The document discusses the Design Council's approach to using design as a framework for innovation in public services. It advocates taking a people-centered approach through observation and understanding user needs, visualizing concepts, collaboratively prototyping ideas through iteration. This allows organizations to manage risk, solve problems efficiently and deliver better outcomes for citizens. The Design Council offers coaching support to help public bodies apply design-led approaches to challenges.
3. ‘to promote by all practicable means the improvement of
design in the products of British industry’ - 1944
4. The Design Council today
Design Commission Restarting Britain (2013) report states:
“The challenge for the coming decade is how best to ensure
that public services are reformed swiftly to meet 21st
century needs at a cost that taxpayers can sustainably
afford.
We believe significant rewards- in terms of maximising
policy effectiveness and lowering overall costs – could be
reaped by the public sector taking a proactive, deliberate
and professional approach to ‘designing’ what it does for
its citizens.”
11. Innovating through design
Deliver
Solutions which work
Develop
Potential solutions
Define
The area to focus upon
Discover
Insight into the problem
12. Innovating through design
Deliver
Solutions which work
Develop
Potential solutions
Define
The area to focus upon
Discover
Insight into the problem
Being people centred
Being visual
Being collaborative & iterative
13. Innovating through design
Deliver
Solutions which work
Develop
Potential solutions
Define
The area to focus upon
Discover
Insight into the problem
Being people centred
18. Why be people centred?
• Don’t create ideas in a vacuum.
• Seek to understand people’s needs….
by spending time with them.
• Observing people and their
environments up close can reveal
fresh opportunities to innovate.
19. Innovating through design
Deliver
Solutions which work
Develop
Potential solutions
Define
The area to focus upon
Discover
Insight into the problem
Being people centred
Being visual
20. What’s this?
Quadruped. Graminivorous, forty
teeth, namely twenty-four grinders,
four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive.
Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy
countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs
hard, but requiring to be shod with
iron. Age known by marks in mouth”
“
Charles Dickens – Hard Times
27. “ The customer insights we
captured through the
design techniques achieved
more than a thousand
words ever could.”
Lindsey Craig, Project Team,
Lewisham Housing Options Centre
29. Why visualise?
• Working visually makes things simpler.
• Making things simpler aids
communication.
• Communication is key to developing
ideas and innovating quicker and
more successfully.
30. Innovating through design
Deliver
Solutions which work
Develop
Potential solutions
Define
The area to focus upon
Discover
Insight into the problem
Being people centred
Being visual
Being collaborative & iterative
37. Why collaborate & iterate through
prototyping?
• Testing an idea early helps manage risk.
• Quick and cheap mock-ups provide early
feedback and can save money.
• Almost anything can be prototyped to test
thinking before bigger investments are made
• Encourages ‘smart’ failure.
38. Innovating through design
Deliver
Solutions which work
Develop
Potential solutions
Define
The area to focus upon
Discover
Insight into the problem
Being people centred
Being visual
Being collaborative & iterative
39. Service Design
and that happen over time.” “
Design for experiences that reach
people through many different touch-points,
40. Service Design
• Holistic & end-to-end
• Channel & touchpoint agnostic
• Cross silo & business ready
41. Service Design
Delivering great customer experiences increases
revenues, drives loyalty, and reduces the cost to
serve.
57. Risk management
£1 - £10 - £100
For every £1 spent solving a problem
in design stage, it costs £10 to tackle
in development and £100 to rectify
after launch.
58. Design Council support
Sustained design coaching for teams around a service or organisational challenge :
• Coaching with a team for 6-9 months, to frame a challenge, identify solutions and embed new
ways of working
• Match funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
• More than 30 public bodies coached to date
• Issues include hospital pharmacy and homelessness services
designcouncil.org.uk/our-services/service-transformation
59. Thank you
for further information at:
www.designcouncil.org.uk/leadership
leadership@designcouncil.org.uk
020 7420 5275
Notes de l'éditeur
We are an independent charity – and all charities have clear missions that benefit society: ours is to improve lives in the UK.
Our belief is that great design grows the economy and improves our quality of life – and the more that the UK makes effective use of design, the stronger the UK will be.
- We work with private sector companies of all scales – from start-ups to multinationals
- We work with public service providers
- We work with Government - both central and local
- And we work with charities and other non-profit organisations
And this is what it looked like. Glad to say our board is more gender balanced now: 4-2 in favour of women.
In 1944 the emphasis of what we did it was more about the what of design than the how: the output not the process…the noun, not the verb.
This is an early meeting of the Council deciding how it would achieve the aim of improving the design in the products of British Industry and therefore help economic growth.
So what’s changed? Need remains – “localism” agenda, austerity – better recognised, but even more of a challenge?
