The importance of co-design when co-designing
A story about problem definition
It’s been several months since writing my last blog on the Place-as-a-Service project, but a lot has happened during that time. Here’s a recap.
The local community group Tu Ake Te Karaka Community Committee had done a lot of work to develop a Community Plan for Te Karaka. Published in 2013, this plan reflected the community priorities for change over the next 10 years.
The Committee felt that it needed an economic development plan to set out ways in which the community may grow and prosper, so sought proposals for the development of such a plan. Our suggestion was to hold a service design event over one weekend so that the community could come together to co-design a plan for making the community more prosperous.
Setting out the road map
Formal project approval came through in late 2015, but to avoid the Christmas holiday period we scheduled the service design event for February 2016. This was to be followed six weeks later by an event retrospective, and a further check-in workshop in June. The final plan would be put together as an artefact and published in December 2016.
We began reaching out through the digital community and social networking sites to promote the event in the first instance. The digital community had been a strong force through the Gigatown competition in which Gisborne (#gigatowngis) came a close second to Dunedin. We selected digital channels for the first wave of promotion as a low cost effective way of communicating with the well connected yet geographically dispersed communities.
Our previous blogs and social media posts had generated significant interest from people and organisations outside of the town, and there were some useful questions being generated as a result. Importantly however, we were not connecting with the local residents who we wanted to come along to the event.
Finding the pathway to our customers
We realised that we had not allowed sufficient lead in time to get the word out to the community through conventional print media and public notices, so we decided to move the event back a further six weeks.
We also suspected that there was some uncertainty about what service design was, and what the event was all about. We began to use simpler messaging to promote the event, and focused on the benefits that people would get from attending the event. We used social media advertising to target the community directly, and created posters to display in and around the town.
An event program setting out the event format and learning experiences was shared with potential participants. This generated further interest from people who were dead keen to come along — but most were from outside of Te Karaka. We began suspect that we were dealing with a Catch-22 situation, where one needs to experience a service design event to appreciate what they are about.
It was two weeks out from the April date when it became inevitable that we were not going to get the 45 participants we hoping for. It was clear that no matter how much marketing and promotion was done, the weekend format of the event simply did not fit the community. We needed a new plan.
Time to pivot
It became apparent that language spoken by designers and our target audience of residents was different. The best way to bridge that gap was not to tell the community what we mean, but to show them. After discussing the options with the committee, we decided to hold a co-design workshop with them to explore the best way to engage with the residents of the town.
What we wanted to get from the workshop was a much clearer understanding of how the community worked — its people and its potential. This would help us to find and identify the opportunities that lay within the town and its people. From there we could learn how to engage with them on their terms, and test our proposed approach.
Defining the problem
The workshop was very enlightening. We discovered that Tu Ake Te Karaka Committee also had trouble getting people to care about the initiatives that their groups had been working on. They had held community events that were well attended, with food, music, and great company.
They had tried to replicate those conditions when holding their committee AGM some time back. The committee had attracted a lot of people along to the meeting, but a popular event does not always lead to a successful one.
When they gave out the committee nomination and voting forms, it became apparent that few realised why they were there. The committee did not repeat the festivities at the last AGM and barely had enough people turning out to fill the committee positions.
And so there it was. The problem that both we as event organisers and the committee were experiencing — how could we get the community to care? To find out how we have begun to tackle this problem, tune in to our next blog post …
