Designing London's Recovery: A mission-based approach for the post-pandemic world

A mission-based approach for the post-pandemic world

Designing London’s Recovery

A mission-based approach for the post-pandemic world

About this report

This report was produced by the Design Council. It summarises learnings developed through the Designing London’s Recovery programme, and picks out insights for audiences interested in commissioning or delivering mission-based innovation. The report also discusses how mission-based innovation can support stakeholders from diverse sectors in coming together to address complex, societal challenges, and how this type of systemc design offers an exciting opportunity for the design sector more broadly.

About the programme

The programme was delivered with LEAP funding and in Partnership with the Mayor of London and UCL’s Centre for Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health (CUSSH). Addressing four of the nine recovery missions defined by the Mayor; Building Strong Communities, Helping Londoners into Good Work, A Green New Deal and High Streets for All, the programme supported innovators from a wide range of sectors to initiate positive change and piloted a new way of collaboration for London’s public, private and third sectors.

Programme structure

The programme was delivered across two phases during which participating teams received support and coaching from Design Council Experts and Greater London Authority (GLA) Mission Leads. Following an open call, twenty innovation teams were selected to join the first phase of the programme to develop their ideas, explore systems thinking, and begin co-designing solutions with communities. Eleven teams progressed to the programme’s second phase which focused on prototyping and testing the innovation teams’ ideas with Londoners. Teams also received support on how to influence the wider system and scale successful ideas. A full list of teams can be found in Appendix 1 of this report.

Mission-based innovation and Systemic design

What is mission-based innovation?

The 21st century is characterised by complex challenges, such as the climate emergency, which call for intelligent, cross-cutting design responses. A mission is a targeted and pragmatic way of addressing those challenges. Mission-based innovation is characterised by actors from multiple sectors coming together to co-create novel solutions and push for change within a framework typically set by Government.

For Designing London’s Recovery, the programme Partners wanted to use the mission-based innovation format to address challenges that had emerged across London after the Covid-19 pandemic. The aim was to explore new ways for designers and innovators to engage with systemic challenges and shift behavioural patterns and mindsets. Framing innovation as a collective endeavour represented a move away from the less systemic, and more isolated, type of design interventions typically promoted through traditional challenge programmes.

According to Theo Blackwell, Chief Digital Officer at the Greater London Authority, approaching innovation in this way yields tangible benefits to the public sector. As he stated, “Working with experts in open innovation (such as the Design Council) enables challenges set by City Hall to be opened up to London’s innovators, and to support them to develop their ideas in a design-led, iterative way, which is often beyond the current capabilities of the public sector.”

Our approach to mission-based innovation

The programme combined some of the core principles of mission-based innovation; direction from Government, co-design between innovators, and cross-sectoral experimentation, with the Design Council’s own approach to systemic design. We developed three guiding principles for how to take a design-led approach to mission-based innovation. They were:

Develop groups of ideas, not individual designs. We wanted the programme to explore ways for multiple ideas to come into contact with each other to support open-ended forms of innovation and generate opportunities for lasting change.

Focus on collective impact, not individual designers. While the programme did support individual teams, the emphasis was on enabling designers to come together as a peer group to exchange tactics and insights, and collectively drive innovation and societal transformation.

Shift systems, not units. We wanted the programme to support scaling of innovations and behaviours to other places. However, we reframed ‘scaling’ as a way to enable multiple ideas to come into contact and take inspiration from each other, to better interrogate existing practice and enable systemic change, rather than simply increase the return on investment or the number of units sold.

These principles were embedded in the support we provided to the participating teams.

Traditional Innovation Support

Mission-led Support

Individual organisations working in competition with each other

A portfolio of ideas that can generate a change movement

Lots of ideas funnelled down to a few ideas

Focusing on your idea only

Organisations working together as a cohort or ecosystem

Thinking about how your idea can connect with others to shift the wider system

Designing London’s Recovery

A mission-based approach for the post-pandemic world

Case study: Pattern Project (Building Stronger Communities)

Pattern Project is a south London micro-factory that makes clean, urban, local manufacturing of clothing possible and cost-effective. Their project, ‘Distributed Stitches’, creates a network of neighbourhood microfactories where patterns are digital, and clothing produced after it is ordered. The factories offer customfit and customisation options, repair workshops, and clothes swaps. They are transformed into community hubs in the evenings.

Pattern Project continues to work with larger players within the fashion and textiles industry to promote their ondemand pieces and reduce the effects of fast fashion on the environment. To accelerate their growth as a business, they are currently seeking further investment.

As part of Designing London’s Recovery, we set up our micro-factory in South London, and it’s been a great opportunity to really put our technology to the test. When you put your idea in a real life situation, you really find out what needs improvement, and it’s been a great prototyping experience. We now have a clear roadmap of what we need to make and build to make this a reality.

Simon Johnson, Pattern Project Co-founder

Case study: Pupils Profit (High Streets for All)

Pupils Profit is an organisation that works to inspire children and young adults to believe in their potential as future business people by empowering them with the skills and tools needed to make positive change within ethical enterprises. The ECO Refill project engages schools to create fully circular child led refill shops; the school based shops allow the wider school community to routinely refill household items as part of their routine and enables children to actively contribute to tackling the global environmental challenge of plastic waste.

