COMPLEX ISSUES? August 2014
Design with people’s creativity
Participants at a conversation in Inverness, co-hosted by Jenni Inglis, on the subject “How can we put Social Innovation to work for the People of Scotland”
Jenni Inglis Master of Design for Services
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Human-centered design is fundamentally an affirmation of human dignity. It is an ongoing search for what can be done to support and strengthen the dignity of human beings as they act out their lives in varied social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances. Buchanan (2010)
Executive Summary
Complex issues? Design with people’s creativity 2
This report is for all those, especially public and third sector decision makers, who are concerned about social issues being resistant to attempts to address them. For example in Scotland recognised challenges include physical inactivity, problem drug use and carbon footprint1. The strategy designed as a conclusion to this project links the results of desk research, a series of dialogues, and a series of sub-projects
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It is effective and sustainable to enable people to respond creatively to complex issues like isolation, obesity and climate change. However practices that find and stimulate creative responses are not widely adopted, why not and what can be done? This project designed a strategy for their wider adoption.
I decided to design this project for myself rather than take on one of the challenges posed by others. I wanted to make a shift in my professional practice, to be clear what sort of design practice would best serve society. In doing so I discovered my sense of purpose as a designer. It is to enable people, including decision makers and those affected by social issues to come together, explore creatively and determine their own directions.
Jenni Inglis
exploring and experimenting at multiple levels by adapting methods from a variety of fields. It aims to guide a shift in the social practices of addressing complex issues. Over forty years ago Rittel and Webber (1973) highlighted “wicked� problems that are resistant to attempts to solve them. They said that those affected by such complex issues would
need to be included in attempts to address them, otherwise changes could be either negative or minimal. Having worked as an evaluator of public services for the last six years it is apparent that most are not designed with the people who are affected by the problems that the services seek to address. In August 2013 I set out on a learning journey to find out how this could be done
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through study and practice of design. There are examples of practices from design and other fields that do involve people affected by complex issues in addressing them, some listed at appendix 4. A common principle behind these practices is they recognise that all people are inherently creative; i.e. they treat human beings with dignity. It is remarkable that they remain niche practices. To illustrate let’s consider two different practices. The first, called Positive Deviance, recognises and works with people’s inherent creativity to achieve sustainable results in complex issues as diverse as malnutrition, hospital acquired infection and domestic violence. The second is a top-down approach taken by the Australian Government, in response to high unemployment, which ignored people’s creativity with the result that some people were creative in ways the Government didn’t want; turn-
ing to crime. Whilst the Australian example is extreme, a common consequence of not treating people as having creative potential is a culture of dependency (Kippin and Lucas, undated). It is easy to blame decision makers for taking riskaverse decisions that maintain a regime of top-down responses and power structures. However research suggested that doing so is unlikely to enable the systems of practice that decision makers enact - and that also constrain them - to shift for the better. I chose to see the way that complex challenges are addressed or not addressed as a series of social practices. I envisioned how they might be in future, and sought ways to design for different social practices to establish themselves. Inspired by what is known about how changes in systems of practice take place, I chose to design at multiple levels- niche, niche to mainstream and the wider
landscape. Therefore my project consisted of a series of sub-projects where I adopted different roles. From these projects, storytelling emerges as an important and accessible generative tool. Three sub-projects are included as case studies. The report concentrates on the case of designing for a series of conversations on the topic “How can we put social innovation to work for the people of Scotland?”, attended by a wide range of people including policy makers. The conversations were a project of The Melting Pot, which is a social enterprise based in Edinburgh. Its mission is to “stimulate and support social innovation”. It provides practical support to social innovators through collaboration. I identified social innovation as a niche social practice for addressing complex issues that might or might not work with people’s creativity as it becomes more
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mainstream; receiving greater attention at a European level. I conclude from the social innovation conversations that there is potential for a community of practice that is inclusive of those affected and that promotes learning, experimentation and risk taking. Therefore the strategy (figure 1) involves five areas for action; 1.Build community of practice of creative responses to complex issues, 2.Make links between niche practices, 3.Build bridges to the regime, 4.Scan the horizon, and 5.Tell a coherent story. The strategy is underpinned by principles to be used as an aid to collaboration and future strategy review. The report concludes with a vision of the system of practice of everyday, every-person creative responses to complex issues that the strategy seeks.
Figure 1- Strategy developed as a conclusion to the project Purpose- to increase the adoption of practices for addressing complex issues that work with people’s creativity
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The future is already here — it is just not evenly distributed. Attributed to William Gibson
Contents
Complex issues? Design with people’s creativity 6
Context and approach
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Contents 8
Overview of case studies
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Case study- Conversations on social innovation
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Summary of case studies 2 and 3
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Conclusion- Strategy, principles, vision
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Learning
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Bibliography and notes
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Appendix 1- Overview of supporting dialogues
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Appendix 2- Case study- Wellderly social design
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Appendix 3- Case study- prompting stories
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Appendix 4- Approaches that work with creativity
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Nobody wants to be 'planned at'
Horst Rittel
Context
Complex issues? Design with people’s creativity 8
Reasons often include that they appear risky and expensive, are outside of the comfort zones of decision makers or they may threaten power structures. My project develops a strategy for spreading and adapting practices that address social issues more successfully. I plan to adopt the strategy myself and invite others to join me. I became interested in this topic because the world is full of problems that prevent us from living happy, fulfilling lives in harmony with our planet. Depending
where on the planet you live you might suffer because you don’t have enough to eat or you eat too much, because your loved ones die young from substance misuse or from illness, because you feel lonely or because of war. However people also have immense creative potential. Why then do we continue to suffer, often as a result of problems that humankind themselves created? Over forty years ago Rittel and Webber (1973) wrote about how there were many complex problems in the field of their concern, urban planning. They said these could not be solved with logical plans laid by experts and would require the collaboration of “those affected” to deal with them. They called these “wicked” problems to denote that they are very messy and interconnected. Many scholars and practitioners have built on their work in the intervening time, some listed at appendix 4, many in the field of
design, and yet the learning has not been adopted as mainstream. The key issue then is how to spread these better practices. Of course I realised I could not solve this issue in this three month project but I decided I could set out a strategy to prompt better responses. To set the context for the way I approached this project I would like to relate two short stories and then outline two theories.
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Enabling people affected by complex social challenges - such as isolation, physical inactivity and climate change - to respond creatively is effective and sustainable. However practices that find and stimulate creative responses are not widely adopted.
