How can designers help the government's Spending Challenge?

The government is looking for ways to reduce the budget deficit by cutting public spending in a way that is fair and responsible.

Its Spending Challenge is asking us all to share ideas about how to cut public spending. Whether the ideas are small-scale or radical, they'll be considered as part of the Spending Review 2010, which will be concluded on 20 October.

That means the design industry can propose its ideas for getting the deficit down. Submit your ideas to the Spending Challenge.

The Design Council has submitted its ideas for design-led solutions to reduce the deficit.

Here is a summary of our Spending Challenge submission, in which we argue that design techniques and designers can help the government make fair and responsible spending cuts.

Designers help understand what people need

A people-centred view is crucial to creating effective products and services. Ethnographic research is essential for generating the necessary understanding and empathy.

The Design Council, in collaboration with the Department of Health, assessed the issue of patient dignity and come up with solutions. Fashion designer Ben de Lisi created a new patient gown that covers both the front and back of the patient, so that they are not exposed, but still allows staff to treat patients quickly and easily: 'This project isn’t about glamour it’s about well-being. This gown has to be hardworking and user-friendly and help clinicians to do their job — without costing NHS Trusts more money,' said de Lisi. Find out more about the Design for Patient Dignity project

In an attempt to reduce long term unemployment, Sunderland City Council worked with design agency live|work to use service design tools to reorganise worklessness services around real customers not public sector structures. With designers' help, the Make it Work project recognised the complexity of the end-to-end journey in the move from unemployment to sustainable work and identified key touch points so they could focus on improving weak links in services. The project showed how, by working to provide services collaboratively, local authorities could reduce the cost of helping a person back to work from the £62,000 quoted by David Freud, Minister for Welfare Reform, to £5,000.

Government should commission outcomes not processes

Government should be focused better results rather than existing processes. Commissioning innovative procurement can help achieve better results.

By opening up the £200bn a year the government spends on procurement contracts to SMEs, government can play a crucial role in stimulating new ideas in the market.

By recognising best practice, government can help other organisations to change. For instance, HM Prison Services was a pioneer in using the Forward Commitment Procurement model. They used it to change the highly unsustainable system for disposing of used mattresses in prisons. The model involves providing the market with advance information about future needs. HMPS was buying 60,000 high specification mattresses and pillows per year and disposing of the majority as landfill or clinical waste, which cost them an estimated £3m a year. HMPS aspired to a zero waste prison mattress – and the supply chain responded with 36 high quality options.

The Design Council joined the Department of Health and the NHS Purchasing & Supply Agency in a project to cut the risk of Hospital Acquired Infections (HCAIs). To reduce the health and financial implications of HCAIs - they cause more than 5,000 deaths per year and, in 2007, 50,000 C.Difficile infections added 3-10 days on average to patients’ stays, costing of £4,000 to £10,000 a year - the Design Council co-ordinated NHS procurement specialists, designers and manufacturers to develop a set of design briefs for the design industry. Eleven new pieces of hospital furniture and equipment were designed to be easy to clean yet cost the same as current equipment. The prototypes delivered by the Design Bugs Out project are now being tested in a number of showcase hospitals, before going to formal evaluation with the Department of Health. Find out more about the Design Bugs Out project.

Encouraging and rewarding creativity and entrepreneurship

Improving efficiency and effectiveness means working creatively across organisational silos.

It is essential to allow people to work in different ways, encouraging a culture of creativity and entrepreneurship. As Osborne and Gaebler argued in Reinventing Government, effectiveness lies in turning government workers loose to do what they know how to do best: 'the people who work in government are not the problem; the systems in which they work are the problem.'

Open source systems – from Linux to wikis and social networking sites – make it increasingly possible to arrive at new solutions and answers. Linus Torvald, creator of Linux, gives his intellectual capital away for free. Hugo Spowers designed the Riversimple hydrogen powered car and has shared everything he learnt along the way so that other people can use the same ideas, or develop them to create new sustainable transport solutions. Read about Hugo Spowers and Riversimple.  

The North East’s Improvement and Efficiency Partnership is working on the Design Council's Public Services by Design support programme to investigate how it can target resources to people with the greatest need and help older people live independently. They have developed a web portal for generating, sharing and procuring the wealth of ideas generated and are working with service design agency Options UK to prototype new ways to deliver better services to older people. Read a case study about the NE IEP Public Services by Design project.

Increased efficiency requires new thinking that moves beyond operational efficiency. Management tools such as Six-Sigma have been shown to be insufficient. The Wall Street Journal recently cited a 2006 Qualpro study showing that of 58 large companies that announced Six-Sigma programmes that year, 91% trailed the S&P 500.

Crowd-sourced problem solving is being advanced beyond government by sites such as PatientsLikeMe, and countless lives were saved in the recent Haitian earthquake thatnks to the website Ushahidi, which aggregated mobile phone field reports in real time.

To promote this thinking, public sector workers should also be encouraged to stand in ‘someone else’s shoes’ by volunteering on the front line each year.

Rewarding ‘intrapreneurship’

Public sector workers should be enabled to develop new ideas, even if it takes them beyond their job descriptions, and to fix problems if they see that something is broken.

In 1992, The American Heritage Dictionary acknowledged the popular use of a new word, intrapreneur, to mean ‘A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation.’

Google offers engineers ‘20-percent time’ so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passionate about; Google Suggest, AdSense for Content and Orkut are among the many products that have emerged from this approach. Intrapreneurship is now seen as a corporate management style that integrates risk-taking and innovation approaches with the reward and motivational techniques traditionally linked with entrepreneurship.

In the current economic climate the Design Council has taken steps to reduce the risk in its own constrained HR budgets, and is considering creative approaches to staff development and training. For instance, some of our Council members may be able to provide  training and development opportunities within their own organisations.

Driving pace and managing risk through prototyping

The rapid iteration and prototyping of ideas creates efficiencies by designing out problems early, and can speed the development of new products and services.

Procter and Gamble CEO Alan Lafley emphasises the need to get new products in front of prospective customers as quickly as possible. Ideas and technologies are translated into concepts, quickly translated into prototypes, and moved through ‘transaction learning,’ where P&G simulate purchase and usage.  

In the North East, as part of Dott 07, service design consultancy live|work developed travel activity packs to help a local school's students and parents move around more easily. Early prototypes of findings led to Arriva, a local bus provider, working with the community to improve its service by introducing a user-friendly, colour-coded bus timetable, and live|work launched an interactive transport map illustrating the potential environmental and financial savings from sharing lifts with other people. Read a case study of the Move Me project.

On our Public Services by Design programme, designers from Options UK are currently working with the North East Improvement and Efficiency Partnership. Simple ideas could be anything from different opening hours to better signage. The NE IEP will create low-cost and rapid prototypes of the best improvement ideas and test them with one exemplar authority and two shadow authorities. This will quickly develop an evidence base for policy makers. Julie Brown, a project manager at the NE IEP said:  ‘We hope to come up with a really compelling case for change. Everyone is fired up, partly because we are trying to tackle some long-standing problems.’ Read a case study of this project.