They were located with other staff working in more conventional ‘head office’ type roles.
They were two tribes co-habiting. I mean, I think they got along, but the digital and design staff were on Apple Macs with a casual dress, visible tattoo, look at us we’re workshopping, check out all the stuff we put up on the walls type of energy. Stand up meetings, sprints and possibly illegal amounts of post it notes. Lots of talk of discovery, alpha’s, and prototypes. The head office staff were generally suited and booted, and resided on the other side of room in long rows of almost call centre like PC fixed work stations. Visually it was pretty stark.
The charity in question was taking a punt that the school of thought that service design equals better services equals greater impact had merit. I was both fascinated and challenged. “Oi, stop solution-ising” was the mantra of the designers. “Stop thinking you know what the answers are, finding a funder, and then ploughing ahead before you’ve really figured out what the problem is.”
All of this against that backdrop of growing unease charities had that they needed to up their digital game or accept the status of analogue also rans.
Maybe. But, statement of the obvious, taking a service design approach to services with people facing challenges isn’t straightforward. It felt like there was a big disconnect between the theory and applying it to reality. Interesting, thought provoking, but hard to apply. For example, designers want to test and iterate, test and iterate. Keep changing it up until it works. And it sounds great – but how do you do that if you’re working with young people where good stuff flows from relationships and trust building might take months?
The first person who put it together in a way that made sense to me was Hilary Cottam in her book Radical Help. I was fascinated by this book at the time, I read it in on a recommendation not long after it came out maybe four years ago.
Go have a read if you haven’t already. There’s some bigger picture welfare reform stuff – but there are also some practical case studies about applying design-based thinking to work and issues that resonate. And it’s based on values of building around human relationships and four key capabilities (work/health/community/relationships). That doesn’t really do it justice but ok where do I sign, now we’re talking.
But, newsflash – trying to do things differently is difficult. Even getting the time to get off the hamster wheel of the dailies to try and even think is difficult. Maybe not for the exceptionals – but for a lot of us it just is.
Anyway. I was speaking to Carol from VONNE recently – the book came up and we worked out we had a mutual appreciation of it. And Carol mentioned someone else we both work with who likes it as well. We got to wondering if there might be a couple of others out there too…..
So I said I’d write a short blog to see if anyone fancied starting a conversation about a service design and services in the North East. We have got some heavyweight thinkers in the North East, I know that, so if the conversation is happening already and I’m sleeping on it, any chance of an invite?
But if it isn’t, is anyone up for starting a conversation? No money attached, no agenda, heck not even any expertise – not yet anyway. But if you’ve read any of the Hilary Cottam stuff, and being in a room and having a natter feels like it might create a space for you to let your ‘creative doing things differently stuff’ out the cage for a minute, please let us know and we’ll invite you along?
Caveat: Will this be another talking shop that amounts to absolutely nothing? Probably, but you never know. Go on, chuck your hat in the ring. If you’d like to join in the chat, please drop an email to carol.botten@vonne.org.uk. Carol has promised that once we have a handful of names, we’ll get a room with tea and biscuits and see where the conversation takes us.