Story 1 In 1991 Jerry Sternin, working for Save the Children, was tasked with tackling malnutrition in Vietnam, in just six months and with limited budget. Rather than buy food or even teach better agricultural practice Sternin enabled the affected community to look for examples of unusually positive results, discover the practices behind them and adopt those practices across the community. Some families had already created more
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successful responses to the issue of nourishing their children without access to any more resources than anyone else, including collecting small shrimps and greens (available but not thought of as food), more frequent feeding and hand hygiene. These people had been creative and Sternin designed a way for the community to discover this and benefit. He called it Positive Deviance. (Adapted from Buscell 2010)
Story 2 Only a few years later, in the late 1990s, the Australian Federal Government were faced with very high levels of unemployment. They decided that unemployed people would have to prove they were actively looking for work or they would lose benefit payments. Job search targets were set and by the peak of the policy 387,000 people had had payments withheld for a period. This peak coincided with a temporary increase in
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robberies but appeared to have little effect on people getting into jobs. (Adapted from Robinson 2012)
Learning from stories From these two stories we can see two very different responses. The first recognises that ordinary people are creative and designs around this fact, with the initiator adopting a “participatory mindset” (Sanders & Stappers 2012). The work involved might look expensive, with uncertainty about the result at the outset, but the result is sustainable. The second story ignores people’s creativity and the way that people often apply this creativity when they feel forced into a situation; they actively resist. As the Australian Public Service Commission said around a decade later (2007) “Attempts to address problems often lead to unforeseen consequences”. Whilst the Australian example is extreme in its failings it is perhaps closer to the default mode of
addressing complex issues than Sternin’s approach is. A more general failing of the current mainstream approach of planning services for people is dependency culture. (Kippin and Lucas, Undated).
So how might systems* change be effected to favour problem solving practices that recognise and work with all people’s inherent creativity? I explore this question in my project through some examples of practice that I initiated or collaborated on, with reference to relevant literature and through a series of dialogues with a wide range of people in different *By system I mean “ ... a set of things- people, cells, molecules or whatever- interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behaviour over time” (Meadows 2009)
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settings. In order to understand the approach I took in this project I will now present two examples of theories of how change in systems* of practice occur.
Theory 1- systems change
Figure 2 Geels (2002)
Figure 3- Geels and Schot (2007)
The explanation of the first theory comes from someone who is both a scholar and practitioner of system change, Anna Birney. Birney (2014) pulls together a range of influences including Geels and Schot to visualise how change happens (figures 2 and 3). The point of this is as Birney (2014) states; that “people make society and are at the same time constrained by it”. Therefore change strategies should take “take a multi-level view” and there is little point simply attempting to change behaviour in one group. She also makes three points about strategy which I have paraphrased and illustrated with an example. The example is of “co-working”, which
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describes the practice of people who work for different organisations sharing an office space. 1. Scan the regime and landscape for weak signals that can be amplified. For example, if you want to promote coworking, a trend towards self-employment might be an opportunity. 2. Build niches and bridges from niches to the regime, particularly through multiple innovations and connecting ideas. For example establish a co-working space in a building let to charities, establish it as a social enterprise, set up a social innovation incubator. 3. Actively open up windows through influencing the cultural conversation. For example attend business networking events, run open events and speak at conferences. The idea in the illustrative example, co-working space,
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has become fairly mainstream in under 10 years as its proponents adopted this strategy. Co-working exists in most cities run by a variety of types of organisation in different formats around the globe.
Therefore in my project I plan to take a mutli-level approach, working in niches, building bridges and influencing the cultural conversation. Theory 2- Social Practice So if niches of innovative practice are a key aspect of system change, how can we create and transfer them? Social practice theory offers some thoughts on the subject. Social practices are thought to have three, interconnected elements: 1. Artefacts, materials, tools, (and, if you are a service designer, touchpoints)
2. Signs, symbols, images, meanings 3. Skills, procedures, competencies (based on Shove and Pantzar 2005) To be recognisable as practices they require practitioners, or a community of practitioners since, “What (a social practice) ‘is’ and what it becomes depend, in part, on who does it and on when, where and how it is done. It is in this sense that practices are inherently dynamic” (Shove and Pantzar 2005) Furthermore, when it comes to changes in practices "Innovation in practice is not a one-off enterprise, nor is it one over which producers have ultimate control. For a practice to endure and exist as an identifiable if mutable entity, it must be continually reproduced by those who do it" (Shove and Pantzar 2005) Hargreaves (2011) suggests paying attention to the power relationships that produce and sustain prac-
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tices through connections, conflicts and alliances between communities of practice. So in each new context different practices will emerge. Â To illustrate, I created a rough map of some mainstream social practices around addressing complex issues (figure 4), see also key (figure 5). This map is not complete and in particular it ignores the influential set of practices of people employed in public service provision. Nonetheless when I thought about what the general population does to address complex issues it was hard to identify a practice, except for voting. When voting we delegate the responsibility for tackling difficult issues to elected representatives. I conclude there are a very large number of people who are not involved in any kind of social practice around addressing complex issues and furthermore they include to a large extent those people whom Rittel (1973) called
Figure 4 Sketch imagining current social practices
Figure 5 Key to illustrations of social practice
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“the affected”. I also considered some examples of more niche social practices around addressing complex issues. One of these is social labs and studio (figure 6). What struck me is the potential to include a wider set of people than labs tend to have done as the practice of social innovation establishes itself. The broad strategy for my project is: 1. Facilitate design in niches, of bridges to the mainstream and of conversations that influence the landscape. 2. Identify chances to change the relationships between meaning, skills and materials in communities of practice towards recognising and work with people’s inherent creativity. The last thing to introduce is what types of designer I am seeking to be during this project. Sanders and Stappers (2012) distinguish between the designer with expert mindset and the designer with participatory
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mindset. I seek to maintain a participatory mindset throughout. Manzini (2013) proposes four roles for the today’s designer; designer as facilitator, co-design team member, activist and trigger. The table (at figure 7) sets out the three cases studies presented in the main body and appendices of this report. In addition to the people acknowledged in the
main body of the report I am also grateful to a huge number of other people for informal dialogues, including me in sessions they were running, agreeing to interviews, for sending me ideas and papers, for communication on social media, by Skype and email. I have provided a summary of this background activity at appendix 1.
Figure 6- Niche practice around social labs and studio
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CASE
OF THE CASES OF PRACTICE IN THIS PROJECT
ASPECTS
METHODS
OF
SYSTEM CHANGE
1. Conversations on social innovation
The conversation, bridges, horizon scanning. Develop community of practice around establishing the niche practice of Social Innovation.
Design for wiser action - “hosting and harvesting” a series of conversations. •
Story circles
•
Group sense making
•
Report
TYPE
OF DESIGN ROLE
PAGE NUMBER
Co-designer with peers
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50 (Appendix 2)
2. Codesign Wellderly social design studio.
In the short termbuild a niche for creative approaches to addressing problems. In the longer term- change the conversation
Workshop with a Community Forum.
Co-designer with peers
3. Prompting future stories
Change who is involved in creating responses to complex challenges.
Iterate a generative tool for use in communities between pairs of peers
Trigger and 54 co-designer (Appendix 3) with someone closer to the issue.
