Co-designing with children and young people
It seems obvious that children and young people should be the experts of their own needs and experiences, and yet so often we see this group overlooked and ignored when products and services are being designed in their name.
My colleague Melanie Rayment and I spoke at the Service Design in Government conference in Edinburgh on 8 March. We introduced the conference to our perspective and use of co-design; a process which not only ensures we have the clearest possible picture of children and young people’s needs and experiences, but allows us to design life-changing services in a truly collaborative fashion.
When we fail to consider how we gather the insight and information in working with vulnerable groups, we undermine the wealth of knowledge they themselves possess, and limit the potential of what we could all achieve if we all worked together.
In using co-design to create the products and services our service users will rely on, our mission is to shift young people from passively experiencing the world to being free, vocal agents. We seek to balance power across the entire end-to-end experience from how we encourage their participation right through to how we continue to extend their voice and influence in how we shape our organisation.
This gives opportunity and agency for them to reflect back on their experience of the world in all that we do, and ultimately so that we may help shape the children’s social care sector around their needs.
We are pleased to share the slides and speakers’ notes used in our presentation, illustrating the research that forms the backbone of every design process we undertake as we revolutionise social care in the UK from the ground up, along with some tweets from the day.
Jess is a Service Designer in the Barnardo’s digital team. To get the latest updates from the team, subscribe to blog.barnar.do on Medium, and follow #FutureBarnardos on Twitter.
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