Ideas to Action: How can design play a role in helping those who are less active become more active?
Neil Gridley, Laura Malan, Melissa Bowden
The Ideas to Action programme, delivered by Design Council and supported by Sport England with funding from the National Lottery Community Fund
was launched to help organisations with bright ideas on how to help some of the least active people in society become more active. It aims
to find new ways to overcome inequalities in physical activity.
In our first blog post we introduced the Ideas to Action programme and gave an overview of the Community Innovation programme and teams. In this post we’d like to share some of our approach and learnings with you.
The programme has been introducing teams to design methods as well as coaching them to use those methods in their work. For the cohort and those of us delivering the programme, it’s been incredible to work in a group with such varied challenges and starting points. Some of the ambitions for the teams were:
- ‘Use smart technology to provide a solution for blind or partially sighted people to access fitness equipment more easily.’
- ‘Explore the possibilities to reach more users through social prescribing.’
- ‘Design and develop strength building programmes which meet the needs of the communities we serve.’
- ‘Work with the community to redesign the environment around them and in particular a local recreation area, skatepark and multi use games area’.
Within the Community Innovation strand we’ve been running a series of masterclasses, ‘Campfire’ sharing sessions, and one-to-one coaching sessions for teams to learn design tools and methods. Masterclasses and Campfire sharing sessions are created and hosted by the Design Council experts and contacts, encouraging teams to build links with other participants in the group. Experts were invited to speak and facilitate Masterclasses and Campfire sessions introducing new perspectives and introducing a diverse range of ideas and inspiration into the programme.
We’ve introduced the teams to various tools and methods for:
- Framing the challenge
- Mapping stakeholders
- Doing design research
- Analysing research
- Developing ideas
- Prototyping and testing
1. Framing the challenge
In the very first Masterclass we introduced teams to a way of writing their ‘challenge statement’. It’s quite an easy thing to miss, wanting to jump into action. But it’s crucial so that everyone’s on the same page to start with — and that the challenge is clear to everyone involved.
This is especially important when you’re involving different stakeholders and partners or when projects are complex, take place over a long period of time and aim to address systemic challenges. It can also help give a focus as a starting point.
“The refining challenge statements are really useful and helped us to “chunk down” the jobs to be done! It’s been useful to bring the user back to the centre of the challenge and think about how to engage with them directly as we move forward.” — Versus Arthritis
Once you carry out design research you might need to go back and ‘re-frame’ your challenge — it’s often the case that your first definition of the challenge was based on assumptions or it was simply too broad.
Sometimes the challenge is really big and it’s helpful to focus on a singular smaller idea, audience or geographical place to get started:
“So we started up a specific group to work on this specific challenge.
[We have decided to refocus the challenge on] three of the most inactive neighbourhoods in West Norfolk.” — West Norfolk
A number of teams have realised that by focusing on a part of their challenge, rather than trying to tackle the whole challenge, gives them more focussed energy and the feeling of achieving some impact or insight quickly, this builds momentum and energy for the topic with the team and stakeholders.
“My key observation is that the more focused we’ve become, the more the energy’s increased and the more the energy increases, the more people own what’s happening.” — West Norfolk
2. Mapping stakeholders
One of the next activities was to create a map of stakeholders and other people involved which helped teams to develop a common understanding of the full breadth of stakeholders, identify who they needed to conduct research with and who might add value to their work.
“But one of the things that came up from the conversations within this group is actually to think a little bit outside the box, you know, what about housing associations? What about businesses, corporate,, or workplaces? So that really has made us think about who else and where our gaps are in terms of stakeholders, we had/have done quite a bit of work in just talking to people about what we’re up to what our priorities are as a charity.” — Versus Arthritis
Once they had started with the usual stakeholders, we got them to think expansively about their stakeholders — beyond the obvious — and define their ‘extreme’ stakeholders, users and groups — beyond the normal majority.
“How do we make something safe, but inviting, we decided to start talking about it. And from that, we started to identify the not-so-obvious stakeholders as well” — Sutton Hill Community Trust
“We kind of said in jest that a lot of young people in our area hang around outside McDonald’s, because they have access to free Wi Fi, hot food, it’s a bit of a hot spot in the community. And then all of a sudden, we were like, well, that’s a great place to go and get chatting to these young people and see if this, this programme is of interest to them.” — Rio Ferdinand Foundation
Often you can learn more from extreme users than you learn from the ‘mainstream’, as they tend to have a more acute relationship with the challenge or have developed a workaround solution you can learn from. In many instances, if you can solve a problem for an extreme user, it can make life better for everyone.
For example, Metro Blind Sports found a man who exercised regularly but was virtually blind. Metro learnt from him what his ‘workaround’ solutions were to make his treadmill work for him.