Figure 7
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THREE
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You can have a group of individually intelligent people- but until that group knows what it knows together, the group as a group is not intelligent - Inspired by Peter Senge Quote from The Art of Participatory Leadership for System Change Workbook, 2729 November 2013
Case Study
Co-designing Social Innovation Conversations 16
There is increasing attention at European level to the concept and potential of social innovation, for example see the European Commission’s Guide to Social Innovation 2 and Social Innovation Exchange3. Innovation is often put forward in the context of science and technology as an important source of business and economic growth, see e.g. the Scottish Government Innovation Strategy4. Social innovation is sometimes seen as synonymous with social enterprise and whilst many social enterprises are socially innovative, social innovation also occurs in other contexts. Since opening its doors in 2007, the Melting Pot’s mission has been to stimulate and support social innovation; it seeks to do this through practical support to social innovators and through collaboration (see box).
I have been a nonexecutive director on the board of the Melting Pot since 2009. Noticing the increased attention to social innovation Managing Director Claire Carpenter started developing the idea of holding a large scale conversation on social innovation. This occurred at about the same time that I had been exploring how policy making might become more inclusive so we agreed to join the two projects up. Claire secured some money from the Scottish Government and contracted a professional facilitator, Wendy Faulkner. I joined a team developing the idea on the understanding that I could use the experience in support of my Masters in Design for Services.
My role: Co-designer I am interested in social innovation because I had identified it as a niche social practice for tackling complex problems. I saw the project to hold conversations as an
The Melting Pot The Melting Pot is a social enterprise based in Edinburgh offering spaces and services designed to enable people to work, meet, connect, learn, and hold events – all to make the world a better place. The Melting Pot pioneered coworking in Scotland and supports the next generation of social innovators through an annual incubation programme. www.themeltingpotedinburgh.org.uk
opportunity to identify further niche practices, communities of practice, people who might collaborate to build communities of practice and also to raise the profile of a range of views on social innovation. In November 2013 Claire and I both attended a three day Art of Hosting training course (see box on p18).
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Background
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The Art of Hosting (AoH) The Art of Hosting, sometimes known as the Art of Participatory Leadership, is a community of practice that encourages people to be increasingly purposeful in “hosting and harvesting conversations that matter”. The Art of Hosting community offer training courses. “Hosting” refers to the idea that practitioners create conditions for good conversations rather than facilitate them and “harvesting” to the idea of capturing conversations to enable clarity and action. Through hosting and harvesting conversations that matter practitioners seek to harness collective intelligence for co-learning and codeveloping solutions to complex challenges. This practice can be seen as complementary to rational planning that seeks to maintain full control. www.artofhosting.org
AoH and Design I found that developing practice of the Art of Hosting was complementary to my developing practice of design. I found many shared concepts, such as convergent and divergent thinking and making things visual. As a small example of the synchronicity of the AoH and design, In November 2013, two months into my design learning journey, I was most concerned with developing my ability to make intangible concepts and services tangible. During the AoH course I worked as part of a team who chose to practice harvesting. A few people remarked to me that they felt there were unspoken issues so I decided to make the “elephant in the room” visible by drawing an elephant on a flip-chart sheet. Many people gave me positive feedback on this intervention. I also started a collaborative story about the future of Scotland on a role of wallpaper, drawing on design practice of storyboarding.
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The course made us revisit the approach we were taking to developing the project. This course also offered Claire and me the chance to meet Luska Jerdin, who works for the Scottish Government. She kindly agreed to work alongside us in applying the learning from the course to the conversations. The final team thus included Claire, me, Wendy, Luska and Ashley Buchan, Events and Marketing Host at the Melting Pot. I contributed fully to the co-design and co-hosting of Figure 8- Design for Wiser Action Template the project. As the project unfolded I agreed to take sources. We used a “Design originally proposed the prolead responsibility for a for Wiser Action” template ject her idea had been to method I proposed to use(see figure 8) to focus our talk about “Putting social the story circle- and for meetings. This template is to innovation at the heart of processing the harvest of the the design of “hosting and the economy”. However the results of the project into a harvesting conversations team considered what our report. that matter” as the business purpose really was and who model canvas is to the we were trying to attract. We design of start-ups. eventually changed the Methodology Core to the practice of question to “How can we put The overall approach hosting and harvesting consocial innovation to work for The team met in person versations that matter is the the people of Scotland?”. several times, drawing on crafting of a “calling quesThe Art of Hosting enour learning from the Art of tion”. When Claire had courages hosting a group to Hosting training and other
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Session
Hosting Method
Harvesting Method
Check in
Whole group circle Participants write on cards (1 Who is here & 2)/ notes taken whilst cir- and why? cle going round (3)
Q1
What do we mean by social innovation?
Pairs and group dis- Participants write on cards, What is? cussion participants group and inter- Divergent and rogate meaning of cards. convergent Whole room affinity mapping.
Q2
What can we learn from our experiences of social innovation?
Small story circles
Key facts about the social innovations and the learning from stories about them noted (1st day by groups and 2nd and 3rd by hosts).
Analogous to
What works? Divergent and some convergence
Q3a What are the most “Target” prioritisation Collate priorities from whole Why? pressing problems fac- tool room on a flipchart. Convergent ing Scotland? (Edinburgh only) Q3b What is our vision for Worldcafé the future of Social Innovation in Scotland?
Drawings, notes and doodles What if? on paper table cloths. Divergent
Q4
Ideas listed on flipcharts and What next?built on by small groups that Convergent rotate around stations.
What conditions will “Carousel” support the growth of Social Innovation in Scotland? Check out
Whole group circle
Figure 9- Overview of design of conversations on social innovation
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So what?
Designing the days We designed the day as a sequence of questions that flow logically and move towards convergent “next
steps” at the end (see figure 9). I have added my interpretation of the modality of the question at each stage, they include convergent and divergent sessions and cover three of the four questions, asked by the design thinking framework set out by Liedtka and Ogilvie (2011); “what is, what if, what wows what works?”. Story circles are highlighted in the table because this is an aspect that I took lead responsibility for. We needed a method suitable for learning from existing practices of social innovation. I had participated in small story circles at an action research training session and found it enjoyable and relatively easy to access. I adapted the version I had been taught, which has around 16 points, aiming to create the minimum guidelines necessary to create good conditions for people to share stories in small groups and make meaning together (see figure 10). This can be thought of as similar
to a “Liberating Structure -sparking freedom that arises from shared understanding of simple rules”5 .
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gain wisdom from a crowd. We designed a day-long process, aimed at working with around 20-40 people at a time. We also designed the “harvest” in order for participants to contribute as directly as possible. This included creation of cards with different purposes, proforma, and encouragement to draw pictures. We designed opportunities to make meaning together e.g. by affinity mapping with the whole group sorting their ideas into themes. We created prompts for people to move to action, e.g. by returning postcards of people’s intended actions to them in the post. We also paid close attention to designing the content for the invitation and getting it out to as wide a group as possible.