Pupils Profit continues to work with local authorities across London to expand the reach of the ECO Refill Shops, increasing environmental awareness and providing practical measures to tackle single use plastic waste in their communities.

I started Pupils Profit about a decade ago. We’d been working with schools setting up healthy ‘tuck shops’ as enterprise projects, and shortly before lockdown I realised that the model could be adapted into an eco refill shop to reduce needless plastic waste. Receiving the Designing London’s Recovery seed funding allowed the idea to be piloted in London schools, and to use design and systems thinking to establish best practice. Data from the pilot led to further funding being awarded by three London councils in order to introduce refill shops into a further 14 London schools, as well as a charitable grant to support the activity in four coastal schools.

Elizabeth Gimblet, Pupils Profit Founder

Case study: Shared Assets (Green New Deal)

Shared Assets is a ‘think and do tank’ working to create a socially just future through practical projects that build new relationships between people and land. The ‘Supporting fringe farming’ project involved the design of a support service for landowners who wish to enable the development of farms and market gardens on their land in London. It also enabled the development of a business case to demonstrate the financial value of urban farming in creating green jobs, green public spaces, and community-building through the provision of good quality, locally grown and culturally appropriate food.

The project team is aiming to engage London authorities through a series of one-to-one meetings and to promote the report and business case through the Capital Growth network and through the national Fringe Farming project. The latter is working to support peri-urban farming in Bristol, Sheffield, Cardiff and Glasgow. The partners will be seeking further funding to pilot the support service with three further London authorities.

The programme gave us an opportunity to work with some great partners to try and bring together a range of different types of expertise. The cross-disciplinary nature of the programme was very important to us. One of the things that the funding has enabled us to do is design a service for public and institutional landowners and to test that with local authority officers and the people who might be the users of that service. The service design aspect has been important for us.

Mark Walton, Shared Assets Founder

Case study: Breakthrough (Helping Londoners into Good Work)

Breakthrough is the UK’s first apprenticeship provider to recruit directly from prisons. Their vision is for every prison leaver to have a pathway into employment that inspires them. Breakthrough uses apprenticeships to fund prison leavers into good work, working with businesses to diversify their workforce. The project refutes the view that prison leavers have low capabilities and dedication, and aims to support those who have experienced difficult periods in their lives to access skills and good work.

Breakthrough has grown to 10 employees, including people from the criminal justice system. They have launched their next iteration of community programmes and will soon run their first ever prison programme at HM Prison ISIS, a men’s prison and young offender institution in South East London.

The workshops were a great opportunity to see and interact with a lot of different partners and to bring together a diverse set of skills and expertise. Service design is at the heart of what we do and the workshop helped us to highlight this importance even further.

Guilherme Preti, Breakthrough Chief Strategy Officer

Our learning

How we evaluated the programme

The partners delivering the programme wanted to capture insights from the programme to support our learning, and to enable others to take inspiration from the programme. Evaluation and learning measures were therefore implemented from the outset to capture insights from the participating teams. Given our focus on mission-based innovation, a key objective was to capture individual teams’ learning outcomes as well as the wider impact of the cohort across missions.

Specifically, we aimed to understand the programme’s ability to build capacity across teams, nurture and develop alternative practices and support learning and adoption. These aspects are discussed over the next pages.

It was also an objective for the programme to support wider learning for the sector. This is covered in the subsequent section, which sets out insights for Government, designers, and social innovation teams.

Impact was captured through cohort surveys, reflective journals, notes from coaching calls, interviews with participants, public facing exhibitions, a speed dating event with invited designers, policy makers and researchers and a panel discussion with invited experts.

Designing London’s Recovery

A mission-based approach for the post-pandemic world

Baseline

A baseline survey conducted during the first phase of the programme revealed that the cohort consisted of design savvy teams. 58% of respondents stated that they regularly use design tools and design thinking in their practice, with 32% stating that they’d heard of design tools and techniques. Only 10% didn’t know about design tools and skills prior to joining the programme.

58%

regularly use design tools and design thinking in their own practice

32%

heard of design tools and techniques.

10%

didn’t know about design tools

Respondents were also reasonably familiar with systems design although this was less pronounced. 26% had not heard of systems design before, while 26% had some familiarity with the concept. The remaining 48% declared that they had moderate experience of working with systems. No respondent stated that they had a great deal of experience with systems design.

Teams had different motivations for joining the programme. 29% of respondents joined the programme to improve their innovation, with 15% joining to use design thinking and clarify what to do next. A further 15% had joined to build relationships to inform their design and share learning.

29%

joined the programme to improve their innovation

had moderate experience of working with systems

15% 15% joined to use design thinking and clarify what to do next

had some familiarity with systems

had not heard of systems design before

joined to build relationships to inform their design and share learning

Building capacity and Developing alternative practices

A final survey was issued to the 11 teams who completed the second phase of the programme.

of respondents stated that they’d been ‘satisfied’ with the overall programme experience, and that they’d ‘benefited’ or ‘benefited greatly’ from participating in the programme.

