Design Lab — lessons from co-production with care experienced young people (Part 01)
“Harry Potter was a foster child. Pip from “Great Expectations” was adopted; Superman was a foster child; Cinderella was a foster child; Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, was fostered and institutionalised; Batman was orphaned…How have we not made the connection? And why have we not made the connection, between…these incredible characters of popular culture and religions, and the fostered, adopted or orphaned child in our midst? It’s not our pity that they need. It’s our respect.
– Lemn Sissay, in his 2012 talk, A Child of the State.
From December 2019 to June 2020 the Barnardo’s Plymouth Care Journeys partnership ran a Design Lab to test ideas aimed at reducing social isolation and loneliness for and with care experienced young people. In this series we’ll share what we learned and what’s next.
- Part one will focus on what we did and learned in the lab before lockdown
- Part two will focus on what we did and learned through testing ideas remotely during lockdown
- Part three will focus on children’s services workers; what was different about this way of working for them and how we are taking the work forward with Plymouth City Council
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.
The overall ambition of Care Journeys is to change the system so that care experienced young people are as or more likely to be in a positive destination, compared to their peers who have not been in care.
The Plymouth Care Journeys Design Lab was made up of a multidisciplinary team including two youth work professionals, a social designer and four care-experienced young people aged between 18 and 25. Each care-experienced young person contributed a unique and important perspective to the lab; from being trans in care to being a mother who has reconnected to their birth family through to a care-experienced young person who has written their university thesis on the experience of leaving care.
To find out how we set up the lab for co-production read this post by Barnardo’s service designer Amy Ricketts.
Why did we focus on reducing social isolation and loneliness?
Leading up to the Design Lab we undertook two Discovery research phases to understand the experiences of young people in Plymouth as they leave care. In the research young people prioritised loneliness and social isolation as the key area they wanted us to explore in the Design Lab (challenging children’s services workers assumption that accommodation would be prioritised). To find out more about our research in Plymouth leading up to the lab read Amy Ricketts series ‘Understanding the experience of young people as they leave care’ on Barnardo’s Medium page.
Positive Destinations — a holistic approach to supporting young people
Loneliness and social isolation is a major factor preventing care-experienced young people from being in ‘positive destinations’, a our personalised starting point for measuring what a ‘good life’ is. Positive Destinations allows children’s services workers to holistically support a young person, to feel good in themselves and to find meaningful ways to spend their days. For one young person this might look like feeling good in their skin as a trans person, making friends they can rely on and getting their GCSEs. For another young person their positive destination might look like being supported to look after their child independently after leaving a harmful relationship. Positive Destinations gives children’s services practitioners the permission to deliver trauma informed, relationship-centred support so that care-experienced young people can set up stable foundations in their lives.
First, a note on working with care-experienced colleagues in a trauma informed way
When we began the Design Lab in December 2019 the team was supported by two care-experienced colleagues at Barnardo’s. We learned two important lessons.
- To be a trauma informed workplace is to not assume that a colleague who is care-experienced or has lived experience in an issue that is relevant to a project will want to be involved. This may sound obvious but as the charity sector encourages more openness about lived experiences and seeks to become more diverse, it can be easy to pigeon hole people. Colleagues who may be doing an apprenticeship or early on in their careers may not feel they can speak out or decide on what projects they work on. One clear solution to this is to make sure every colleague has a clear development plan so their workload is aligned to their potential, not their past.
- If a care-experienced colleague decides they want to work on a project with care-experienced young people be very clear from the outset about their role to prevent any blurriness about young people seeing them as a It’s also entirely up to a care-experienced colleague to disclose that they were in care and completely up to them whether they want to draw on this experience openly in a project.
The Design lab, pre-lockdown
We worked together in Plymouth for three months on Tuesdays and Wednesdays before the UK’s COVID19 lockdown. Making tea every morning and afternoon became our ritual, our way of helping everyone ‘land’ in the Design Lab. Between sips and slurps we began developing ideas that care-experienced young people would facilitate for their peers to reduce loneliness and social isolation. To focus us, we developed this design challenge:
How might we create opportunities for care-experienced young people to build (or maintain) new and meaningful relationships with others?