Running the sessions We hosted one day in Inverness and two in Edinburgh. We had only planned two days initially but added the third day to enable more people to attend. Just over 60 people attended across the three days. There is much I could report on but I focus here on the story circles since they were my lead responsibility. I introduced the story circle session on each day and ensured their smooth running. On the first day I designed the groups to be selffacilitated, as I had experienced at Ashridge. However it was important to this process to capture the rich detail of the stories and the patterns of learning from them and we had initially designed a means of harvesting the conversations in the story circles that required participants to write
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Principles for Story Circles 1.Create a good circle of 4-6 people where everyone is in equal physical space. 2.The essence of story telling is in the listening. Whilst you are listening to a story just listen, don’t think about your story, don’t take notes. 3.Tell the “deepest” story, relevant to the theme, that you feel comfortable with. It can be your story or one you know of. 4.Only after everyone who wishes to has told a story can cross circle talk to identify patterns begin.
Adapted from Ashridge Action Research Skills Programme, who in turn acknowledge Theresa Holden.
Figure 10- Principles for Story Circles
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Introducing story circles
capture the stories. After day two a further iteration was made, following a suggestion from a participant, so on the third day we invited participants to listen for particular themes during the story. We iterated other aspects of the design of the days each time. In particular I prompted reflection after the first session on whether we had included enough consideration of why we were looking at social innovation, i.e. what challenges it was important to tackle. Claire
proposed a new session Q3a, to deal with this.
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on blank cards. I noticed that asking the groups to record led to one group writing during the stories, going against one of the principles and reducing focus on the stories. What they recorded also wasn’t very clear. Therefore we improved the design of the session so that one of the hosts sat in each group on days two and three to act as a scribe. This aimed to ensure that we better captured what the social innovations actually were and the learning from them. We also designed a pro-forma to
Processing the harvest The design of the conversations included designing how harvesting would work. We designed for people to leave with contacts and ideas about next steps but we also needed to capture the results for a wider audience and I took the lead on reporting. We were left with a myriad statements on cards, flip-charts and drawings on tablecloths. Ashley and I
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met again several times and worked our way steadily through the output from each session, looking for patterns and differences across each day and I drafted a report. I condensed the output of each session in a range of ways. Again focusing here on harvest of the story circles, I summarised two aspects of the learning as lists but the other points were highly interlinked, creating a very complicated affinity map. To tackle this I drew a picture that illustrates the learning points, and the relationships between them, in a digestible format (see figure 11).
Results The output of the conversations aided my development of a strategy to increase adoption of creative practices considerably. There was clear interest amongst participants in being inclusive of those with less power and influence, an awareness of the complex
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nature of social problems and an appetite for working creatively, particularly of increasing experimentation. The conclusions and recommendations from the report, are summarised below.
Conclusions • Participants attended to learn and share knowledge about social innovation, because they were interested in the Art of Hosting and “because it is time”. • There were diverse opinions on what social innovation is. Dimensions highlighted included community versus individual effort, both means and ends being social, the likely complexity of results, complexity of multiple perspectives, that it is not the preserve of the social enterprise sector and that can be top down or bottom up. • Learning from stories of practice included that social innovation qualities include: • Making connections
Disruption Critical mindset Vision Persistence Ability to learn Reflection Experimentation Take risks Question results Focus but also openness • Ability to “sell” • Courage Learning from stories of • practice included that social innovation can arise in a number of ways including: • In response to a perceived need or opportunity • To solve a clear problem OR an evolving issue • From a love of social justice • Organically and in several places at once • By accident • From frustration • From relationships (between different types of people) • As a result of disaster • • • • • • • • • •
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Figure 11- Illustration of some learning from social innovation stories
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•
•
•
•
• From vision of how things could be over different time horizons Further learning from stories of social innovation is illustrated at figure 11. Inequality and apathy were the issues prioritised by the most participants. There were 15 themes explored in future visioning, the theme of democracy, leadership and civic participation included a lot of material. The most popular topic explored as a condition for social innovation to flourish was learning culture.
Recommendations • To support social innovation recognise that people have strengths, not just problems and enable genuine participation and collaboration across sectors. • Recognise that there are many existing examples which can be learnt from and built upon and that doing so can be empowering to those involved.
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• Develop social innovation to address priority issues of inequality and apathy. In doing so social innovation will need to operate across a broad range of fields but perhaps nowhere more so than in the relationship between the Scottish and Local Governments and citizens. Many aspects of the future vision of how social innovation could work in future already exist in niches and should be nurtured and connected. • Recognise that the most significant condition required for social innovation to flourish is a culture of learning and experimentation, in communities and supported by those in positions of power. Ideas for promoting such a culture are placements and exchanges, school social innovation clubs, structures for community led innovation and investing in experimentation. Decision makers must encourage and enable risk taking.
Feedback on process What people thought about the days is also very useful to my project to develop a strategy. The first day in Inverness and the second day in Edinburgh were largely very well received with more mixed reviews for the third day, also held in Edinburgh. The design of the conversations was seen as sufficiently robust for one of the participants to show enthusiasm for repeating the process elsewhere. I have again focused largely on story circles.
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A drawing made by one of the participants in the future visioning Worldcafe
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Story circles
Carousel ideas for action
Feedback from the story circles across all three days was overwhelmingly positive (see page 29). There was only one negative comment and one idea for how story circles could be improved, both relate to the quality of the stories; ‘limited value, examples varied’ and ‘some warning to think of ideas beforehand’.
Feedback on this session includes that some people found it the most useful session, particularly at the last day in Edinburgh. Others thought it was not long enough.
Worldcafe visioning In contrast to the story circles, feedback on the Worldcafe future visioning session was much more mixed. It included: ‘good session leading strong positive vision’, ‘quite difficult. Thinking to 2050 made it too unrealistic to really consider’, ‘felt too generic + utopian’, ‘worked well’, ‘good way to focus on goals and why we should be trying’, ‘probably hold this another time; creativity after lunch is horrible’, ‘struggled to get from big picture to practical’
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Conclusions Telling stories is an accessible, enjoyable method capable of producing rich meaning. In contrast, visioning, and especially drawing visions, is loved by some and hated by others. Some people are more action oriented than others. I have circulated the draft report to the co-hosts for feedback. We are scheduled to meet to consider next steps, including how the recommendations can be taken forward. As co-hosts we will look to build on the conversations, however participants also gave us feedback that they were inspired to act. On the second day we gave them postcards to capture their
next steps and will return them by post. We will send the report to participants and publish it more widely. The most useful result of the conversations for my project to develop strategy is that there is clearly a group of people who are interested in being inclusive and creative.
A participant’s postcard
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A very important session, well facilitated
Fascinating stories
Worked well
Stories grounded discussion in reality
Really good session. Story telling works well.
Really liked this format Really enjoyed this session. Wish I could have heard more stories
Stories are always good!
Feedback on the story circles
Best way to get insight to others’ principles and learn from their experience
My favourite part
Excellent. Would have loved more stories.
