Design where it should be? Week notes w/c 30/5

I’m excited about something. Something that I hope isn’t controversial and might (not guaranteed) be awesome.

For the last couple of months myself and others (shout out to Simon Dixon amongst others) have been working on a concept called ‘Bottom Up Design’.

We will work on the name I promise.

I believe design should be here, in communities. Not in big central buildings

Background

I first started in this role (Head of User Centred Design for the Regions) in January this year. After about a month of trying to find my feet I did what any self respecting person should do in any job ever….. I called Pritesh Mistry from the Kings Fund and told told him how the gig was shaping up. I was talking about teams I was going to put in place, presentations I was doing and strategies for this and that.

‘Pete, this is all sounds super interesting but you haven’t mentioned community resources once. What’s wrong with you? You never not mention them.” — Pritesh being completely right as always

This coincided with a couple of other things

In my view (and I think the view of others but I don’t want to talk for them) the health system has the following problems with respect to design

1. Overwhelmingly the design community resembles me (I identify as a white male). From time to time I even have the requisite beard and I’m becoming increasingly pretentious about coffee. We need more diverse voices in our sector
2. There is more design work to be done (especially in the regions) than there are designers to do it. We need to grow our own
3. We do design in the posh buildings and ask people to come to us. We should go to where people are

So what

Well, what if we helped grow designers in the very places that design should be done?

I’ve talked to a couple of different organisations about this and they like the concept.

What if we funded an external org to train up members of those community assets to be designers or design hubs?

My view of the health system

Things that might happen (or might not)

1. Community assets are better placed to engage people and communities that we have historically ignored. And they could do design work where that community feels most safe and open
2. There could be a business model for trained up community assets to be involved in local/regional design work. Competing with established agencies
3. We (the centre) could get more designers from diverse backgrounds applying for roles that we advertise
4. We build better resources to help train people up in the practice of User Centred Design

Pete, this is amazing.. we are completely behind it.

Awwww thanks everyone. You are too kind.

We have got the funding to try some stuff out. So here’s what we are thinking.

1. we commission an org to be the trainers/mentors
2. we commission 3 community orgs (and pay them properly for their time and expertise) to be trained up. We pair them with a local transformation leader so they can work on real projects
3. we make it so design is for everyone and done with everyone.

…… Lemon squeezy.

Side note: remember in In the Loop where Tom Hollander says ‘difficult, difficult, lemon difficult.’ That made me laugh… and might be more appropriate haha

I’ll be working on the tenders for this over the next few weeks and will keep you updated.

Can you keep a secret?

We are also in the process of advertising some Senior Designer Roles to help support the regions on their User Centred journeys. (There will be a fuller blog on this when the jobs are live — so I can link to them). There’s just a few more hurdles to get over so shhhhhhhhhhh for now.

Hopefully this all comes together to form a big ol’ package of support led by the very communities that use our services.

As always if you’ve got any questions or want to chat about any of this please get in touch

Stay safe

Pete