Responding to the government’s Ageing Society Grand Challenge
Design Council and the University of Arts London have been working in partnership since 2016 with a shared vision to support students to develop the skills they need to transform the world around them. Our Design Academy programme has supported more than 75 students from the London College of Communication (LCC) to apply their design skills to solve some of society’s biggest challenges.
This year, we were delighted to be asked by LCC MA Service Design to help them design a sprint as part of their programme of events being held during the London Design Festival. Open to anyone, the sprint focused on the government’s Ageing Society Grand Challenge and achieved amazing sign-up from a wide variety of backgrounds including lawyers, management consultants, people in later life and LCC students, all eager to understand more about service design. Even more exciting for us, was that some of our Design Academy alumni and current MA Service Design students at LCC were able to put their skills into practice by supporting the teams throughout the sprint.
Working collaboratively with colleagues from the Centre for Ageing Better, we kickstarted the sprint with an overview of Design Council’s Framework for Innovation, some great examples of innovation already underway in this space from our Transform Ageing programme and key insights and evidence from the State of Ageing Report 2019.
Four teams worked intensively over 10 days to research, develop and test a service design to respond to one of the challenges of an ageing population. Here is a snapshot of what they developed:
Team 1: Looked at Healthy Ageing by creating a proposal for a community garden. The garden looked to address increasing social isolation and physical inactivity amongst ageing communities. They proposed outdoor exercise classes, raised beds for growing fruit and vegetables and a shop/cafe to cook and sell food from grown in the garden. The group also suggested opening the garden to school and nursery trips to encourage intergenerational activities and community transport bookable by text or phone to remove the barrier for people to attend.
Team 2: Looked at Safe and Accessible Homes and came up with an idea for a community-led skills-exchange service to carry out home maintenance for older people, creating a “later life community association for housing maintenance” working through local community centres. This overcame the often-complex systems which determine older people’s access to maintenance services and tackles the social isolation suffered by many people in later life by providing an opportunity to exchange skills.
Team 3 proposed a way of promoting more Connected Communities asking, “How might we create opportunities to build strong and supportive relationships across generations?” Their idea proposed using cardboard coffee sleeves to exchange short stories about your life — using everyday activities like buying coffee to bring stories and experiences of older people to all generations.
Team 4 tackled Fulfilling Work with a brilliant idea to create a new service for people looking to transition from long-term, full-time careers to working part time, using their insight and experience to help start-ups and SMEs. They proposed a digital and physical platform which could “Leverage lifetimes of wisdom to help small and medium enterprises”, combining a digital matchmaking service and training delivered in dedicated centres for both the older people and their SME clients — the service demonstrated the huge benefits each group could have in working together. This service really captured the panel’s imagination — tackling the challenges we all have ahead of us in working for longer and feeling fulfilled by making the most of our skills and experiences.
The groups worked at an incredible pace to come up with ideas for services that were firmly rooted in user-research. By spending time with people who have lived experience, they were able to really understand the challenges faced by a wider range of people in later life. We were lucky to be joined on the panel by Paul Springer, a consultant at Age UK Lambeth who at 72 works 6 days a week and leads an active life, running 5k every day. He reminded the groups that, one of the biggest challenges ahead is casting aside our own preconceptions of people later life. With all of us remaining active and employed for longer we must shift our mindsets to create inclusive services that work for the widest range of people possible — regardless of age.
This week UKRI have released the first round of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) Healthy Ageing Trailblazers to encourage businesses and public sector led collaborations, including social enterprises, to develop and demonstrate how products, services and business models which support people as they age will be adopted at scale: https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/440/overview. This is an opportunity to work towards meeting the UK government’s ambition to give its citizens 5 extra healthy, independent years of life by 2035, while narrowing the gap between the experiences of the richest and poorest. We believe design plays a crucial role in bringing these ideas these ideas to life, by putting collaboration and insight at the heart of designing services that allow us to stay independent, productive and connected for longer.
