Design Lab — creating the conditions for co-production
Over the past 12 months, as part of our Care Journeys programme at Barnardo’s, a small team of us have been carrying out in-depth research to uncover what is preventing young people leaving care from ending up in a positive destination.
Barnardo’s Care Journeys (Children In and Leaving Care) Core Priority Programme, set out in our Corporate Strategy, invests in transforming our services in a vital area for young people moving towards adulthood.
Official data, referenced in our Impact Report, shows that overall, care leavers are still much less likely than their non-care experienced peers to be in education, employment or training, more likely to be involved in the youth justice system, experience mental health and emotional challenges, or experience homelessness and social isolation.
Every year, around 10,000 young people leave the care system, and in total, there are over 40,000 care leavers aged 17–21 in the UK.
You can read about what this research told us in a series of 3 blog posts here.
In October 2019, we were ready to move into the design or Alpha phase of the project. We knew we wanted and needed to collaborate with the kinds of young people we’d met through the research — people who had lived experience of the problem we were looking to solve.
This blog post sets out our vision for our Design Lab and how we are using this as a way of co-producing ideas with and for care-experienced young people.
What is the Design Lab?
The Design Lab is a team of people — thinkers, doers and makers — that work together to solve problems through experiments.
The multidisciplinary team includes young people and professionals, some of whom have lived experienced of the problem we’re trying to tackle — loneliness and isolation.
The Lab is one workstream in Barnardo’s Care Journeys Programme, officially launched in partnership with Plymouth City Council on 3 February 2020, with widespread coverage including here, here and here (listen from 2hrs, 6mins).
Barnardo’s has teamed up with Plymouth City Council in a trail-blazing new project to improve the life chances of young people in care, and leaving care. Barnardo’s is investing more than £1million of its own voluntary funds to develop the ‘Plymouth Care Journeys Programme’. Its aim is to significantly improve the life chances of young people in care, and leaving care.
The seven-year strategic partnership is one of the first of its kind in the UK and signifies a new way of working for both organisations, sharing experience and expertise to design and deliver better outcomes for care-experienced young people.
What are we working on?
How might we create the opportunities for care-experienced young people to create new and meaningful relationships with others?
This is the question the Design Lab will be focusing on first. Research told us that by the time young people leave care at 18, for some, their social and support networks have been significantly disrupted as a result of their experiences in care. This can result in small and homogenous social networks at the point of leaving care when they are expected to flourish and become independent.
Furthermore, many young people place greater value on self-protection (keeping myself to myself) rather than making new friends. So despite all of the evidence that suggests relationships are a vital part of remaining mentally and physically well, for many young people, making friends and having a support network is just not a priority.
Creating the conditions for co-production
The Design Lab is a model we hope to use again in future, so we’re viewing this as a test.
There are a number of conditions that are helping to make it a success so far, things we would repeat when doing something like this again.
Although the teams are in the midst of developing and starting to test ideas, we felt it was important to share some of the lessons learned so far.
Recognising those with lived experience as equal members of the team
The Design Lab wouldn’t be possible without the insight, leadership and expertise of young people. So, we’ve been guided by appropriate principles of power sharing, recognition and acknowledgement of their invaluable contributions throughout our work together.
As explained in a previous blog post by Davie, co-design is a design approach in which a designer encourages people to identify a problem and empowers them to solve it. Designers lead those involved to think beyond their current situation and guide them to not just imagine an ideal future but to take steps to help make that future a reality.
Although there is a heavy presence from our design team to steer the process, the ideas being developed and tested have come from the young people themselves. They came up with the ideas, they designed the criteria by which ideas would be chosen, and they’re in the process of developing them before testing out in the community. We are simply providing the scaffolding, a bit of structure to help guide the process.
This means each young person is invested in learning from and developing the ideas and this means, week after week, they meet to continue the work.
Describing a clear problem
We have been clear from the start about the problem we’re trying to solve and remain focused on this as our ‘north star’.
Before diving into ideas, we spent time sharing stories and understanding what the research has told us so we all have a good sense of the problem as it is experienced by other young people.
Space and facilities
We have hired a neutral space which we use each week to convene and work together in. It was important that the Design Lab was not hosted either at Barnardo’s or within any of the premises of Plymouth City Council, our local authority partner. The space needed to be somewhere everyone felt comfortable, safe and not distracted.
We also have provided access to design software, Barnardo’s laptops (for some young people who do not have access to a computer) and lots of design materials for planning and sketching out ideas.
As well as our time in person every week, there’s lots of activity online. We have video stand-ups, a central Design Lab online group with lots of supportive chat and some coaxing of lab team members out of bed in the mornings. The online element is the social glue. It has been exciting to see the ideas built on and shared each week and notice friendships that are starting to form between the team members.
Pastoral care
The young people we are working with are just entering the world of work and learning how to work as a team, how to communicate, how to work through disagreements. On top of that, many of them are wrestling with issues in their personal lives, whether it’s uncertainty over accommodation or mental ill health. It is therefore not realistic to expect each of them to turn up on time, every week, ready to contribute fully.
Within our team is an experienced direct worker — someone who has supported many young people over their career and is a vital member of the Design Lab team. Some weeks, we have created more space and time for pastoral care that needs to take place to enable our youth colleagues to be in a better head space to engage with the work. This may mean a morning of sharing how people’s weekends were or quick breaks in the day for a 1:1 chat. One week, we paid for a taxi so one of the young people could pop home to collect their medication that they had forgotten; something that was causing significant anxiety for them that day.
The Design Lab is a test in it’s own right
We predicted fairly early that not only is the Design Lab a vehicle for developing ideas, it is a possible solution in and of itself. It has all of the hallmarks of something that could help reduce loneliness and isolation for those who take part:
- It offers an open, neutral physical/online space for people to gather with others who have had similar experiences;
- It gives people a sense of ownership over something, and collective responsibility to the group;
- It creates shared experiences;
- It taps into people’s passions and interests;
- It asks people to contribute;
- It gives young people a sense of purpose and structures their weeks.
These are principles that we noted as being important to the kinds of things that help reduce loneliness and isolation, all learnt from looking at things like Camerados, Good Gym, Everyone Everyday, Nudge Community Builders and InHouse Records.
We are starting to see signs of the impact the Design Lab is having on the team itself. Over Christmas, when we downed tools for 2 weeks, it was clear that the Design Lab had been providing some much needed structure and purpose for some of the young people. Young people asked us to pick up the work a week earlier in January, which we honoured, with some very clearly ready to come back to it.
As well as testing the ideas developed by young people, we’ll also be tracking the impact of the Design Lab itself on their own sense isolation and loneliness.
What next?
As ideas begin to take shape, we’ll begin testing them out in the local community. We will end this phase of the Design Lab with a learning showcase, an event where we invite current and future partners to discuss our insights and co-develop opportunities to scale in next phase of the Care Journeys Design Lab.
We also hope that we will be able to lift and adapt the ideas to other localities where care-experienced young people are experiencing similar problems.
Amy is a Service Designer in the #FutureBarnardos transformation team working across the Plymouth Care Journeys programme. This work is now being carried forward by designer, Irit Pollak.
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