Social Service Labs at IRISS

First of all, what is a social service lab? A Lab is a fancy name used to describe a method of innovating and improving services using a day-long experiment. The experiment is conducted in a ‘lab’ that is created to imitate natural surroundings, or even better – the lab is held in natural surroundings. Labs allow people to create highly personalised experiences that transform the users from being observed subjects for testing, into valued creators in the co-creation and exploration of emerging ideas.

Labs can be called different things depending upon the aim and outcome of the method, for instance: Experience Labs, Customer Experience Labs, Information Experience Labs, Insight Labs, Social Labs, Living Labs, Innovation Labs. However, each type of Lab requires an approach that is user-centered, creative, flexible and conducted in a way that is powerful and safe enough to offer an opportunity for radical innovation.

“Labs can be applied to diverse application domains such as lifestyle, healthcare, retail and hospitality”.

In the past this has been used to help business leaders to transform the way customers experience their products, services and brands through the use of mobile, social, cloud and advanced analytics technologies and to move away from transactional experience to deliver innovative solutions. Labs have been used previously by public and private sector service organisations to improve and innovate service provision. For example, they have been used by Philips to test product or technology innovations. They have also been used in NHS Grampian, Highland and Islands Enterprise (HIE) and Lab for Living as a means for testing healthcare innovations and by Deep Sight and Glasgow School of Art for testing design innovations.

This project is exploring the application of Labs in the social services sector in Scotland, with particular focus on what a lab might look like, how it might operate and what outcomes it could offer people in this sector.

We asked practitioners to pitch ideas to be tested within a lab environment and after careful deliberation we are now working with Day Care Centers in South Lanarkshire who are moving to an outcomes focused self directed support provision model, and with Positive Prison Positive Futures and Her Majesty’s Perth Prison who are developing mentoring training with prisioners and prison staff.

Testing how day care center staff will work using an outcomes focused approach with individuals when detailing a persons support plan

Day care centres in South Lanarkshire are moving from a programme driven service delivery model to outcome-focused arrangements. The current model of support is traditional where services are designed and delivered around physical service resources and groupwork programmes. Through this model, day care staff are used to working as service providers, enabling people to access activities, or developing a programme of activities that people may be interested in. However, a move towards outcomes focussed support means that day care staff will need to change the way in which they work, supporting individuals to create a detailed plan that identifies the most appropriate way to have their needs met and their outcomes realised.

There are numerous changes involved in this new way of working for day care centre staff. Changes at a conceptual level about service provision, staff roles moving from a provider to a facilitator, practically introducing new conversational approaches, having increased responsibility, and utilising existing and new knowledge in different ways. This change may evoke concerns, uncertainty and a feeling of being overwhelmed for day care centre staff, people who use services and carers. For this reason this Lab will create a safe space where staff can test how they will work using an outcomes focused approach with individuals and their carers when designing a personal support plan.

Establishing and testing a Code of Conduct for prisoners and prison officers to work together as colleagues to provide peer mentoring support

Positive Prisons Positive Futures (PPPF) aim to reduce offending in Scotland. They seek to do this through a number of processes, one of which is through the introduction of peer mentoring in Scottish prisons. Currently prisoners are provided with ‘listener schemes’ and ‘peer tutor’ support whilst in prison. However, they are provided with little support to help them plan for their release through development in cognitive life-skills such as assertiveness, self-esteem, communication and so on. Furthermore, prisoners are not currently supported to become peer-mentors for other prisoners within this environment.

PPPF are currently working with HM Perth Prison to provide peer-mentoring training that will enable prisoners and prison officers to work together as colleagues to provide in-house, mentoring support. IRISS will be working with PPPF and HM Perth Prison to develop an innovative approach in which prisoners and prison officers can co-produce a suitable code of conduct that will inform and guide how they provide peer mentoring. This will clearly establish the boundaries, roles and responsibilities of all those involved in the peer-mentoring . During this process prisoners serving short (<4yrs) and long-term (>4yrs) sentences at HM Perth Prison and prison officers will be invited to participate in two co-design sessions in which they will have opportunity to develop a clear code of conduct for working together in the capacity of peer-mentors. This will be the first time that prisoners and prison officers will be working alongside one another as colleagues with an equal voice.

The Lab will then provide a safe space for these groups to test this code of conduct in practice through a series of scenarios developed by PPPF and IRISS. Through this process we will also be able to test how prisoners and prison officers can become confident in working together in future. It is planned that, off the back of the Lab process with IRISS, PPPF will then take this approach and apply it more widely in the context of other Scottish prisons.

October 3, 2013October 3, 2013

So who designs and what are we designing for?

Before you read this post you may find it useful to read – What do we mean by design?

So who designs? Everyone of course!

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Simon (1996).

Design and social work and care professionals, to a certain extent, approach the design of situations in a similar manner. Donald Schon (1994) explained that many professionals work using spontaneous and largely unthinking actions that go hand in hand with a more conscious approach. This spontaneity Schon describes as ‘knowing in our action’ and a conscious approach ‘reflection-in-action’, or ‘knowledge in action’ – depending upon whether a person applies their sensemaking or theoretical knowledge (or both) to a situation.

Schon found that professionals tend to reflect-in-action when dealing with ‘situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict’ and use their training and experiences of similar situations to respond. He also points out that reflective practice, whilst widespread, suffers from a lack of acceptance in many professional circles due to the perception that professionalism is identified with technical expertise (in whichever guise), and that reflection-in-action is not considered a form of ‘professional knowing’. And the negative aspect of this practice can be that professionals can think in rather specialised, narrow view, and can become selectively inattentive to particular phenomenon that do not fit with their categories of practice.

