Collecting ideas
I am definitely for borrowing ideas from other industries and sectors and was rather excited by the card machine in the Co-operative shop on Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow the other day.
They are using the card machine as a new way of engaging with their customers and letting them know about other services that they offer – in this case it was legal services – which I certainly didn’t that Co-op offered – and fortunately do not currently need!
So this just made me think where else this could be used – perhaps in the pharmacy as part of a wellness initiative to ask if a customer has recently had a check up for diabetes. Or perhaps a local Tesco could advertise a local healthy eating event. Think about the times that you use a card machine a day and how many potential opportunities to engage with people there are.
Service Design Network Glasgow and the ALISS project
A few weeks ago I joined a group of people from across Scotland for the inaugural Service Design Network Scotland evening meet in a Glasgow pub.
Still quite a niche area, the Service Design Network is an informal network of groups around Europe and beyond – that brings together people who design services. The background to the network are a growing group of designers who instead of designing jewellery, or furniture, or posters – are using the tools and methods and applying them to designing services – both in the public and private sector. If you want a better explanation and some examples, the Design Council has a good explanation of service design.
Everybody I met at the event was in fact working in the design of public services – with some incredible and complex ideas for support people being developed. ALISS is a project that is exploring how information can be harnessed and delivered to support people with long term conditions struck me as an incredibly visionary operating model as well as an innovative open approach to developing the project.
ALISS’s approach is to actively search for opportunities that connect across groups in a positive way – and to say it clearer they look for opportunities such partnering with local schools to encourage school children to become researchers and populate the ALISS engine with local activities, groups and services. It is a very contemporary attitude to knowledge – from this way of gathering and harvesting information to how the service empowers people by recognising the changing way individuals use information – accessing vast amounts of information and making decisions about what it relevant to them.
Image copyright: Interaction Design Programme, Danish Design School
Case stories and Good Morning Glasgow
Recently I visited Nicky Thomson at Good Morning Glasgow, who was kind enough to give me several hours of her time to enable me to find out more about the service they offer to 300 vulnerable people in North Glasgow. She also introduced me some her clients who were just about to go on an organized trip to STV – one lady was kind enough to ask me along an offer I would have loved to take up.
I am currently searching – and actually will continually be – searching for great case studies of innovation and improvement in social services to celebrate doing things differently and analyse how success was achieved. If you have a story of innovation you want to share please do email me at lucy.robinson@iriss.org.uk.
The case studies will be available on the new IRISS when it is launched in July.
