Stewarding over a decade of Snook stories
You may have seen that today I announced that I’m moving on from Snook after co-founding it 12 years ago.
This project will never be finished.
Striving to create a future where people and the planet can thrive is a mission I will always be dedicated to. And Snook will continue to go on and do more brilliant work. The story is far from over.
To end this particular chapter, I wanted to take some time to look back, and highlight some of the fantastic teamwork that’s happened along the way.
These memories are deeply cherished by me. They don’t cover every project, that’s almost impossible at over 1000 projects to pick from, but some of the following I had a hand in.
Our first mission and principles
I made this poster as we began to build our understanding of what we were here to do. I’ve still got the original print of this — now 12 years old. Not much to say on the graphic design (!) but it’s such a big memento of our intentions when we started out.
MyPolice, UK’s first police feedback tool
MyPolice was our first project. We managed to successfully launch a live prototype of an online police feedback tool. It was designed for the public to feedback to the police, and be responded to in the open. Sounds like Twitter right? Well at the time, the police weren’t really on the internet much, so it was pretty landmark. A first example of a speculative prototype put to work, when we hit the streets to advertise it back in 2009.
The Matter
The Matter was a partnership with Young Scot. We were funded through the Design Council’s Working Well challenge to create a service that would support young people to develop employability skills — a personal goal of mine. It was a programme that introduced young people to media production; how to research, design and publish newspapers in response to a question set by a client.
Edinburgh Council set a question about youth voice. I remember one of them waving the paper around at the final show saying “I’ve made a f$^%£*ing newspaper, I’m going to take this home to show my mum, I can take this into a job interview and show them what I did.”
One of my favourite projects ever, to this day. In fact, the first group we worked with went on to repeat the process themselves. They made an issue about bullying, then commissioned us to design it for them. After finishing their newspapers, the group were quoted saying they “…believed they could do anything.”
Dearest Scotland
Dearest Scotland was a side venture that had its time during the Scottish referendum and was really carried by Cat Cochrane. It was an invitation to people to write about the future of Scotland. Over 1000 letters were sent to us digitally, through the post, and from community letterboxes. We produced a book which was launched by Nicola Sturgeon and provoked positive debate in Scottish Parliament.
Cyclehack
Another side hustle, with Matt Lowell and Jo Holtan. We built a global hackathon model that took place in over 70 cities from Mexico City to Berlin at one point.
Planners, citizens, local authorities and drivers came together to devise ways to reduce barriers to cycling and produce prototypes. Some of these stayed in the public domain whilst other relationships that were formed led to new bike schemes being commissioned.
The energy and passion of that community around the world was inspiring and I loved working with Matt and Jo to find a way to design a scalable platform for others to own. My favourite bit was seeing the logos each group made from our original design.
Hat tip to Adam St John and Markus Edgar Horness for the inspiration from Global Service Jam. We even won a Core 77 award for Social Impact!
To cap it off, Penny in your Pants, a simple hack to tie your skirt up whilst cycling, which came out of the 2015 CycleHack, scored 3.8 million hits on Vimeo and was featured in national newspapers and Cosmopolitan!
Free access to NHS and Government websites for citizens
Over the years we’ve done lots of work on digital inclusion and started seeing similar patterns in why people didn’t have access to the internet. From here, Anne Dhir asked the question; How might citizens have unfettered access to government digital services? We pushed a hypothesis that the internet should be like other utilities, with people having a fundamental right to access it.
Fast forward to the pandemic in March 2020 when we worked with UK mobile operators to give free access to NHS and Government websites to the general public. Big up Jason Caplin, Chris Ashworth, NHS X, NHS Digital and all the Telcos who made this a reality.
Such a great example of how a good idea, when shared, can turn into a reality. If you’re interested in finding out more on this, Chris started #clickzero to continue the challenge.
Automating access to free school meals
I believe we should do as much as we can for citizens who need support. But so often we make people do the hard work for the services they need.
Benefits shouldn’t be difficult to receive if you’re eligible for them, So we created a service and algorithm that lines up the data a council holds on (consenting) citizens to automatically allocate free school meals to those who are eligible for them.