The Big Challenges:
Reduced resources (people and funding);
Increased, more complex demands;
Risk aversion;
Commercial competition;
Low morale;
Silos
We work with businesses (from manufacturers tech start ups, developers), government (both central and local) and design sector (practice and research communities).
We do that through three main areas of delivery:
Our Challenges work: tackling big, intractable social problems (e.g. hospital infection; violence in A&E; dementia care)
CABE advisory services in the built environment (developers, local authorities).
Design Leadership Programmes – these are our coaching programmes across (three areas: business/public sector; and science/high tech ventures.)
In this presentation I will focus on our work with business and science ventures.
Design is not just the output, the product or the service but the process behind creating it.
SO how do designers go about innovating
Not just a noun but a verb,
Note to DA’s
Most people think design is something to do with flowery wallpaper or fancy looking products
For a long time it has been this (and in many places still is)…
Design can influence many aspects of a complete system.
Quick recap last workshop
Well most people start here.
Someone presents the problem to people who then come up with solutions.
For a long time this was how the design industry worked.
But over time, designers (or anyone else responsible for coming up with ideas) have pushed back a little further to better understand the problem itself, often reframing it.
And to ask -
Why is that a problem…?
Who does it affect?
What are the real issues and challenges behind the problem?
And how can we better understand those issues?
So a business might say to us we want a new website or brochure to make us look more professional – what are you trying to achieve?
Working this way makes sure we’re working on and solving the right problem in the first place, that we really understand it - the real cause not just the symptoms
It also enables us to identify where the real growth opportunities in the future might be
The better you define the problem and understand it the better and more successful the solutions you do will be.
Throughout this process there are 3 principles that we apply …no matter what the challenge
Being people centred - getting customer insightsto identify opportunities by spending time with people
Being visualto aid understanding of both the problems and solutions
Being collaborative and iterativeto reduce risk by testing and evolving before being launched and roll out
These 3 core aspects help innovation happen and happen successfully
….and its these 3 principles we’re going to share with you today
Note to DA’s
Designers understand what people need by spending time with them in their own homes.
This photo comes from a project the Design Council did in Bolton, working with people who had diabetes to improve their interactions with the health service.
http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/Case-studies/Diabetes-management/Working-with-patients-to-create-a-new-kind-of-service/
In a hospital in the states, the leadership team were keen to know what the customer experience was like. For the first time on a strategic management project, they hired a design consultancy.
Because of their experience of working with management consultants, they were expecting to be presented with a lot of data and charts and graphs and reports.
What they were shown was this (20 minutes of it)
Because this is a very common patient experience. Filming the customer journey and using what they captured to help the management better understand where some missed opportunities may lie. “You see 20 minutes of ceiling tiles and realize the most important thing is telling people what’s going on.”
Harrison fisher: In danger of becoming the best manufacturer of products no one wants to buy.
Because they hadn’t understood that the customer had moved on and wanted different things
Its all about getting close and having some empathy with the people who use your services
How can YOU get really close to the people who are your customers to better understand what really matters to them?
And what new opportunities could you reveal by doing this?
Throughout this process there are 3 principles that we apply …no matter what the challenge
Being people centred - getting customer insightsto identify opportunities by spending time with people
Being visualto aid understanding of both the problems and solutions
Being collaborative and iterativeto reduce risk by testing and evolving before being launched and roll out
These 3 core aspects help innovation happen and happen successfully
….and its these 3 principles we’re going to share with you today
Ask the audience what Charles Dickens is describing here (it should normally take some time for them to realise it’s a horse)
Make the point that even one of our great writers can be a bit wordy/unclear at times.
A picture is worth a thousand words – sometimes its easier and better to use a photo to get your message across
Note to DA’s
...even a stick figure is useful to communicate with!
The answer is 14
Much easier to see when visually differentiated.
The human brain processes visual information at 10x the speed of listening to words… (1250Mb/s v 125Mb/s)
Design and sexual health (DaSH)
This image comes from the DaSh project that the Design Council ran during Dott 07 in Gateshead in the north east of England.
The design team from Options UK were working with Gateshead PCT to develop a new sexual health service. The designers wanted to speak to people about what they wanted from a sexual health service, but they found it hard if not impossible to interview people directly about what they wanted because...
People hadn’t been to a sexual health service before, so had no idea of what would make it better
Even if people had been to a sexual health service, they weren't going to tell the designers that! – so many claimed not to know what would have made it better.
To get around this the designers created a set of interview cards. They broke the experience of visiting a sexual health service down into a services of steps -
from how it was advertised, to the clinics look and feel, to how people would receive their results. They then created a set of visual cards for each step that
described different options for how the service could be delivered.
They then asked people to assemble from the cards their ideal journey through the series of steps.
This helped facilitate the conversation as the designers were then able to ask people why they had chosen certain cards over others.
