Design thinking is everywhere
We just need to learn how to find it
I’ve always felt that the most fertile ground lies between practice and policy, which is probably how I ended up with an array of difficult-to-explain job titles. Whilst service design methodology is helping us articulate this middle ground, I’m most interested in showing how it can support natural innovators in the community sector do good things better.
We know that community workers provide the realpolitik and we provide replicable methodology that can, in theory, help unlock solutions. The reality is we need each other but the exchange isn’t always smooth. We’ve been doing a lot of interrogating as a team into what good service design looks like, and testing these values in different places and in different ways.
One of the ways is our Community Challenge Prize, a chance for us to offer money and space to the community sector to solve problems in their community. This prize is a challenge for us too. How can we support the rich, natural innovation of grassroots organisations? How do we create a trusting, meaningful exchange? Can this be achieved through design workshops?
96 challenge prize applications and 3 design workshops down, here are some learnings:
Help people tell their story. Conventional funding streams throw multiple theories, frameworks and terminology at people (what’s the difference between aims and objectives again? Is this idea SMART enough?). This can cloud intuition and confuse the narrative of their idea or the problem they want to solve. It’s important we don’t force practitioners through yet another set of methodologies but pick simple tools that help practitioners focus their thinking and pitch ideas in an easy, compelling way.
Design thinking without knowing it. ‘Testing’ and ‘prototyping’ aren’t new approaches and ideas, they’re behaviours and methods we’ve labelled. They’re what many organisations have been doing since day one. If you want to use these labels, frame them to elevate what people do already and help them to make it better.
Help people regain ownership of what they know and what they don’t. Evaluation is best when it improves services, not when it tells funders what they want to hear. Help people decide what matters to them. What do they really want to learn about their work? What does success look like to them and their service users? What are they not doing well and why? Share different ways of exploring and evaluating where they might be able to learn the most. Help demystify evaluation and give ownership back to them.
It’s got to be quick. Time and resources are precious when you’re constantly in the doing. Share ways to conduct user research on the job — help people become ethnographers as well as support workers. Share simple ways they can document what they’re learning as they go so they’re not massively adding to their pile of case-notes to write up. Share free and easy-to-use digital platforms they can adopt to test an idea without having to purchase new software. Make design thinking the everyday, not the stuff they do on the side.
The best critique comes from experts by experience. A large part of our work is interrogating why and how services are delivered, but it doesn’t just have to be us that does this. The real magic of the workshops so far have been when we’ve stopped talking, and got participants to pitch and critique their ideas to each other. Turn competitors into critical friends.
Do your user research first. Know your audience. Speak to community workers beforehand. Spend half a day shadowing them. Understand where they feel their strength and weaknesses lie, what support they’ve had before and why it did and didn’t work, where they’re at in terms of their idea and what they need to progress it.
There are many ways to work through problems and get to solutions. It’s not design methodologies themselves that impact people but how they’re adapted and applied in context. Our creativity and expertise lies in understanding people and the context they’re working in.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be producing a set of personas that represent the community centres we work with to help us understand how we help them do good things better.