Early results showed an increase of 1,841 in the number of children who registered for free school meals in North Lanarkshire and a reduction in administrative work for staff processing forms of 17 days a year.
All in all, the benefits going back into families was estimated at £1m, which is £400 per family a year.
A whole model for communities
The area around Craigroyston is where I grew up, I still have family there, so working in a space I knew well as a young person felt important.
We supported the wonderful Christine Mackay from Edinburgh Council to design a way of working together to look at improving outcomes for children and young people.
We heard stories about families working with more than 10 people a day coming through their door from social services, education and healthcare. Information breakdowns between siloed services were the backdrop to a community who wanted the best for their children — to ensure access to good education, keep them safe, and have opportunities for them to learn and progress locally.
We co-produced a roadmap with the council and community which was used for 5 years by the Total Craigroyston team as a guide to improving outcomes for children and families.
Their holistic community work had many positive outcomes, leading to reductions in school expulsions, increases in attendance, more children taking part in clubs and activities, a reduction in repeat youth offending and attendance at clinics 80% higher than normal.
Inclusive-recruitment.com
The design industry has a diversity problem. I’ve always wanted Snook to push beyond projects to look at how our industry can progress and address systemic issues like this.
We had been looking at how we change our approach to recruitment internally then opened this thinking up during #sdfest and developed ideas with other designers.
The result was the open online inclusive recruitment guide. We’ve had great feedback on it from other companies, with one saying 2 of their new hires declared it ‘the best onboarding process ever’ and many reporting using it to inform their recruitment process.
We’ve trained 1000s of people in design
I’ve trained universities, local authorities, big supermarkets, small charities, funders, social enterprises and ministerial departments in countries from the UK to America, Oman to Australia, the Philippines to Japan.
I’ve always believed if we want our systems and services to work for us, we need a basic literacy in design and what good looks like.
We all make design decisions that affect the user experience.
Teaching skills in prototyping so we can share ideas, seeing services as processes and experiences and learning how to dream up new sustainable futures has been such a passion of mine and I’ve met people years after training who’ve applied these skills to really amazing new services, organisations and personal projects.
Post 16 education review
We led a review of the post-16 education landscape with Scottish Government back in 2011.
We worked with students across the country to understand their perspective on choosing subjects, mapping their futures, how they make decisions and what we can do to help.
I produced a short film on it and we held co-design workshops with over 100 teachers, students and policymakers to review findings and make suggestions on how to improve the system. It was published on the Government’s website and was one of the first design-led approaches taken with policymakers to look at user needs that we were aware of.
I remember going to meet a college head 5 years later and he pulled out a tattered paper copy sharing how helpful the findings and recommendations had been to him.
Project 99 and Aye Mind
We worked with the marvellous Trevor Lakey and Heather Sloan at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde on an early exploratory project on young people’s mental health and technology.
It was the first full co-design tender I worked on. We partnered with Young Scot to co-design new mental health services and concepts with young people. Led by Roberta Knox, the participants came up with great ideas including Support Squared, an app to create positive mental health messages.
The project evolved into Aye Mind, becoming an information service for workers who are supporting young people.
From here we co-developed a range of solutions, my ultimate favourite being a positive gif maker to share supportive messages online (this was 2012, so we were ahead of the curve). I’ve heard from many professionals who have used the information to get up to speed on young people and social media and run our gif making workshops which we open-sourced as a guide to help young people talk about their mental health.
I loved finding out that one of our workshop participants won an international award for the gif she’d made about her dad’s heart attack.
Opening up planning in Loch Lomond
I was involved in helping the team at Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park think about how they design their planning consultations. They wanted to reach more people and make it easier for the public to understand what’s being scoped for development in the future. LIVE Park used a powerful mix of charrette-based community engagement, service design and integrated marketing communications to deliver a consultation process that engaged a broader audience and reduced objections. The park won a national Royal Town Planning Institute Award for Planning Excellence for the work. I’m blessed to work more closely with them as a board member now.