100%

75%

of teams reported that they agreed that their knowledge of missionbased innovation had increased over the course of the programme

stated that they’d applied systems thinking in developing their project

However, we also received suggestions for how to evolve the programme offer. Principally, these related to exploring ways to reframe the workshop format to allow more time for collaboration and co-creation. Respondents also noted that more could be done to support teams beyond the lifecycle of the programme.

Finally, the teams suggested that, within their missions, it would have been beneficial to have had even more time allocated for collaborative work. It was suggested that this could be achieved by having more in-person events.

had not heard of systems design before

had some familiarity

Adoption and Adaptation

We also wanted to capture how ideas generated through the programme were adapted to new situations and adopted by others. 100% of respondents reported positive spillover effects. This included developing physical assets, now used by other teams, and generating novel data through surveys to build an evidence base to impact policy.

100% of respondents reported positive spillover effects

Teams also reported developing new connections through the programme, with 15% creating connections within the programme (for instance with other teams and with colleagues from the project teams), and 46% reporting that they had created connections with external partners (for instance with other local authority officers, and community groups).

However, teams also reported that they would have liked to have had more opportunities to engage with external stakeholders, highlighting a speed dating event convened with external stakeholders as an example to be replicated.

46% creating connections within the programme

reporting that they had created connections with external partners

Recommendations

Overall recommendations

Drawing on insights from the programme, this final section of the report sets out some brief recommendations relating to the design and delivery of mission-based innovation programmes. These are included to support the delivery of future programmes and to share insights across the sector.

Overall we’ve found that missionbased innovation provides a useful framework for exploring and nurturing designs to shift systems. When framed carefully, this type of programme can create opportunities for the public sector to engage with academic and private sector partners, as well as communities, in developing forward looking solutions to complex challenges.

It is however important that a careful balance is struck between the needs of the individual teams and the needs of the cohort as a whole. We found that teams benefitted from face-to-face interaction and so a mix of in-person and virtually delivered workshops is recommended. Finally, it is important that teams are appropriately resourced to engage with the programme and so we encourage allocating funding to teams wherever possible.

Below we summarise recommendations for different stakeholders groups.

Recommendations for Government (central and local)

#1 Set the direction for innovation by establishing clear mission challenges for teams to engage with;

#3 Ensure a supportive environment is created for teams to explore and evolve their innovations;

#2 Create opportunities for diverse teams to come together and co-create solutions to tomorrow’s challenges;

#4 Consider allocating funding to enable teams to fully commit to the programme;

Recommendations for designers

#1

Provide teams with a physical space to interact with each other, whether within or across mission themes

#3 Strike a balance between talks (learning) and workshop activities (doing) with an emphasis on the latter

#2 Ensure teams are supported to work collectively, keeping in mind their individual needs

#4 Have a clear structure in place for how to support teams beyond the lifecycle of the programme, for instance by co-creating a programme of events that can live on after the programme ends

Designing London’s Recovery

A mission-based approach for the post-pandemic world

Recommendations for innovation teams

#1

Come with an open mind and be prepared to challenge your existing ideas and designs

#3 Share insights and failures with the rest of the cohort.

#2 Consider ways that your design can work with those of other teams to reframe behaviour and drive change

Peer learning is one of the most powerful ways of developing novel insights and ideas

Appendix 1: Participating teams

Kafei Ltd

Breakthrough Social Enterprise

Catch 22 Charity Ltd

London Borough of Newham

Islington Council

Roehampton University, Wandsworth Council, Royal Horticultural Society, FabricSpace

Silver Startups & Inploi

The City and Guilds Institute & Crown Estate

Capital Enterprise (UK) Limited

Play Build Play CIC

Shared Assets CIC, Sustain, Capital Growth, Organiclea, Cohere Partners, Ubele Initiative

Sustrans & Livework

Dark Matter Laboratories

The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design (RCA) & PiM Studio Architects

Pattern Project Ltd & A Small Studio

The Poetry Translation Centre

Camden Council & Central St. Martins

The Community Brain CIC & Kingston Council

Pupils Profit

Kingston University

Designing London’s Recovery

A mission-based approach for the post-pandemic world

Appendix 2: Delivery team

Design Council

Cat DrewCat Drew

Frederik Weissenborn

Hugo Jamson

Jessie Johnson

Laura Casali

Lucy Wildsmith

Maayan Ashkenazi

Melissa Bowden

Nat Hunter

Niall ÓConnor

Steve Lee

Tom Wynne-Morgan

UCL CUSSH

Greater London Authority

Gemma Moore

Giuseppe Salvia

Julie McLaren

Ahmad Bismillah

Aine Ruth

Almira Lardizabal Hussein

Cameron Tait

Catherine Glossop

Farah Elahi

Helen Moore

James Parkinson

Janaki Mahadevan

Jon Emmett

Josephine Clarke

Katrien Lindermans

Max Smith

Megan Dean

Myles Wilson

Nathan Davies

Nusrat Yousuf

Sandy Tung

Scott Mills

Truly Johnston

Vanessa Robinson