Best session – hearing real stories helped me think about what it really is and how to do
Great session and process
Concrete examples Loved this
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Type to enter text
People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Ivan Illich
Summary of Case Studies 2 and 3
Wellderly Social Design & Prompting Future Stories 30
This case concerns the co-design of a new enterprise called Wellderly with two other designers. Wellderly brings decision makers together with older people to explore and create responses to complex issues. See appendix 2 for more detail. I worked on this case in order to gain further practical experience of enabling others’ creativity. The case study focuses on the co-design of a workshop with older people and decision makers to explore improving connections in a community. The methods used include an exercise aimed at generating a broader perspective on an issue. In this exercise participants built empathy maps in response to four different persona. Whilst the exercise was successful in broadening perspectives, participants remained enthusiastic about a solution they had already identified.
My conclusions are that pre-packaged solutions to problems may be appropriate in some circumstances but can be seductive. As we continue to develop Wellderly we will need to prioritise building long term relationships that enable growth in capacity to create together.
Prompting future stories In this case I co-designed a toolkit with a lady in her seventies. See appendix 3 for more detail. I chose to do so because of my observation that there are downsides to relying on getting a crowd in a room when developing creative responses to issues. I wanted to experiment to see if it was possible and productive to prompt exploration of complex problems between two people at a time in a community setting. The methods included in the toolkit were inspired by Sanders’ (in Valentine 2013)
Participatory prototyping cycle; make, enact, tell a story. My conclusions are that: • It was a highly unusual experience for the participants who consequently did not attribute the same meaning to the toolkit as I did. I would need to support the use of the tool further, e.g. through a community of practice to build a different meaning. • It was nonetheless successful in prompting consideration of potential responses to a complex issue by lay people, even though they saw the main purpose as feeding back their ideas to me. • In comparison to making and enacting, storytelling is likely to be a more accessible activity with less support required for most people. To create a prototyping cycle where stories are built on by making and enacting it would probably be necessary to work with a group.
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COMPLEX ISSUES?
Wellderly
COMPLEX ISSUES?
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones Simon (1988)
Conclusion- Strategy, principles, vision
Complex issues? Design with people’s creativity 32
COMPLEX ISSUES?
I have designed a strategy for increasing the adoption of problem solving practices that recognise and work with people’s inherent creativity.
An overview of the strategy is shown at figure 12 and this concluding section explores it further. I intend to work with others to apply this strategy. I expect that it will change over time so I have also considered the principles that might underpin it. I present these later in this section.
Based on the output of this project I have also developed a vision of how the social practice of addressing complex problems might evolve in future. This is presented in order to help the reader see where adopting the strategy might lead (figure 13).
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1. Build communities of practice The first step in the strategy is to build communities of practice that should be centred around the purpose of developing everyday creativity applied to addressing complex issues. These communities may be initiated with others who share this clarity of purpose. The communities will co-design practices to include people who start with mixed levels of confidence in creativity and who have more and less power in the situation. This will include working in the places and contexts that people with less power inhabit and developing peer to peer networks. It will involve working with the wisdom of the crowd and working on a small scale with those that are put off by crowds. Building communities of practice will enable the meaning of creative tools and skills to be recast to everyday- from childish or something that only creative people do. It will achieve this by enabling participants to experience these ways of working, thereby achieving a shift in the way they think about their creativity. It will also enable decision makers to develop skills in working directly with people with less power and change the meaning of the practice of doing so from being for those people to essential and for everyone. There are people in Scotland who care that the future practice of social innovation works with lay people and addresses inequality and apathy. The people could therefore form the basis of a Community of Practice. Wellderly could be developed as such a community of practice.
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Connect to those that share or overlap with the purpose of recognising and developing everyday creativity as applied to complex societal issues. Promote sharing of practice between communities, for example through hosting exchanges. I identified appropriate communities including the Scottish Co-production Network, those involved in the Art of Hosting in Scotland and participatory democracy advocates, including So Say Scotland.
3. Build bridges to the mainstream There are many policies in Scotland that open up windows for influence by more niche practices. For example community empowerment, public service reform, innovation and design policy. I discovered through a one to one dialogue at one of the conversations on social innovation that the research centre “What Works Scotland” is more focused on working bottom up and with co-production than its counterpart; the “What Works Network” in England.
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COMPLEX ISSUES?
2. Connect to existing communities of practice
4. Horizon scan for weak signals The conversations on social innovation acted as an immersive horizon scanning, amongst other things. A strong signal was that the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014 has stimulated interest in democratic innovation. This could offer an opportunity for practices that enable people to participate. A weaker signal was that there may be a backlash against consumption as the dominant practice of society. This could favour the development of creative practices. The strategy therefore includes attending events and following social media to spot other signals.
5. Continue to influence the conversation
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This can be achieved by telling a coherent story that gives people a sense of hope and shared direction. Birney (2014) even talks about how a coherent story can make the case that change is inevitable. Story telling was a common theme in this project. It provoked a positive response from people of all backgrounds. As Sanders and Stappers (2012) say “People think of people and stories best.... most people are not good at dealing with abstractions, as in mathematics and formal logic�. Therefore my strategy is to create opportunities for people to come together to develop the story of the future that they want. At the same time I will articulate and reflect back that in doing so they are part of a movement for system change.
Note The balance of these five aspects is also important. For example focusing on building a niche of great practice is pointless if it never influences the mainstream, building bridges to the mainstream is difficult without solid examples of niche practice, niche practices are stronger when linked.
Why have principles? My experience, e.g. from setting up story circles, is that having a set of principles can aid collaboration and practice development. Indeed Sanders and Stappers (2012) set out four principles of which they say “it will be helpful for you to reflect on these principles and discuss them with others you are collaborating with in conducting generative design research.” The purpose of setting out some principles here is thus to act as a flexible guide to developing practice with others. These principles were developed through this project and they may be revised through future practice. 1.All people are creative. To uphold this principle designers must be truly human-centred or perhaps even life-centred as thought-leaders IDEO are just starting to talk about6 This requires a shift from the “user-centred”, “de-
signer as expert” (Sanders and Stappers 2012). As Buchanan (2001) puts it “Human-centered design is fundamentally an affirmation of human dignity. It is an ongoing search for what can be done to support and strengthen the dignity of human beings as they act out their lives in varied social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances”. 2.Be flexible in leading and following based on a sense of common purpose. Mary Parker Follett called purpose “the invisible leader”. The experience of co-designing Wellderly has been really liberating. I have been asked a few times “of three designers involved, which is the leader?”. The answer is that the person taking the lead shifts from moment to moment. I believe it is the clarity of purpose that the co-founders share that enables this way of working.
3.Make ideas tangible as fast as possible. Without the harvest of the social innovation conversation it would have just been an interesting conversation. Creating a harvest enables a long term legacy.
COMPLEX ISSUES?
Principles
4.Build capacity to use generative tools. Whilst all people are creative, many have lost confidence in this. A recurrent theme in my project was that many people do not initially feel comfortable using some generative tools and attribute particular meanings to them, such as childishness. Story telling may be a good route in to working with most. 5.Nothing is ever finished, it is just a more or less stable system of practice. All actions should be seen as adventures rather than the answer, since in taking any action a new aspect of the problem may reveal itself. An inquiring and reflective mindset is needed.
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COMPLEX ISSUES?
