Adaptive Path Blog

Jennie Winhall

Red Project: Addressing social and economic issues through design-led innovation. How public services can be transformed through design skills. In the past, did work redesigning prisons (design for rehabilitation). Did work on domestic energy consumption, and redesigned better interactions with Members of Parliament.

Big push on public sector reform, for the first time looking at the experience of the end-user.

There are limits on modernizing existing services. Shells of services were designed a long time ago and society has changed. Demand outstrips supply. And now looking at a new range of social issues (climate change, obesity, etc.)

Need to help people co-create their own decisions. Which would be fine if people made rational decisions, but they don’t. Easier to build new power plants than to change every person’s behavior.

The public sector needs a new generation of public services. Preventative, co-created, and around individuals.

Health care project: can we use the characteristics of communities of participation to create new health care services? Redesign the interactions with patients and doctors to be more collaborative and interactive. Created a set of cards with issues and statements that the patient can use to talk to doctors about. Shifts the power from the system to the patient. It forces a different kind of behavior. Very adaptive–allows doctors and patients to get straight to the problem.

Exercise project: How do you make exercise social? Activmobs. werearemobs.org Self-organizing system. Rather than try to prototype it ourselves, actually made three activmobs and watched what they did and designed the system around what arose. Social dynamics were very important: support and peer pressure. A number of the tools developed were about increasing self-awareness. What is important to users. Also a lot about progress and visualizing progress. Especially as a group. It’s important to make things visible.

Designing for Behavior Change
Go beyond shaping products, to realizing that the products we make shape behavior. Metrics have to be meaningful to individuals. Self-assessment.

Can’t use a delivered service process. People need to shape the service itself and thus you can’t design the service entirely. You need to distribute tools to people.

Aspiration is important. Users have to want to participate.

Services have to be more desirable than owning the product itself.
New kind of disciple: transformation design.

Transformation Design
Half the skill of design is identifying the correct problem to solve. Problems are complex and require systems thinking and inter-disciplinary thinking. Integrate non-design aware people into the process.

Reinventing the organization to deliver the new offerings. Top-down structures aren’t working. Need to embed a culture of innovation onto an organization so that when designers leave, it doesn’t all collapse. Build capacity, not dependency.

Lots of non-traditional design outputs. Things like job descriptions, not just things.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 11:50 am and is filed under Conference commentary, Design leaders, Service Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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