Finding a direction
The Design Council’s initial work at Park Wood offered the team a good understanding of the issues surrounding residents’ lack of activity – and also a wealth of good ideas and opportunities for improvement.
‘We could see that any service we developed would have to remove the barriers to activity – whether they were actual or perceived – and build motivation. We would have to create the opportunity for people become active,’ explains Jennie Winhall at the Design Council.
Reviewing the many ideas collected during the first phase of the project, the team found that their concepts could be divided into two groups.
The first set of ideas involved community projects such as ‘the Park Wood Olympics’, where residents would take part in a series of competitive activities, or the creation of a Park Wood farm.
‘Although undoubtedly exciting, these ideas took the estate as a whole, instead of taking inspiration from the motivation of individuals,’ explains Winhall. ‘This went against the idea of a co-created system that could be replicated anywhere.’
Ideas for individual activities
More promising were the ideas in the second group, geared to individual and small group activities. ‘Here we could see the potential to develop a platform that could be replicated nationwide,’ says Winhall. Among this group of ideas was ‘Fitmobs’, the germ of an idea that would eventually become the Activmobs scheme.
The inspiration for Fitmobs came from the small social groups that the team had learned about on the Park Wood estate ‘We saw a parallel with flash mobs - informal, non-hierarchical groups that come together often just for fun,’ explains Chris Vanstone. ‘We felt that the term ‘mobs’ captured the spirit of what we were doing, and it’s a long way from the language of existing health care services.’
Inspiration also came from another surprising source – Tupperware parties. ‘Tupperware parties create the social obligation to buy through the motivational potential of small group interaction,’ adds Winhall. ‘The team’s thinking was that getting people into small groups for activity – Fitmobs – would encourage a social commitment to get active and stay active.’
Informal activity groups can work very well without outside support, but in order to overcome the barriers perceived by many at Park Wood, the team could see that a surrounding infrastructure of support and some basic rules would help to get groups going and to sustain them into the longer term.
Having collected a wide range of ideas, the team combined the strongest elements of the Fitmobs proposition and presented its ideas for a full prototype to Kent County Council. Key elements were
- the group structure
- the choice of activity
- the use of enabling technologies and social software
- and a ‘Health Miles’ loyalty scheme that would work in the same way as Air Miles, giving credits to enable participants to earn discounts from local shops and services