Customers:
Reduced use/time spent in temporary accommodation
Reduced homeless registrations
Reduced waiting times and improved routing
Team:
Staff attendance levels increased
Capabilities and capacity increased (greater productivity)
Budget:
Improved targeting of resources on those in greatest need
Savings of £368k per year
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Working visually makes things simpler.
Making things simpler aids communication.
Communication is key to developing ideas and innovating quicker and more successfully
…be visual throughout the process to share understanding of the problem as well as the solutions
…and also think about how you communicate your services to the people who need them
Throughout this process there are 3 principles that we apply …no matter what the challenge
Being people centred - getting customer insightsto identify opportunities by spending time with people
Being visualto aid understanding of both the problems and solutions
Being collaborative and iterativeto reduce risk by testing and evolving before being launched and roll out
These 3 core aspects help innovation happen and happen successfully
….and its these 3 principles we’re going to share with you today
1. Is one of the first Ipod prototypes. It was used to convince the board of directors that this idea was worth pursuing
2. Dyson built 5126 prototypes before he got to the first production model
Note to DA’s
Introduces the notion of levels of fidelity (e.g. Sketches of screens > Static Power Point mock up of screens > Fully interactive software prototype.
Pending the idea and the goal, you won’t be able to do this yourself. You’ll need specialist input.
NHS Whittington were looking to redesign the pharmacy. They were part of a Design Council programme to help enable better use of design in the public sector. They had a space that kind of worked but they felt sure it could be improved for the users and make better use of the space. A colleague of ours Anna White, ran a few project that myself and a guy called Sean Miller were involved with to help frame the project and then find the right kind of help.
Used prototyping in three sessions. This photo is the first one, a co-design session with staff and public. A design company called Tilt brought along a plain scale model. Just the cardboard in the picture. Then four different teams worked on: O/A layout / Signage and messaging / Furniture and other moveable physical stuff / Staff and patient interactions
See on left ‘Prescription collection’ sign. Had it on left, pick up and leave through a new door to be created on the right. This was the first physical manifestation of an idea to improve flow and start thinking about the counter and how it could be used better.
The next session was prototyping in a live environment with real staff, doing their jobs with real customers (look at the yellow warning sign in the middle of the picture). This picture shows a few things of interest.
They tried out a couple of different flows: the new way that they’d first tried in a scale model and then in a way that was arguably easier (right to left) because it mean not needing a new doorway. This is right to left. You can see arrows on the floor to guide customers and some people queuing up to hand in on the right.
At the hand in point there’s a new serving hatch – testing an idea to improve privacy for customers.
So, they wanted to see if a right to left flow worked and it didn’t. People walked straight to the first person they saw to hand in – despite the signage - they went where they expected they should go. It was a vindication of their idea that the new flow of left to right was worth pursuing. Impact beyond just the flow, on signage and interior.
They might have gone on and made the change without prototyping it and all might have been fine BUT they wouldn’t have the confidence which they got from this prototype, nor the evidence they gathered and or the buy in from a range of key stakeholders from the customers to senior management. And it help give birth to new ideas too.
They got a fantastic reaction from all involved – customers to senior staff and the Chief Exec, Chair and Ops Director from the trust who see value in this way of working. They see it influencing how they commission the redesign of a ward or operating theatre.
The original pharmacy design did involve staff but only as a paper exercise – not physically prototyping it and not really being involved in design decision making. That is another key difference. It’s not just about involving people, it’s how you involve them that matters.
If time – tell the walkie talkie story…or the webcam and the robotic picking machine…
The single biggest reason to prototype is to manage risk
Early – Prototype early not at the end, don’t be perfect and late - prototype before piloting. Pilots can quickly become too big to fail.
Ugly – doesn’t always matter what it looks like to get the learning
Often – Try things out, learn by doing - break some rules!
Collaborate and Get the team dynamic right
Testing an idea early helps manage risk. Prototyping is much better than going straight to pilots that can be expensive and can quickly become to big to fail
Quick and cheap mock-ups provide early feedback and can save money.
Almost anything can be prototyped to test thinking before bigger investments are made
Encourages ‘smart’ failure. Iteration strengthens the idea
And throughout all this you need to work collaboratively, not just internally but with other networks, partners and specialists
Throughout this process there are 3 principles that we apply …no matter what the challenge
Being people centred - getting customer insightsto identify opportunities by spending time with people
Being visualto aid understanding of both the problems and solutions
Being collaborative and iterativeto reduce risk by testing and evolving before being launched and roll out
These 3 core aspects help innovation happen and happen successfully
….and its these 3 principles we’re going to share with you today
Working this way delivers ideas that fit and manages risk
That’s really all from me
Website - A lot more case studies, films and information on our work
If you’ve got Questions? Speak to me afterwards
I’d like to finish by thanking you.