BBC THE FIX: Taking Service Design to public radio a second time: learnings and reflections
Series 1
Last year, BBC Radio 4 teamed up with Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and Uscreates to create BBC The Fix. This initiative was set out to tackle tricky social problems, such as the housing crisis or childhood obesity, using a design process which enabled us to get to the root cause the problem, and come up innovative ideas to solve it. The ’12 of the brightest young minds’ who worked together to find a solution to these problems were from entirely different backgrounds and deliberately non-experts in the subject. This meant they had a heightened sense of curiosity around what the real issue was and could bring fresh perspectives to addressing it. We prompted the participants with some evidence such as statistics, personas and invited a few experts to attend who shared their knowledge on the topic. Once they had identified the problem, we took them through some creative tasks to generate some radical new responses to the problem. At the end of the session, each team pitched their ideas to the judges who decided on a winner. We ended up with some incredibly innovative national-level ideas, such as building houses from your mobile phone or a virtual reality game for preparing to leave prison.
The feedback was fantastic. The BBC and their listeners loved the interesting ways to find out evidence, new ways of looking at a problem and creative ideas that came with the process. And, for the first time in history, service design appeared on public radio, reaching just under 1 million listeners a week! The programme even made the BBC annual report and was shortlisted for the Criminal Justice Alliance Journalism of the Year award.
Series 2
With such a great response, the BBC would ask us back again for a second series. This time, we went local — going to specific places or institutions and solving challenges that had been given to us by real people with very real problems. We wanted to use local assets and people as key ingredients for tangible solutions to place based issues. We travelled to Tetbury in Gloucestershire to look at social isolation amongst older people in rural areas, St George’s hospital in London to boost junior doctor morale and Bartley Green school in Birmingham for responsible social media use by teenagers.
Matthew Taylor from the RSA was hosting as usual: interviewing the problem owner, ensuring judges made their decisions fairly and occasionally intervening in the different teams to make sure their ideas were really radical. There were two teams this year and to sport some healthy competition, Uscreates was pitted against the RSA with two great leads from each organisation, Lil and Rebecca to guide them. This year, we had real users in the room to help the teams deeply understand the issue and co design solutions together. And as it’s important when thinking about place based approaches to identify local assets, we got the teams to map local people, places, services and values that could be part of the solution. Who knew that the old Tetbury currency could hold the clue to loneliness? Or that student prefects could transform into social media mentors with empathy spells? Or even that Florence Nightingale can inspire new ways of gratitude to doctors? These are all the clues we are giving away for now — for the real answers and winners, tune in on 22nd, 28th of August and 3rd of September to find out!
Reflections of co design process
In true service design style, at Uscreates we plot out the emotional journey of the project as a way of understanding what worked and what was a challenge so that we can continuously improve. We did the same for the three episodes of series 2 so that we can make it even better if, fingers crossed, it’s recommissioned again.
The main three big reflections we found were:
Reframing problems and inspiring innovation
Lateral inspiration and reframing prompts are really important to help people move into a radical ideas space. Asking questions such as “What if junior doctors were treated like patients?” or “What if retirement was treated as aspirationally as leaving school” helps our teams to dig down to the underlying societal values and culture that holds the problem in their present state. Giving them inspiration from organisations/cultures that do things differently — such as the Bla Bla Car carshare scheme or the fact that Toyota in Japan practice ‘Shafu’ meaning company spirit where they start each morning by song — provided food for the mind. This helped us to pivot and reframe the problem, inspiring fresh and innovative ideas
Role of users and experts
In this series, we realised the importance of having real ‘users’ and experts in the room as they helped the teams understand the true nature of the problem as well as challenging their assumptions. For example, having a Junior Doctor explain his daily life with a beeper going off every 5 minutes, emphasised the incredibly busy nature of his role and provided the teams with key insights they wouldn’t ordinarily have. Having Maisie and Asha, students from Bartley Green school in Birmingham, as part of the two teams meant their assumptions about what social media school students used and the levels of resilience they already have, were challenged. However, sometimes having too much knowledge can stump the teams thinking in big and radical ways during the ‘idea generation’ stage. Overall though, experts provide a more ‘helicopter view’ of the problem which was vital to understand what could work and the constraints surrounding the issue.
Tools are tools…
But you don’t have to stick rigidly to them. Design processes are geared to be agile so whilst the tools are great prompts, it occasionally requires tailoring the activity or simply leaving it out all together. For example, in the idea generation phase of the social isolation episode, we asked the teams to do a ‘brainwriting’ exercise, a bit like ‘game of consequences’- where, having generated loads of ideas, each team member draws out their best idea and passes it to the right for someone else to improve, and so on, until they get their idea back. It’s a great way of converging ideas. But Lil’s team had already settled on a single idea, so wanted to move more quickly to prototyping. During the Junior Doctors session, we had planned to carry out a‘ 3 whys’ activity to further understand systemic causes. However, as our experts were so enlightening and engaging, we had already delved deep into the problem area and had found out most of the answers simply by engaging in questions and answers.
If you’d like to find out more about the process and even give it a go yourself, we’re running a workshop on BBC The Fix Methods as part of the Service Design Fringe festival during the last 27/28/29 of September and at the Service Design Global Conference 2018 in Dublin on 12 October where you can listen to excerpts of the show, try out the methods used, and then have a critical reflection about how to apply or improve them. If you’re interested in attending, please email: marialusia@uscreates.com