The care-experienced lab team went through a process of ideation, going wide and discussing what kinds of opportunities they could create for their peers to meet up. We decided to focus on three themes, ‘food’, ‘nature’ and ‘friendship’ as areas to build test ideas around. The lab then developed test idea concepts to present back to the lab which we scored according to this criteria:
- Could it reduce loneliness and social isolation?
- Would you recommend it to a friend?
- Is the idea sustainable, could it continue beyond the lab ?
The highest scoring test ideas developed into Day by Day, Wild Plym and The Social Spatula Project. These projects would all be run by and for care-experienced young people in Plymouth 18–25 years old.
In the Design Lab we used a service design approach to build the ideas into services. Each group researched their idea, tested concepts, created a brand and designed an end to end service experience through the 5 Es framework.
Test idea 01: Wild Plym
A weekly meet up for care-experienced young people who are nature lovers, adventurers or just like being outside. Wild Plym planned to meet in a cafe one week to map out a local adventure they’d take together the following weekend.
Test idea 02: The Social Spatula Project
A weekly cooking club run by care-experienced young people for their peers. Learn how to cook a new dish every week and eat it together.
Test idea 03: Day by Day
Supporting care-experienced young people through friendship. Day by Day is a one-to-one friendship programme that connects care-experienced young people with equal friends, volunteers 25 years or above who may or may not be care-experienced.
Lessons from preparing the ideas for testing
The most challenging part about co-designing and planning the test ideas was balancing ambition and authenticity with pragmatism — finding that sweet spot between what’s desirable, what’s feasible and viable for testing can be really painful!
Social Spatula started off as a festival, where young people in care could come and try different foods and then sign up to cooking classes with the chefs whose food they liked best. The Wild Plym team started out wanting to run a series of wilderness residentials.
We shared the Design Lab’s budget with the lab team; we had £15,000 to cover all our lab expenses, including the running of the tests, so that left us with between £2,000 and £3,000 for each idea during our 6 week testing period. Being transparent about our constraints helped the lab team get into the mindset of ‘Minimum Viable Product’ testing. Even though the experience of refining ideas so we could test them as MVPs was tough, the lab team still maintained agency through deciding what trade offs would be made. This is one of the most important, powerful parts of co-production; when service users are actively involved in where and how compromise is made in the design process.
Getting feedback from care-experienced young people on the ideas
To help refine the ideas for testing — and build research skills — the lab team gathered feedback on their ideas with other care-experienced young people through phone interviews. The interviews helped us make further tweaks to the ideas, from inviting pets along on Wild Plym walks to making sure we make it clear that the tests are free in our posters. The interviews also helped us figure out where we could promote the tests, recommending closed facebook groups for care leavers and advertising in certain local shops and supermarkets.
Learning from other organisations
The Social Spatula team visited community cooking projects in Plymouth to learn about running cooking events and sourced teaching kitchens where they could run their workshops. Wild Plym team spoke to Under The Sky, a charity that provides free outdoor activities for care leavers.
Before testing started we arranged an inspiration trip to London to speak to organisations doing work connected to the test ideas and also to reinvigorate the lab team and reward them for their hard work so far.
We visited Girlguiding HQ to learn about planning adventures for young people and had a learning lunch with Settle about proving support to care-leavers. We also met with the team behind Friendworks at Family Action, to find out more about 1–2–1 friendship programmes for our Day by Day idea.
Hearing about the amount of training and support required for Friendworks’ volunteers to authentically build friendships with care-experienced young people, alongside learning from Barnardo’s Independent Visitor Network helped the Day by Day team realise that we would need a lot more than 6 weeks to authentically test the idea. We decided to use the testing period ahead to develop a proposal for a 2 year pilot with a strong evidence base so that Day by Day could have the best chance of supporting lasting friendships in the Beta (next) phase of the Design Lab.
How we approached engaging the hardest to reach
We knew from the beginning that recruitment of care-experienced young people to participate in test ideas would be our biggest challenge, despite the test ideas being run by care-experienced young people themselves.
Our challenges:
- Transport barriers for young people including how long it would take them to get to the meet up, the cost of transport or not having access to transport in their area if they lived outside the city
- No website for Plymouth City Council Personal Advisors to share with young people. Recruitment relied on sharing posters and digital sign up forms.