“It [customer journey mapping] has been really important to work out where are the key challenges that people are faced with when going to the gym, for people with sightloss[…] some of the equipment simply isn’t usable for people who are blind or partially sighted.” — Metro Blind Sport
Health and Nature Dorset wanted to find people who don’t visit green spaces to understand why. However the challenge is how to identify and find them, so they are exploring networks that may help them reach those people.
“We decided to start with organisations we’ve already have connections
with and really just go where the energy is. So where we find a blocker, and we’re not getting anywhere, we’ll just move on to another organisation and start to make progress.” — Health and Nature Dorset
3. Doing design research
Standard ‘consultation and piloting’ often doesn’t work, in the context of this work some of the reasons are:
- The audiences are under-served
- Real reasons why they are not active can be hidden or hard to get clear
- It can be difficult to engage the right stakeholders
- Some projects cover large geographical areas or broad audiences
- Challenges can be complex and systemic
All teams are trying to get to outcomes that help people overcome barriers and problems they have in being more physically active, but it’s common to feel the urgency to jump to solutions as soon as possible. Spending time really exploring and understanding the problems from various perspectives is essential if you are to develop relevant and sustainable responses.
“We could very much have jumped straight into building a skate park — but we’ve been going back to understand the needs of the people on the estate better, which will help inform a better outcome.” — Sutton Hill Community Trust
We’ve been introducing teams to design research methods to engage people and communities meaningfully in the process and build a qualitative understanding of the realities. It’s not about big quantities like market research surveys, it’s about smaller numbers of people but developing a richer, deeper understanding.
“I think what we found through our work working with frail older people, people living with dementia and other long term conditions, often who have become completely sedentary. The last thing on their mind would be taking part in physical activity. It’s about that emotional engagement and building up people’s emotional and physical confidence through that.” — Sporting Memories
For example it was through research The Bridge found that their space which provides facilities and a gym for women didn’t feel inclusive or like a warm and welcoming space for women. They also realised supporting women with physical and mental health conditions was something they hadn’t considered previously:
“…[we used these new research methods] to really understand not only the lived experiences of the woman that we’re working with, but also what they actually need or what they would actually benefit from. From [this] we came to this idea that our challenge was actually the fact that there’s a lack of community spaces for women with long term lived experiences of physical and mental health conditions.” — The Bridge
In various sessions teams heard from experts on various methods such as:
- Journaling — where users keep a day-to-day journal from their perspective. It enables you to ‘look through their eyes’ and see things that really share the realities.
- Observation & Interviewing — spending time with people and interviewing in context so that we can see the reality for them and they can refer to what’s happening around them.
- Prototyping — people usually think of prototyping as something done once you know what you need to make. But prototyping can, and in the early stages should, be ‘quick and dirty’ as an essential method to learn and iterate. It’s also a great way to co-create — if you get people involved in prototyping. This can be as simple as a sketch, model from card and paper or a simple storyboard.
- Experience Mapping — creating a visual map of someone’s step-by step flow of an experience over time. For example, the steps in taking a flight would be booking, packing, getting to the airport, checking in, etc. You would capture all of the insights from people across those steps including negative and positive things and especially capturing why.
4. Analysing research
Teams have been introduced to methods of how to carry out as well as analyse research. Analysis of design research is about looking across all research (both quantitative & qualitative) and clustering things that are related and articulating ‘insights’ that provide new perspectives on the topic. Often called an ‘ah-ha’ moment, where you suddenly see something new or more clearly.
“[There was] a huge epiphany for me in that not everyone wants to be online or sees why it’s helpful to be online. And also that we can’t replicate our face to face classes online. And so the club needs to be something different, it can do so many different things. We need to identify how it can be different, and how that enables us to reach a new customer base.” — Move It or Lose It
We encourage teams to do this ‘visually’, because this helps to collaborate and look across everything so you can more easily spot patterns. Project walls, whiteboards and online tools such as Miro make this process easier. Reviewing and collaborating with stakeholders in this process can help spot the patterns and provide new perspectives. These insights usually point towards ‘opportunity areas’ for alternative solutions.
“A total light bulb moment in the room where we realised that the local support centre has basically designed local people out due to antisocial behaviour, so they deliberately don’t want them to feel welcome. So that was a bit of a clanger. But it makes it really clear the challenges that you need to address…” — West Norfolk
Through research and engagement, you will learn new things about your challenge and you need to be prepared to then reframe it. Often through research that provides lived experience and deeper insights you discover your original challenge statement was not right, or it might be a different challenge, or it might be more focused challenges beneath your original higher level one. For example the team from Sutton Hill Community Trust were initially focused on reducing anti-social activity and creating a space for young people, but through research and reframing they realised the importance of making the space welcoming and useful to all ages, and encouraging intergenerational activities.
This is vital in preparing to generate ideas for solutions to the challenge, it needs to be, of course, the right challenge(s) to focus on and framed in a way to help drive good ideas for solving that challenge.