Vision The page opposite illustrates a vision of mainstream social practices in future where the meaning of being a good citizen has shifted from voting. Being a good citizen now means participating in society through the use of tools for creation, also known as convivial tools (Illich 2001), and skills of learning and connecting to purpose. It envisages a world where people take turns at being participatory leaders and of the more intense role of being parliamentarians. It foresees a world where there is nobody sat outside of the circles of practice of addressing complex issues.
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COMPLEX ISSUES?
Figure 13- A vision of future practices of addressing complex issues
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COMPLEX ISSUES?
Purpose is the invisible leader
Mary Parker Follett
Learning 40
COMPLEX ISSUES?
The development of my practice of design for services Mental Models The most fundamental learning over the last six months of my design learning journey is an evolution in my mental model. In February 2014 I presented the figure (14) to explain where I was thinking of focusing my attention on this project between May and August 2014. I thought that the problem with complex problem solving was a failure to gather and include different viewpoints prior to developing a brief. What I now realise is that this way of thinking about it ignores that any step forward, whether theoretical or actual, no matter how well grounded in an understanding of the system, will reveal something else about the situation (VanPatter, n.d.). Then I came to appreciate a sketch by Sanders (in Valentine 2013) that makes the
Figure 14- Earlier mental model
discovery phase, or “fuzzy front end� more participatory. Sanders’ sketch, shown at figure 15, suggests that a design direction can be determined through enabling people to participate in a prototyping cycle. During this project I have established that the role I want to have as a designer is to design supporting systems for the pattern, shown in figure 16, where people
may come together, explore and determine their own direction. This project has enabled me to develop clarity of purpose in this, which is to continue learning about creativity myself and to enable others to join in. Knowing what sort of designer I am is the best result.
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COMPLEX ISSUES?
Developing Skills Reflecting on the development of my skills as a designer, not just over the last three months but over the last year I can see enormous development. I embarked on this learning journey primarily because I wanted to learn how to co-create and also to meet people who I might work with in future. I have been able to achieve both. Figure 15- Sanders in Valentine (2013) A year ago I had an idea that learning to express concepts more visually would help my practice, an unexpected result is that I have skills in prototyping. For example, in that time I created a low fidelity prototype of a peer support service for new mothers using lego and service “touchpoints� like information leaflets. I used this at a workshop I ran at a conference of social impact analysts to explore how user responses might inform the design of impact evaluation frameworks during service Figure 16- My version of the sketch- designers support people to design. I have also been come together, explore and develop their own directions.
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Integrating skills I didn’t start as a blank sheet of paper and I know how my skill as a designer interacts with previous skills such as social research, evaluation, programme management, bid development and many others. I learnt that I might develop as an interesting critical voice in the field through feedback to some of my earlier writing. There have been many “aha moments” over the last year’s learning journey. Perhaps none more so than discovering Kimbell’s take on “design as enquiry”, which
has helped me significantly with integrating previous knowledge and skills drawn from other fields that see life as a process of enquiry such as Participatory Action Research.
build platforms for others to come together and find out what they want to do. Given the level of need for a new strategy to increase participation in creative responses to complex problems, I see great potential for what I can offer.
Continued learning I learnt that I have a huge appetite for learning and that I learn best through a messy combination of putting myself into positions where I can experience practices, reading academic texts, reflecting on how things fit together, being critical of practically everything and trying things out. I work best when I am working with other people who also question a lot. Certainly I have learnt how to apply a lot of tools in a lot of different ways. I have had the chance to test design thinking strategies and to reflect critically on what my practice of design actually is. I now see that my skill as a designer is primarily to
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COMPLEX ISSUES?
part of a team that prototyped the situation around professional responses to loneliness, and prototyped a set of prompt cards with healthcare professionals. This contributed to set of prompt cards published by IRISS. Most recently I prototyped a prompt for conversations on complex issues in this project; see the Case Study in Appendix 3.
COMPLEX ISSUES?
Bibliography
Complex issues? Design with people’s creativity 44
Australian Public Services Commission 2007, Tackling wicked problems: A public policy perspective http://www.apsc.gov.au/ __data/assets/pdf_file/00 05/6386/wickedproblems .pdf Birney, Anna. 2014. Cultivating System Change: A Practitioner’s Companion. Do Sustainability. Buchanan, R., 2001. Human Dignity and Human Rights: Thoughts on the Principles of HumanCentered Design. Design Issues 17, 35–39. doi:10.1162/0747936017 50357178 Buscell, P., 2010. Inviting Everyone: Healing Healthcare through Positive Deviance, 1 edition. ed. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Bordentown, N. J. Curtis, T., n.d. Making Community Policing More Wicked [WWW Document]. The Huffington Post UK. URL
http://www.huffingtonpo st.co.uk/tim-curtis/com munity-policing_b_47461 71.html (accessed 7.18.14). Dubberly, H. Undated blog post. The Language/ Action Model of Conversation: Can conversation perform acts of design? http://www.dubberly.com /articles/language-action -model.html (accessed 29/07/14) Hargreaves, T., 2011. Practice-ing behaviour change: Applying social practice theory to proenvironmental behaviour change. Journal of Consumer Culture 11, 79–99. doi:10.1177/1469540510 390500 Hartmann, T., 2012. Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: Planning as expectation management. Planning Theory 11, 242– 256. doi:10.1177/1473095212 440427
Illich, Ivan. 2001. Tools for Conviviality. London: Marion Boyars. Kippin, H., Lucas, B., Undated. From Big Society to Social Productivity, RSA 2020 Public Services Hub. http://www.thersa.org/__ data/assets/pdf_file/000 7/1464136/RSA_BigSoc_ A4_04.pdf Liedtka, J., Ogilvie, T., 2011. Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers, 1ST edition. ed. Columbia University Press, New York. Manzini, E., 2013. Making Things Happen: Social Innovation and Design. Design Issues 30, 57–66. doi:10.1162/DESI_a_002 48 Meadows, D.H., 2009. Thinking in Systems: A Primer, First edition. ed. Routledge, London. Reason, Peter, and Hilary Bradbury. 2006. Handbook of Action Research: Concise Paperback Edition. SAGE.
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Bibliography
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Robinson, L., 2012. Changeology: How to enable groups, communities and societies to do things they’ve never done before. Green Books, Totnes, UK. Sanders, E, and Stappers, P., 2012. Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers. Senge, P.M., 2006. The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization: Second edition, 2nd Revised edition edition. ed. Random House Business, London. Senge, Peter M., Joseph Jaworski, C. Otto Scharmer, and Betty Sue Flowers. 2005. Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Shove, E., 2005. Consumers, Producers and Practices: Understanding the invention and reinvention of Nordic walking. Journal of Consumer Culture 5, 43–64.