Start-Up Stirling
I really enjoyed working with Diarmaid Lawlor from Architecture Design Scotland and Andy Kennedy at Stirling Council on prototyping how we could rejuvenate the high street in the wake of the city centre becoming full of vacant shop units.
We worked alongside Ice Cream Architecture and helped steward the concept of a new shop co-run by local creatives. We led some initial community engagement and research to get the public thinking about the possibility of community-run high streets. Universities got engaged in central civic life and peppercorn rent based opportunities. Made in Stirling, the shop that came out of the project still exists today as a shared business run by creatives who sell their work there and is supported by Creative Stirling.
Supporting Vulnerable residents in housing associations
We worked with a housing association to explore the opportunity of repair workers entering residents’ homes being able to spot issues with vulnerable people and possibly avert problems. We ran a short prototyping phase, where we trained operatives and gave them an app to document concerns. This resulted in two people being identified who needed additional support, validated by support workers.
We worked with the housing association to define vulnerability, investigate the ethics of flagging it and prototype our way through the service, to then build an integration to the main software used by operatives on one drive.
Know How
Know How was a programme initiated by Broadway cinema in Nottingham to develop digital capabilities across the cultural sector in the East Midlands.
I loved this work — working closely alongside Andy Young and Alex Clarke, and Mat Trivett — who was originally our client before I had the joy of welcoming him to Snook.
We ran two cycles of a Know How programme where we trained cultural organisations in design, digital thinking and agile, culminating in a live hackathon where they developed minimum viable products with developers.
We had some great success on the project including People Dancing who were funded to develop their service offering dance therapy to people with Parkinson's.
Working in our first home town, Glasgow
Glasgow was my home town and Snook’s first home. We got to work on some wonderful local projects.
A few of my favourites included helping Glasgow City Council redesign their website — ensuring that citizens were involved in the process, and working on the Technology Strategy Board’s future city investment — scoping designs for a future city where citizens thrive.
One of my favourite concepts was for a circular economy exchange service where bulk uplift services would advertise what was being thrown away, with a short window for people to pick it up.
Still think there’s mileage in that somewhere.
Samaritans
There are many people who need support with their mental health but would prefer to avoid talking to someone on the phone — and/or need alternatives to the traditional Samaritans helpline.
We’ve worked over the last few years with the Samaritans to research using webchat and apps to connect and support people outside of the main phone line.
I can’t say much more about the work in-depth but it’s been a humbling experience for our teams researching and meeting people who use and deliver this essential service It’s led to us considering more deeply how to work with vulnerable people who are during research. And also how to protect our own staff when hearing about heavy topics at work.
Scouts
‘We call it the Snook steps’’ is what I heard back from our client at the Scouts when we delivered a new vision for the volunteer journey.
I can’t tell you how long I had hoped we’d get a chance to work with them, and after leading several pitches I was thrilled to have their confidence to invest in working with us.
Each week, almost half a million young people enjoy fun, friendship and develop skills for life with the Scouts and to reach even more, they needed to better support and motivate their adult volunteers. So we reimagined the volunteer experience and included a simple plan for change to align their ongoing transformation projects.
We co-designed an adult volunteer journey that’s fit for the future and had fun with volunteers whilst doing it. Hopefully, they will soon call it the Scout steps. We loved the work and it was a wonderful journey to go on together.
Cork County Council
Oh, my little Irish buddies. This project was such a joyful experience with simply wonderful local government folks in Cork County.
We led a training programme in service design whilst working on live projects — what we call Design in Practice. We had some good wins on reducing the cost and resources to deliver repair services but it was the process we really loved with them.
They were so kind, so welcoming and so eager to make change happen and they took design thinking and infected the rest of the council with it.
We will never forget those scones and tea breaks. And my personal highlight was being given the ‘President’ suite (which had a sauna in the bedroom!) one night as I got to know the hotel staff across the road.
Their deputy CEO called our work transformational and I don’t think there is a higher accolade than that.
Design on the inside and DOTI Fest
DOTI (short for Design on the Inside) was an affectionate title I came up with for a series of events where we brought people together to share the realities of designing and delivering services.