5. Coming up with ideas, prototyping and testing
While most teams are still busy with their design research phase, we introduced them to idea generation, prototyping and testing methods that will be useful beyond the end of the programme as they begin to produceideas and interventions.
Some of the methods we covered included ‘How Might We’ questions, a great way to convert their insights into opportunity areas — a great springboard to explore more innovative ideas. We also looked at how to turn insights into rich ideation briefs to stimulate creative thinking and idea generation workshops.
Finally we left the teams with guidance on prototyping and testing. A prototype is an early sample or model that allows you to test a concept, process or service with people to gain their feedback. What you learn from this feedback helps you to further refine a concept, process or service.
“A highpoint in the last few weeks has been, we have the opportunity to do some quick and dirty testing of our product with a care home group over the coming weeks, so that’s really good for us” — Sporting Memories Network
We shared a range of different methods, principles and types of prototype, their use is depending on what’s being developed: paper prototypes, wireframing, service blueprints, physical mock-ups, digital prototypes, role playing, and storyboarding.
“Had a great coaching session with a lightbulb moment on how we could communicate to people we’re working with, and show them what the concept is using a storyboard technique… I’m really excited about it.” — Sporting Memories Network
“And these challenges and barriers that we’re identifying are really complex, but they do offer lots of opportunities for different interventions, and we can do some different tests and learn projects around them.” — Health and Nature Dorset
What’s next?
Ways of working have changed because of being on the programme — enabling teams to collaborate and co-create more. It’s not easy to do this, but it’s essential in these types of challenges where problems are complex. Collaboration with people with different perspectives enables you to better tackle complex challenges where you simply cannot see the whole picture — you cannot create a credible solution alone.
“And we always knew it was going to be a long term project, or kind of feel like we’re not going to get to the end of this programme and go, we’ve got to get to the end. But we’ve got all the skills to be able to do that in small chunks and thinking…” — Health and Nature Dorset
Teams have shared how they have learned to think and work differently by being exposed to design expert speakers and the methods used. Those who are part of bigger organisations (councils and local authorities for example) shared how they are enabling and inspiring the wider organisation to do things differently and embedding these ways of working into their operations.
“It’s really changing our thinking about how we work with that community as a whole, not only on this project, but across the board.” — Sutton Hill Community Trust
“I’ve found for my work personally, being under the badge of a Sport England, Design Council, sponsored programme has really opened doors for me because it gives an air of credibility and interest and intrigue to something. […] Just as an example, we are going to have a public health funded Engagement Project in our area, specifically as a result of this programme, because they’ve heard us talking about research planning in a related field, and then approached us to say, ‘Oh, looks like there’s some really good stuff happening. Can we do this work in your area?’” West Norfolk
Across the programme there have been many common insights, challenges and relatable feelings shared between groups providing different services/programmes. It has been reassuring to hear that other teams have similar challenges. One key benefit that stood out was how this programme built their confidence as well as capability to be able to work on their challenges. The support from each other and the creation of a collective intelligence gave teams the energy to try things they otherwise would not have.
“I think we were a bit overwhelmed by the scope of what the potential of our project could be and I think going through the double diamond process has been really useful. And I think coming back to that, it’s not a one and done thing. It’s reiterating and it’s using that process and those tools again and again for different elements of what we ended up doing together.” — Health and Nature Dorset
“There’s something about being part of this group that gives you the confidence to try new things that I don’t think I would have felt comfortable with. ” Music Makes Us Move
Finally, for some it has completely changed their whole approach and they plan to rethink their whole operation as a result.
“Using a lot of the tools and the thinking around kind of development with participants, it has not only led us to kind of be a lot more specific as to what kind of things does the community actually benefit from, but rethink the way that as an organisation, we operate as a whole — all the way from the space we use and the way that we interact within our team. So it’s been really kind of very specific, but also quite big for us to engage in too.” — The Bridge
“Our major challenge has just been supporting those with long term health conditions and older people to get online and be active. And this has been absolutely a breakthrough in terms of changing our mindset and actually realising that we can actually reach the unreachable customer for us and reach those who can’t now get to community classes but can still exercise with us online.” Move It or Lose It
“It’s really changing our thinking about how we work with that community as a whole, not only on this project, but across the board.” Sutton Hill Community Trust
If you are interested in learning more about the teams and their challenges, listen to the Ideas to Action podcast, a series of thirteen short episodes interviewing the teams on the Community Innovation programme about how using design tools and methods have helped bring their ideas to action: https://www.ideastoaction.design/podcasts
For more information about the Ideas to Action programme please visit https://www.ideastoaction.design/
If you are interested in learning more about our design programmes or working with Design Council please email info@designcouncil.org.uk and you can sign up to our mailing list to keep up to date with Design Council news.