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doi:10.1177/1469540505 049846 Simon, H.A., 1988. The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial. Design Issues 4, 67. doi:10.2307/1511391 Tonkinwise, C., n.d. DRAFT - How We Future - Review of Dunne & Raby _Speculative Everything_ [WWW Document]. URL https://www.academia.ed u/7710031/DRAFT_-_Ho w_We_Future_-_Review_of _Dunne_and_Raby_Specu lative_Everything_ (accessed 7.30.14). Valentine, Louise. 2013. Prototype: Design and Craft in the 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic. VanPatter, G.K., n.d. Rethinking Wicked Problems: Unpacking Paradigms, Bridging Universes (Part 1 of 2) [WWW Document]. Issuu. URL http://issuu.com/nextd/ docs/conv28 (accessed 7.30.14). VanPatter, G.K., n.d. NextD Journal: Rethinking
Wicked Problems: Unpacking Paradigms, Bridging Universes (Part 2 of 2), GK VanPatter, Jeff Conklin & Min Basadur [WWW Document]. URL https://www.academia.ed u/3729047/NextD_Journ al_Rethinking_Wicked_Pro blems_Unpacking_Paradig ms_Bridging_Universes_P art_2_of_2_GK_VanPatter_ Jeff_Conklin_and_Min_Ba sadur (accessed 7.30.14).
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Act yourself into a new way of thinking Jerry Sternin
Appendix 1
Overview of supporting dialogues 48
Some dialogues and practices that added background to this work N AT U R E
OF
INTERACTION
TYPE
OF
PERSON
OR TION
O R G A N I S A-
Face to Face Interview
Ex- MSP
Face to Face Interview
Leader of a participative democracy movement
Lunch meeting
Parliamentary assistant to an MEP
Lunch meeting about engaging politicians in working with communities
Employee of the RSA
Email exchange
Parliamentary assistant to an MSP
Participation in an Action Learning Set, I asked for input on my project, specifically in relation to Wellderly
Run by a member at The Melting Pot and attended by other members.
Participation on the last day of the second Scottish Art of Hosting, I proposed Wellderly as new Design for Wiser Action Project.
Another Scottish Government Employee, a voluntary sector manager and a PhD researcher participated in the Design for Wiser Action session with me.
Group problem solving session- I asked for input on my project
Run by a member at The Melting Pot and attended by other members.
Email exchange
Director of a social lab
Skype conference call
Five people involved in the social innovation movement globally.
Participation in a Chiasma run by Design in Action.
I had a particular dialogue with someone involved in “Design Disruption�; see appendix 4.
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There's no termite with a blueprint Jane Fulton Suri
Appendix 2- Case study
Wellderly social design studio 50
IRISS
In April I worked in a design team on a project for IRISS where we explored how health and social care practitioners could be prompted to take preventative measures. In particular this was focused on the problem of increasing risk of loneliness and isolation as people age. This is an example of a complex problem. Whilst working on this project I identified that I share an enthusiasm for enabling people to create their own responses to complex issues with fellow designers Keerthana Jayogopal and Moyra Gill. We began to explore together what was needed in Scotland and what we could do together. We noticed that social design studios, social labs and other vehicles for creating social change are often an improvement on undesigned solutions because they research and understand to some extent the experience of people who are most affected by social is-
The Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services (IRISS) is a charitable company with a mission to “promote positive outcomes for the people who use Scotland’s social services by enhancing the capacity and capability of the social services workforce to access and make use of knowledge and research for service innovation and improvement” http://www.iriss.org.uk/about sues. However we noticed that they do not often enable these people to explore and generate their own solutions. The issue and the responsibility for generating responses in these cases is most often held by a professional design team. We started exploring ways to challenge this. Keerthana had an initial idea linking the learning from the IRISS prevention project with the idea to include people directly in a social studio. We entered this idea for the Scottish Institute for Enterprise’s Young Innovators Challenge and started designing it as an organisation called Wellderly.
Wellderly I am one of the three cofounders of Wellderly. Wellderly helps decisionmakers and older people to collaborate to develop better responses to the big issues facing society. Many of us experience loneliness and isolation as we age and society faces many challenges that cannot be solved with the thinking that created them. Wellderly enables creative environments where teams, including older people and decision makers, work together. This tackles loneliness and leads to wiser responses.
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Background
COMPLEX ISSUES?
My roles I have collaborated on many aspects of designing Wellderly and led others. Together we co-designed a short video pitch for SIE. We co-designed the business model using a Business Model Canvas, we all participated in a bootcamp and workshops run by SIE where we have practiced pitching. We prototyped how we might work together with decision makers and older people through a co-design of workshop in Pitlochry. I have taken a lead on setting up appointments with a range of relevant connections and pitched successfully for further resources. This case study focuses on the workshop in Pitlochry.
Methodology Keerthana, Moyra and I were invited back to Pitlochry to run a workshop as Wellderly with the Community Health and Social Care Forum on the back of having previously worked with PKAVS and IRISS on Crea-
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tive Care and Support Pitlochry http://www.iriss.org.uk/ne ws/creative-care-and-suppo rt-pitlochry. We accepted the invitation as a good opportunity to prototype our way of working. It later transpired that the Community Forum already had a particular solution to their problem in mind and that it was anticipated that we might help them to implement it. We wondered how far to question the proposed solution. We resolved the apparent tension between exploring the context versus moving to implementation by designing a session intended to both advance the understanding of the possible solution and to prompt questioning about some of the challenges. If the model turned out to be not quite the right thing we could encourage further creative thinking. To help the group to consider a range of different perspectives we developed four persona and an exercise
PKAVS PKAVS is a voluntary organisation that has been helping people and families across Perth & Kinross since 1972. They promote volunteering and citizenship among people of all ages. They also support, promote and develop the Voluntary & Community Sector through information, training and access to a range of facilities at their premises in Perth, The Gateway. https://www.pkavs.org.uk/
around empathy mapping. We deliberately chose four different perspectives, these were a 35 year-old healthcare professional, the daughter of an older person living in Pitlochry who lives in Birmingham, a recent retiree to Pitlochry and a widower with failing health. We planned two rounds of idea generation around community connection, one prior to the empathy map-
Delivery We delivered the workshop and received feedback that it had gone well. I prepared a short report back on our workshop to the Forum and agreed it with the Wellderly team. The Community Forum is taking a break until later in August 2014, when we plan to get back in touch.
Results
can usefully include helping people to implement something that they had already decided upon but it must also include examples of how we have enabled groups, including older people, to grapple with challenges and be more creative in their response. Interestingly the participants at the workshop expressed a strong view that more community members were needed to take this, or
any other initiative forward. I conclude that it is not just the people at the social innovation conversations that care about inclusivity.
COMPLEX ISSUES?
ping exercise and one after it.
Perspectives of the group were broader after the empathy mapping exercise. Although the group did identify a number of significant challenges to the idea of employing a community connector they still appeared positive about it at the end of the workshop. People seem to like to feel that they know what they are doing. Since the workshop we have been working on improving the way that we communicate what it is that Wellderly does. Our portfolio
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COMPLEX ISSUES?