We ran lots of free events putting together panels of speakers at small gatherings in Glasgow and London. This was really pushed forward by Emma Parnell and the wider team at Snook. In 2019, we ran DOTI fest, a whole day conference in London.
This was like taking the Snook essence and bottling it up into a conference. From the name badges made out of paper that could be planted to grow wildflowers to the vegan food and recyclable decorations, every detail felt like Snook had come home. We had some fantastic feedback on the event.
Building live products
Over the years, we’ve been growing more capabilities in the team to work on digital products. An old favourite of mine was a product we created for Moodle that integrated Mozilla Open Badges to award students collectable digital badges on the internet for their work.
One of my recent favourites was watching the team deliver a new digital travel product called Plan Ahead with Camden Council. It supports users to plan their journeys in advance and travel with greater independence by providing clear, easy to read directions and images.
Systems Changers
Systems Changers was a programme funded by the Lankelly Chase Foundation and developed by The Point People. The aim was to look at how the insights and perspectives of those who support people who face severe and multiple disadvantages in society can transform the wider system.
We ran two cohorts over 3 years, holding residential events in the countryside, to build skills in systems thinking, design and change.
Each System Changer initiated tests and prototypes ranging from service re-designs to events bringing senior decision-makers together with people who have lived experience.
I’ll never be able to find the words to share how special a project this was, but the people I met and the stories I heard blew me away. I know from our reflections it had positive impact on participants too;
“Systems Changers helped me to look at problems systematically and holistically. Rather than just looking at an issue from the point of view of my organisation and our clients, we learned to look at the situation from the point of view of every agency or individual in the system. This has changed my way of looking at things and has allowed me to look for solutions in a new way, and to see things I didn’t see before.”
It gave me the space to design and deliver one of my favourite talks ever on Cholera and poo and Systems Change. Strange combination but I like to think it worked.
Designing governance
Who doesn’t want to work with the crew at Civic? I was fortunate to work alongside Immy Kaur, Andy Reeve and their team with Snook’s Keira Anderson to look at how they could design their governance models to balance the needs of the team, their users and their ‘business’.
It was deep and challenging work, attempting to avoid getting sucked into implementing standard governance practice. We worked together on reviewing the needs of both staff and the business, designing new models of delivery and getting some rituals and rhythms into place — from how holidays work to their membership model.
I loved this team, and their work and really practising the reality of designing governance.
Design Patterns for Mental health library
My passion project! Starting with Public Policy Lab, and then partnering with Barnardo’s and Nominet, we built a library of patterns — a set of best practice guidance to improve mental health products and services.
This is a project that’s taken over three years to bring into fuller fruition from our first minimum viable product. It really helps articulate how I see design pattern libraries as being useful to industries to crowdsource good practices and reduce the harm done by bad design.
Culture shifts with British council
Some of our team, myself included, spent time working with the British Council to explore creative economies abroad and bring people together to develop new networks. I travelled to Athens, Dubai and Cairo, whilst some of our team spent time in Nairobi and Madrid.
We had the opportunity to meet so many wonderful people and I’ve never had more fun at work than experience prototyping a driving license service with over 100 people in a hotel in Cairo.
Tech versus abuse
Domestic abuse takes many forms: psychological, physical, sexual, financial, and emotional, with control and coercion at its heart. Its impact on individuals and families is profound and long-lasting.
In 2016, we undertook a collaborative research study about the use of digital tools to support people affected by abuse, working with Think Social Tech and SaferLives.
We listened to the stories and experiences of people who’ve been affected by abuse and presented an open report and steer to Comic Relief on how to launch their £600,000 fund to develop responses across the sector.
Designing social prescription services from early hypothesis to a data standard
I’ve long been a supporter of the concept of social prescription- enabling health professionals to refer people to a range of local support and activities.
The result confirmed social prescription could improve health outcomes but the real challenge in all of this is a data challenge.
There was no one way that community data, — (things like lists of organisations and activities people could be prescribed) was being shared consistently.
Fast forward to 2019 and we were working on a project — Open Community — funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s Fix the Plumbing fund with Adur and Worthing, Buckinghamshire and Devon County Council.
