The team started meeting regularly during 2007 for brainstorming sessions. Brainstorming is a great way to generate a lot of ideas in a short space of time by getting together a group of people who see a problem from different perspectives, says live|work, the service design agency which ran the New Work co-design team.
The atmosphere of a brainstorming session, which encourages the rapid flow of sometimes wild ideas which are never criticised, can also encourage people who aren’t designers to release their inhibitions, which can in turn lead to better design ideas. So the New Work team brainstormed and the project leaders helped make sure there were plenty of ideas that could be presented visually as well to help stimulate responses.
Ross Cooney, from small software development company Rozmic, says brainstorming is a good way to have lots of ideas quickly without worrying about wasting time: ‘If you spend half an hour on a bad idea, there could be a nugget of gold in there, somewhere, where you could either rejuvenate that idea and make that bad idea good, or actually just take that nugget somewhere else.’
Together, the six businesses thought about how they could design an answer to questions including how the local community could handle increasing levels of self employment and more small businesses, where small businesses turn for help designing their working life and whether other people, businesses or technology help shape the future of business.
Brainstorming sessions helped to break down the shared problems and identified six key, but manageable, concerns:
- Finding and keeping the right staff
- Selling products and services
- Delegating responsibility
- Keeping up standards when expanding
- Accessing finance and investment
- Managing time effectively.
After the scale of the problem had been explored through brainstorming, the team began developing a response. The businesses documented how they used their time, space and other local facilities on a day-by-day basis. Enabling Concepts and the designers from live|work helped them create an opportunity map of practical ways that their daily lives could be improved because they knew it was important for the businesses to be able to visualise the problem because it would help them understand it better than by just putting it in words.
Grant Carruthers, from e-learning consultancy Bright Creatives, says working with the other businesses was a positive way to identify the problems associated with working for a small business and to visualise possible improvements. ‘If you’ve got a group of likeminded businesses that are willing to pitch in and help each other out, that makes a big difference,’ he says.
Further workshops encouraged the businesses to come up with some creative solutions to their problems. First they pinpointed one thing they wanted to do differently, then they came up with ideas for how they could change things. Enabling Concepts asked the businesses to think about how they might deliver new services by working collaboratively.
Carruthers says this way of thinking and working fits well with the needs of a micro-business: ‘We really need to have this structure around where you can say: “I don’t know how to do this. Maybe someone will know and I can call or e-mail them and get a quick response”.’
Some service design suggestions
The micro-business taking part in the New Work project followed some simple design processes. They learnt how to identify a problem precisely and generate an idea for a service response.
‘I had a few days off a while ago – but all I did was worry whether the business would cope without me,’ says Manuela from Lexica Communications.
The team’s service design idea for addressing this problem, Get it Done, turns a To Do list into a group of physical objects, each of which represents a different task. Rather than write an email or note that could be forgotten, a business can hand over actual things to people to do. Once the task is done the object goes into a ‘Done’ box, which helps the team feel they’re getting through their tasks and that nothing’s been forgotten.
‘My work is my passion and I’d love to share my enthusiasm with others,’ says Ben from Whiptail Cycles. The service design idea in this case was Working Back at School. Micro-businesses run an in-school workshop, which allows students to learn about that business, while the person giving the presentation gets to interact with young people and get some insights from them.