Not if, but how we involve people

The way we encourage participation determines the value we get from it.

The question of whether or not we should involve people in design and decision making is a debate that must surely be over.

Co-creation, co-production and co-design are phrases that are now commonplace in a lot of industries and used interchangeably to describe the process of designing with people.

At Good Things Foundation one of our core design principles is ‘Design with, not for them’. ‘Them’ being the people that the members of our Online Centres Network work tirelessly to support. So it’s ingrained in all of our work that we involve people in the design process to ensure that the services and products we provide are useful, usable and used to their full potential.

The focus can now move to how we involve people — ensuring that we’re doing so in a way that gives real value to our team and the people we’re designing with.

A little context

For the last 4 years I’ve been doing ‘Service Design’. It hasn’t been my sole role or even my job title until I joined Good Things Foundation.

Now that it is my job title, I’m regularly asked what Service Design is.

It’s not the easiest question to answer. It’s easier to show, not tell people what it is. But my current best answer is ‘Designing with context’. That context comes from the people we’re designing with and the places that they operate in.

Bringing people into the room isn’t always enough

My experience of involving people in design has very much been based on bringing people into the room with you to give them a voice and an opportunity to shape the services and products your designing.

This is great — a huge and necessary shift from the days of designing behind closed doors. We’re involving people, we’re getting their opinions and they’re answering our questions.

But is this really the best way to design with people? This question is what’s challenging us every day.

Bringing people into your office or inviting them to a nice photogenic building with floor to ceiling glass meeting rooms is one way to involve people but it comes with some drawbacks.

It creates a false environment — no matter how much we try not to, we’re setting people up to behave and provide answers in a manner that they feel we’re expecting of them.

What people say when they’re in a workshop and what people do when they’re back in their own environment can be two very different things.

The analogy I like to use to illustrate this — imagine you’re walking down the street and you bump into someone you haven’t seen for years. You get chatting, you ask how they are, what they’ve been up to, you swap numbers and you say we must get together — go for a drink and have a proper catch up. How many people actually leave that situation and give it another thought let alone pick up their phone and arrange that drink.

I know I don’t.

And there are reasons why we don’t — we have commitments — work, family, friends that we have kept in touch with that all place much higher on our list of priorities. This is valuable context to understanding why we behave in a certain way. Context that is missing from that initial meeting on the street.

By creating these false environments, we’re missing so much.

Go to where the people are

Something that we embed in all of our work at Good Things Foundation is the idea that we need to go to them. Not bring them to us.

The benefits of doing so are huge. We get to understand their environment, feel it, smell it. We see how people interact — what’s important to them, what’s not. We see their body language and hear their tone of voice. And we understand their needs, not just their opinions.

This is the context!

We need to break away of the standard go-to workshop approach where we fill the walls with post-it notes hoping that the answer will show itself**.

Let’s get out, go and see some of the places that we’re designing for. Meet the people in their environment. Stop asking questions — start a conversation and then listen.

The value of a conversation is far greater than the answer to a question.

As designers, if we design everything from the comfort of our Aeron chairs, in the company of a few personas on the wall, we’ll design great transactions and services that will satisfy the objectives of a project but we’ll be missing the key to making them useful.

What about the networks and relationships that people have around them that help get them to a point at which they are willing to engage with a process in the first place? You can’t truly understand this context without being there and seeing it.

We’re not experts at this yet, we’re still learning. But the key for us it to keep challenging our own assumptions and beliefs that we’re doing and going far enough.

How do we know when it’s working?

This post is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Delib Practical Democracy event in Edinburgh last month.

As part of my talk, I was asked this question ‘How do we know when it’s working?’. A great question. Feeling great about a process doesn’t mean it’s delivering the value that we think it is.

To answer this question I used the examples of our work in Nailsea and Hastings, two of our NHS Widening Digital Participation pilots where we’ve been to where the people are. We’ve challenged ourselves to find the furthest first and embedded ourselves in their environments.

Both of these projects are still in the early stages but we’re already starting to see some promising results that we can tie back to the way in which we engaged people in the design process.

The best example of this is how the team at 65 High Street in Nailsea are sharing their insights from the pilot project on their Medium channel. We can see the people who they’re talking about. We’ve met them and they were the ones who came into the pop-up shop and helped us design a space and a service that they needed.

So how far can we go?

Where does it stop? When do we know that we are going far enough?

We don’t know the answer but what we do know is that if we stop now and think we’ve cracked it, we’ll be missing a trick.

Let me know what you think

I know it’s not always that simple — I’m under no illusion that here at Good Things Foundation we’re in a very fortunate position to be able to spend a lot of time with the people we support — but there are some really simple changes we can make that will make a huge difference to what we design.

I’d love to hear what people think — let’s get the debate started. Write a response below or get in touch — tim@goodthingsfoundation.org / @timbrazier

** Don’t get me wrong — there is a time and a place for a good old workshop with walls filled with Post-it notes. Design is a toolbox and about choosing the right tool for the job — and this is a very useful tool.