People think of people and stories best Sanders and Stappers (2012)
Appendix 3- Case study Prompting future stories 54
I noticed that models of participation often emphasise getting a group of people together in a room. Reflecting on my experience with the social innovation conversations and Wellderly I was concerned that this favours those with expert knowledge of a subject, those who feel confident and those who are paid to be there. Furthermore participatory group sessions are practiced away from the day to day of many decision makers, which may reinforce the idea of it being a niche practice. Therefore models of participation that only include groups risk neither including the people who are most affected nor building a strong enough bridge to mainstream practice. It may be possible to address some of these issues, e.g. through a better lead up process to group meetings that builds understanding of an initiative with more marginalised populations. Therefore
group processes should not be written off but I wondered what other ways to address the situation there might be. Inspired by Sanders’ participatory prototyping cycle (in Valentine 2013) I wondered if there might be a way to encourage people in communities to include themselves in developing responses to complex issues in a one to one setting.
My role My role in this case is as a prompt and an activist since I envisage a different role for ordinary people in addressing complex issues often left to policy makers.
Methodology I remembered a conversation that I’d had with someone who had asked me what I was doing. That person, let’s call her Ann, is in her 70s and had asked if she could be involved in Wellderly because she has lots of ideas but does not know how to implement them. She stated that even though she has
plenty of things to keep her busy and plenty of social connections she still feels lonely sometimes with her family living so far away. Later, when I wondered whether I might enable participatory prototyping to happen in the community rather than only at big meetings, I decided to invite Ann to my home to explore this. I shared some context about what I was trying to achieve. I explained I wanted to involve people who are affected by some of the big problems facing society but may not feel there is anything they can do about it. I asked what she thought about trying out participatory prototyping, sharing that that is about building on each other’s ideas through telling a story, making something or enacting something. Ann agreed to explore a topic with me, she picked social isolation, and then picked “tell” i.e. to try to tell a story together about a future where social isolation was being tackled.
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Background
COMPLEX ISSUES?
We made an audio recording. I then created very rough version of a toolkit in order to get some feedback from her before creating a version that she could use in person in a one to one meeting and hopefully pass on for them to have their own meeting. My hope was that people would at least find it interesting and at best would have a greater sense of they could do something about social isolation. I saw the output, in terms of any ideas that they might share, as a side effect rather than as the main purpose of the exercise. The toolkit included an audio recorder onto which I had transferred the initial story Ann and I had told together, materials to make, a few key principles and brief instructions. It also included a card for participants to record brief details about themselves and what they explored with each other (figure 1).
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Testing Ann invited a neighbour, Jane who, like Ann was prepared to tell a story. They could not work the audio recorder so they neither listened to the existing recording nor recorded their own story. Nonetheless they took notes and shared them with me. Jane was unwilling to take the toolkit to try telling a story with anyone she knew but passed on the card (figure 1) to Mary who it out and also asked her friend Owen to add to the card. When the card came back to Ann she asked another neighbour, John, to participate and this time they managed to get the voice recorder working. What was returned to me was a recording of a conversation between Ann and John about potential solutions to social isolation, together with the notes that Jane, Mary Owen and John chose to share about themselves and the written note of the conversation between Ann and Jane.
Figure 1- the card included in the kit.
Key points- Ann and Jane • Start from the grass roots • Start with quality of communication between mother and child • Connect with nature • Communicate via machines sparingly • Become more aware of our relationships
Key points- Ann and John
Learning People can be prompted to consider how to solve complex issues, however they are liable to attribute a meaning like “participating
in research” to toolkits that prompt them to do so. Ann talked about “doing interviews” and one of the other participants shared the meaning that the card had for her- a kind of chain letter that she had always tried to avoid. My reading of social practice theory (Hargreaves, 2011) suggests that by building a community of practice with influential peers, a set of competencies and an iterated tool, it should be possible to establish a social practice of people including themselves in responding to complex problems. The meaning they would attribute to the tools and competencies would change. The test was only with one chain of people. All chose to tell a story, perhaps further underlining the accessibility of telling stories. I have previous experience of making and drawing not being embraced (Inglis 20137) but not everyone has good access to verbalising (Sanders and Stappers 2012) so I
would not give up on offering the chance to try making or enacting in this type of toolkit in future. In considering how I could develop this in future I return to Sanders and Stapers (2012) who observe four levels of creativity and propose four different ways of designing for them.
C R E AT I V E LEVEL 1. Doing
DESIGN SHOULD Lead
2. Adopting Guide 3. Making
Scaffold
4. Creating Offer clean slate To build confidence with acting or making it would probably be necessary to invite people to a workshop. I conclude that to develop this successfully as a social practice I will need to create a community of practice. It may however be a useful addition to workshop based approaches for Wellderly.
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• One approach might be to re-create small mixed social units where people who function less well are “carried”. (Because in cities people who function less well get labeled and are handed over to “experts” for drugs and counseling) • Avoid labels, they can be very isolating. • Bring children up to like to talk to others • Create non-threatening environments where people feel safe to go even if they are struggling. For example some churches. • Re-create an atmosphere of conversation on public transport. • Give people social functions to perform. It doesn’t have to be difficult. • Enable people to get out and about.
COMPLEX ISSUES?
Don’t jump to your own conclusions, let the community draw their own. Tim Curtis and Amy Bowkett
Appendix 4
Practices finding or enabling creative responses 58
Some examples of practices that work with those affected to find or enable creative responses to complex issues NAME OF PRACTICE
SUMMARY
LINK
Locally Identified Solutions and Practices (LISP)
Tim Curtis and Amy Bowkett at University of http://issuu.com/cirtist Northampton developed LISP with Northamp- im/docs/lisp__toolkit__ tonshire Police. LISP is a toolkit aimed at “co- 15_with_draft_images producing community safety”.
Positive Deviance (PD)
Developed initially by Jerry Sternin, PD enables communities to find and adopt unusually successful responses to problems. Hidden Insights Europe have further developed the approach and applied to public sector contexts.
Design Disruption
The Design Disruption Group is a group of http://designdisruption design educators, researchers, practitioners, group.wordpress.com/ and students based at Northumbria University Design School. Their objective is to bring about positive change via “disruptive design acts”. They run generative workshops with voluntary groups and others.
Theatre of the Oppressed
Theatre of the Oppressed was initiated by August Boal in Brazil. The actors play out a scene of oppression and then the audience becomes active, becoming part of a re-run of the scene and attempting to change its course.
http://www.hiddeninsig hts.co.uk/
http://www.theatreofth eoppressed.org/en/inde x.php?nodeID=45
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Notes 1
See Scotland Performs- many performance areas remain static or are getting worse
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/About/Performance/scotPerforms/glanceperformance The guide to social innovation can be downloaded at http://s3platform.jrc.ec.europa.eu/documents/10157/47822/Guide%20to%20Social%20I nnovation.pdf 2
3
http://www.socialinnovationexchange.org/ideas-and-inspiration
4
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2009/06/26143501/0
5
http://www.liberatingstructures.com/
6
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2014/events/event_IAP21775
Inglis (2013) available from http://beta.scie-socialcareonline.org.uk/social-assets-in-action-evaluation-report/r/a11G0 00000188zlIAA 7
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