The aim was to research and develop solutions to community data sharing in England and Wales.
The project was funded through multiple rounds and working with Porism, we successfully managed to get local authorities to adopt Open Referral, a community data standard.
This means that services can more easily share information making it easier to improve outcomes for people.
ALISS
ALISS was a precursor to all the work on data standards in 2009.
It was the first ever Snook commission. Working with Scottish Government and NHS, our dear friends (and clients!) Christine and the late Derek Hoy, Andy Hyde and Peter Ashe, we undertook research to understand where and how people could be better supported to live independently with long term conditions.
We then ran a series of co-design events called supporting pipes to bring people together to think about what kinds of services could be built on the back of a central data and information standard for Scotland.
I have such fond memories of that team and such gratitude for them believing in such a new and young company!
The Community
I have made so many friends for life through going to conferences, Twitter, events like the Global Service Jam and through the cities I’ve lived in.
I know we have our moments of introspectively looking at our practice online from time to time. But take a step back — what a wonderful community we’ve built up as the discipline expands in impact and evolves to meet more and more challenges.
I’ve done my best in what time we had between projects to facilitate conferences. A particular favourite was when a group of Finnish delegates came over and we brought together who we knew was doing service design work in Scotland (not a lot at the time!) to make their trip worthwhile. We put a conference together called Renewing public services by design where I remember Mike Press closing splendidly.
Behind the projects are the people
It’s the team who make the work. And they are and have been incredible to work with.
I feel blessed every day to have such fantastic and talented people around me.
And it’s such a pleasure and source of pride to see how they evolve and where they go next.
We’ve had ex-Snooks go on to be the first designer in Government in Australia, set up their own agency in Brussels, join Governments around the globe to make services better for citizens, go on to lead charities in design, and take on design leadership roles.
And many become our clients as they join new organisations. I couldn’t be happier to know that, even if for a short time, we had some of this incredible talent inside our studio walls and were a small part of their story.
But it’s also the fun, and oh boy, has there been a lot of fun.
From a game show in the Scottish wilderness where our team all put their heads inside a suitcase and sang (videos not permitted to share!), to karaoke nights where C’est La Vie had to be played before you were allowed to go home. The knitting and craft crews chatting and making small treasures together at lunchtime and the travelling sourdough starter in Glasgow.
Even in remote working times, the camaraderie, silliness and mutual support continue — people go out of their way to share recipes, pet-pics, random observations and to thank each other every day.
The ‘Overhead at Snook’ Slack channel has me laughing out loud every day. My favourite all-time quote is from our friend Jo, now back in Oz, asking me, “Who is Ben Nevis?”
All of these moments and more have made this journey such fun to be on and taken the edge off the late nights and weekend working that came with the job.
Looking back
My job involved writing loads of proposals, in fact, I have a folder of stuff people didn’t fund us for, totalling about 300 days of ‘lost’ time.
But while you can regret those periods of writing proposals on your first or last day of holiday, it really is training and practice for the opportunities people do move forward with.
And you need to believe that. Each proposal exercises muscles and keeps you fit for the next challenge. Nothing is lost.
It is such a big body of work, and in some ways, I feel sad to move on from the question of ‘what else can we do?’ But my time here is up for now.
Writing this has been cathartic for me and if you made it to the end — good job!
I needed to look back and remember. I’m so proud of what we’ve done here.
Our work wasn’t just the projects, it was the stories we told about them. I know these stories inspired people to think about how we can operate in a different world and for the industry, to show how we might work with people to design a world where people and the planet thrive together.
These stories are everything to me and re-telling them again and again and again was about stewarding and protecting the ideas we developed into a new world but only when it was ready for it.
Share your story
It’s hard for me to conceive of the impact we’ve had beyond our project work.
I’ve had the privilege of meeting people all around the world teaching design, talking about our work and making cool stuff happen. I’d love to capture that, so if you have a moment it would be wonderful to know if you have a story to tell about working with us, attending an event or reading about stuff we produced.
Anything — it would make my day.
Finally, if you just want to write to me I’m still here on Twitter and you can contact me here via my website.
Until my break is over, see you on the other side.