- Social anxiety: Some care-experienced young people don’t feel comfortable going to meet ups with people they don’t know
- It was upsetting for some of the lab team if they invited care-experienced friends who didn’t turn up
What worked:
- Meet ups being co-run by care-experienced young people helped get the word out with more credibility
- Keeping the tests ideas going regularly for a longer period of time, so young people have a bigger window of time to attend and build relationships
- Eating meals together
- Knowing someone, whether it’s a young person or professional at the meet up
- Nudge calls or texts before the meet up to remind a young person it’s happening but also to show them they’re wanted and needed
Running the first Social Spatula and Wild Plym meet ups
In early March we kicked off in person testing with two Social Spatula clubs in a teaching kitchen of a local high school in Plymouth on Wednesday evenings. The evening was entirely planned and run by the care-experienced lab team, from food-themed quizzes to running a cooking class and creating a friendly environment for everyone to eat what we made together afterwards.
We had a mixed bag of young people turn up, some who’d found out about Social Spatula through flyers at Aldi while others had found out about it through word of mouth. Everyone was respectful and Jesie, pictured above ran the session like a pro. She later told us that she was nervous, but you’d never have known.
The next day we ran our first Wild Plym meet up in a local cafe…before everything changed.
What we learned from testing pre-lockdown
Play is medicine
Creating space to relax and have fun together is as important as ‘doing the work’. Without regular breaks the design lab can quickly become a high pressure environment, so, being responsive to the lab’s mood, we took time out to do creative things, making macrame pots, coffee shop breaks or going for walks, when it felt we needed a mental breather. Moral of the story? Take time out together and don’t feel guilty about it.
Try ‘Living Notes’ to make your documentation and learning more transparent with colleagues outside of your team
Before she left Barnardo’s to start up her own social design and research organisation Bright Harbour, Caitlin Connors recommended using ‘living notes’, a transparent process of documenting and share live learning through Google Slides as we go. It was so useful to have one link to share with Barnardo’s colleagues who were interested in tapping into our live learning. Living notes send a clear message that as researchers, we want to be open and transparent. We drew from these notes to make presentations and our final learning showcase.
There is an inherent tension between documenting projects in compelling ways and protecting young people’s privacy
When we first set out to run the design lab we had planned to document our work through video storytelling. Three out of four young people in the lab team had signed informed consent media releases, but early on, when we asked the young people to do video reflection interviews or to film the lab themselves, there was a clear uncomfortableness.
I remember one time when the lab team actually ran into a storeroom to hide, they were laughing and joking around, but the message was clear — stop filming. So we did. Instead we turned to photographing the work we were doing and recording anonymised 1–2–1 reflection catch ups. The paradox in this situation is that colleagues, funders and stakeholders outside of the lab tend to expect photos and videos of young people but our first priority is to protect young people’s privacy if that’s what they want.
Try focusing innovation on processes instead of end products
Just before we began testing I started asking myself, “what actually makes these ideas ‘innovative’?” A cooking class, a friendship programme, a adventure club…isn’t this just what good youth work delivers?
The ‘product’ or service itself isn’t the focus of innovation in this work — our focus is how care-experienced young people are meaningfully involved in making the services they want. We can build the slickest digital tools and pour money services but unless young people with lived experience of being in care are involved in how we develop them, we’re just taking (expensive) stabs in the dark. If focusing on food, friendship and nature is what this group of care-experienced young people say might help reduce loneliness and social isolation, then innovating surely means starting there.
In the next post
Find out what happened in the lab during lockdown and and lessons we distilled into 7 steps to running peer-to-peer services with care-experienced young people in our next post.
With thanks to Nadia Irakoze-Thums, Carin Laird, Jemma Flower and Nick Cook from the Plymouth Care Journeys team. And to Sohila Sawhney from the #FutureBarnardos team for supporting the work throughout.
Irit is a Social Designer in the #FutureBarnardos team working across the Plymouth Care Journeys programme.
To get the latest updates from the #FutureBarnardos team, subscribe to blog.barnar.do on Medium.
