Design for Growth: Public Services from Design Council on Vimeo.
Deborah Meaden
The UK is undergoing major changes which affect how our public services are delivered - and design has a vital role to play. Design helps create new citizen-focused products and systems, helps in redesigning more efficient, lower-cost services and improves people’s well-being.
Design for growth: Design and public services
Government spends some £220 billion a year on products and services - so how can it use design to reduce costs, provide greater value, and better experiences for us all ...
Tom Hulme, IDEO
Government initially needs to recognise the value of design, it’s not until you see the value and then I think its demonstrable in many cases that actually you start to be able to look for it and actually see it when its there.
Barry Quirk, Lewisham Council
I would say that government can, through redesigning the character of service, not just improve the quality but lower its cost.
Gill Ayling, Head of Older People & Dementia, Department of Health
Given the current efficiencies, government can’t allow itself to just do nothing, it has to think in a different way, it has to think innovatively.
Tom Hulme
For public sector leaders, design has a couple of huge potentials, it fundamentally has the opportunity to improve the wellbeing of citizens but secondly has the opportunity to drive sustainable growth across the UK.
Success story: London Borough of Lewisham Housing Options Centre
Deborah Meaden
The London Borough of Lewisham was keen to improve the service delivery of its Housing Options Centre …
Barry Quirk
We were very concerned that the numbers were rising and that we weren’t really providing a good enough service. What we decided to do was to engage designers to work with the staff, the frontline staff themselves, and the service users, to think about the interface of that service.
Deborah Meaden
That introduced Barry Quirk’s team to design techniques to analyse the current service and create ways to improve it. Taking a designer’s ‘people-centred’ approach, staff conducted their own research - and ultimately identified four key opportunities for improvement.
Barry Quirk
The effect of designers in our Homeless Centre was actually to change not just the visual appearance but actually changed outcomes, the quality of service provided is better, it’s more reliable its more consistent and actually the key thing is the numbers of people claiming homelessness has dropped significantly.
Staff morale has improved, staff absence levels have reduced, money has been saved and customers are enjoying using a more efficient and appealing housing options service in Lewisham.
We are one of the first local government authorities that worked with this sort of design based approach and I think increasingly there will be more authorities doing this because they are challenged to reduce their costs and improve their quality. They can’t do that by just simply doing more of the same.
It is anticipated that the changes brought about by the Design Council’s Public Services by Design programme will deliver £368,000 efficiency savings per year.
Gill Ayling
I think design is fundamental to everything we’re doing within the Department of Health. We have to think of different ways of delivering services because of the efficiencies both health and social care have to deliver, we need to get value for money so therefore we need to think of different ways of doing it.
A major hospital's design project reduced incidences of violent crime in its A&E department by 80% through changes to the signage and layout
Deborah Meaden
Some good examples there of how design can drive innovation in public services. But how can government meet the challenges ahead, by using design better to deliver the services people want and need ...
Tom Hulme
I think demanding innovation, demanding design is probably counterproductive. Instead it should facilitate innovation facilitate great design and that’s about bringing you know multi disciplinary people together and collectively solving problems.
Gill Ayling
We are good at design we are good at innovation but it’s about how you spread that and how leaders use that information erm to encourage others to do it.
Barry Quirk
By redesigning the service you change the platform on which the service is delivered and therefore you’ve got a big opportunity to lower its cost.
Tom Hulme
The procurement process is all about defining and locking down a question and then running a very laborious and long process to begin to solve it. Take care of the question and shorten the process to enable the barrier to drop to contribution so that you can involve more people and actually they can iterate on the question they’re asking.
Gill Ayling
Look at what others are doing see what the value it is see what efficiency gives you and also how it improves peoples lives and I think if you have those two outcomes then it’s got to be a win-win for everybody.
Thanks to
Deborah Meaden, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and all who appeared in this film