And what are we designing for?

Philips Design believes Western societies are moving from industrial economies to experience, knowledge and transformation economies. An overview of these categories and an explanation are provided in the image below (Brand and Rocchi 2011).

From a design perspective some designers roles are changing as they engage with these new economic paradigms. A role that tended to be solely focused upon the making of things in the industrial economy, to one that is emerging as a facilitator, researcher, co-creator, communicator, strategist, capability builder and entrepreneur (Yee J et al. 2009). This has resulted in a challenge for designers in terms of how they are educated and trained ( Forlizzi and Lebbon 2002), and in some instances has resulted in designers becoming involved with human-centered methodologies (Badke-Schaub et al.), rather than being solely focused on the making of things. In such cases design can be said to be designing for experiences, the transfer knowledge and the transformation of how people contribute to society.

Thinking about how the social services designs for people, I would guess that most people from this sector would identify more readily with the experience, knowledge and transformation economies. It could be said that aspects of an outcomes focused approach (Scottish Executive 2006), when designing systems, services, knowledge and interactions, align with human-centered designerly approaches.

So, if designers that apply human-centered design approaches and the social services workforce are both designing their working practice around and for individual empowerment and collective issues that affect communities, what skills, knowledge and benefits can these professions contribute to support this ambition?

Through these posts I aim to explore the application of design in the social care sector to think about synergies and differences between approaches and practice. Importantly I want to reflect on the outcomes of these approaches to the individuals and communities who are the focus of such work ,and would like to hear from others interested in this topic area too – so please follow this blog, receive RSS updates, and comment away!

References

Badke-Schaub et al. – http://www.designresearch.nl/PDF/DRN2005_BadkeSchaub.pdf

Brand R, Rocchi S (2011) Rethinking value in a changing landscape, a model for strategic reflection and business transformation, Phillips Design.

Forlizzi J. Lebbon C (2002) From formal to social significance in communication design, Design Issues, Autumn 2002, Vol. 18, No. 4, Pages 3-13.

Schon D (1994) The reflective practitioner, Ashgate Publishing Limited, USA.

Scottish Executive (2006) Transforming Public Services : the next phase of reform, p31.

Simon H (1996) The sciences of the artificial, MIT Press, USA.

Yee J. Tan L. Meredith P (2009) The emergent roles of a designer in the development of an e-learning service, First Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation, 24th-26th November, Oslo.

September 27, 2013October 4, 2013

What do we mean by design?

I’m afraid it is quite difficult to explain, is something others struggle with, and others ignore the need to define.

“Design is a particularly fertile and challenging subject for the historian because it occurs at a point of intersection or mediation between different spheres, that is between art and industry, creativity and commerce, manufactures and consumers. It is concerned with style and utility, material and artifact and human desires, the realms of the ideological, the political and the economic. It is involved in the public sector as well as the private sector. It serves the most idealistic and utopian goals and the most negative, destructive impulses of human kind. The task of a design historian is a daunting one requiring as it does a familiarity with a multitude of topics and specialisms.” (Walker 1989).

This fertile ground is illustrated by the use of the word design in the English language. It is used as a noun and a verb, and its use in English vernacular takes on common and descriptive meanings. For example, when referring to the look and desire of something – ‘I like the design of those shoes’, or being used as a preprocessor and therefore having some kind of cultural significance – ‘designer jeans’, ‘designer brands’, ‘designer babies’.

In the field of designer, designers themselves find it difficult to agree on a definition of what design means and so many develop their own interpretations, definitions and meanings of design (Ralph and Wand 2009). Unsurprising really when the breadth of how design is categorised in design libraries ranges from: the history of design, materials, styles, fashions, the evolution of products, systems, environments and structures, theoretical perspectives, design movements, schools and institutions, design from different continents and countries, fashionable or popular designers, design groups, organisations and businesses, conferences, manufacturing companies, brands, journals and magazines, as well as different design fields, subjects and disciplines – which in themselves can be hard to categories or distinguish between in their purley textual, pictorial or a mixture of the two formats.

So with all this confusion it’s a wonder that anyone is able to design at all! Not so suggests one design researcher,

“…definitions serve strategic and tactical purposes in inquiry. They do not settle matters once and for all… Instead, they allow an investigator… to clarify the direction of their work and move ahead with inquiry in a particular thematic direction.” (Buchanan 2001)

However in this instance a perspective of design what resonates with the I&I programme is that:

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training; it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences.” (Simon 1996).

At IRISS our relationship between design and innovation and improvement (I&I) in the social services sector is evolving.

Part of our role is to test and reflect on what design can offer those in contact with social services. The blog posts I am writing will focus upon design, participatory design, visual communication and service design which all take a human centered approach but are rather large an ill defined areas. So to support understanding around the perspectives I am engaging with check out my other post – So who designs and what are we designing for?

References

First image sourced from – http://www.nngroup.com/articles/tag-cloud-examples/

Second image sourced from – http://www.123rf.com/photo_16578812_abstract-word-cloud-for-user-innovation-with-related-tags-and-terms.html

Buchanan R (2001) Design research and the new learning, Design Issues, Autumn, Vol. 17, No. 4, Pages 3-23.

Dilnot C (1984) The state of design history: part I, in Design Issues, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, pp. 4-23, MIT Press.

Ralph P, Wand Y (2009) A proposal for the formal definition of the design concept, in Design requirements engineering: A ten-year perspective lecture notes in business information processing, Volume 14, 2009, pp 103-136, Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Simon H (1996) The sciences of the artificial, MIT Press.

Walker J (1989) Design history and the history of design, Pluto Press.