One of the guiding notions behind Dott Cornwall’s programme of public service innovation is that we may be entering a period requiring ‘prosperity without growth’. Economic growth, says the Sustainable Development Commission, has led to greater inequality between the rich and the poor, as well as an ever-rising strain on finite resources. This urges us to explore new ways of living and of measuring standards of living.
With this in mind, sustainability is a precept for the Designs of the Time programme, not least in terms of the projects themselves – ensuring their models are sustainable is one of the measures of success. ‘A working hypothesis of Dott is that to tackle the big issues of our times sustainably – demographic change, climate change, economic change and so on – it is not enough just to be innovative, we must also create the conditions for innovation to thrive and evolve,’ says Dott’s Big Society by Design report.
In many cases, Dott’s co-design projects also tackle sustainable living head on; in particular, by investigating ways to reduce resource use. Travel, for example, is a major issue for Cornwall when it comes to sustainable living. Meeting national aspirations for an environmentally sustainable low-carbon economy is difficult in an area of relatively small towns and villages, scattered across a long peninsula. People have, on average, further to travel to work than those living elsewhere in the UK and gaps in the public transport system lead almost two thirds of people to travel by car.
According to Dott, the number of vehicles in Cornwall has grown by 66 per cent in 20 years, bringing rises in congestion that are exacerbated in the summer holiday season. One project which aims to tackle this is Share the Road, a scheme developed by Dott and University College Falmouth as an early prototype for the university’s Academy for Innovation & Research . The project focused on the problem of traffic and parking congestion around Falmouth and Penryn.
Co-designing with members of the public, and bringing in four recent graduates from around the country to help develop the scheme, Air looked at different ways to provide sustainable, user-centred transport systems to residents, visitors and students. The result was a prototype car and bike transport club administrated via text messaging. A prototype was tested in a workshop with Penryn residents in September 2010 and is now being developed by Air at UCF.
One project with a specific focus on environmental sustainability is the Eco Design Challenge. Led by Dott senior producer and Leap Media founder Matt Hocking, the challenge asked Year Eight secondary pupils and their teachers to come up with design ideas for reducing their school’s carbon footprint. Using digital toolkits and special lesson plans, schools across the county identified areas for energy-use improvement and developed initial design briefs for their ideas. These briefs were then refined with the help of professional designers, including Sebastian Conran of Sebastian Conran Associates and Sophie Thomas of Thomas Matthews, who acted as mentors.
Eco Design Challenge finalists presented their ideas at a Dragon’s Den-style event in July 2010. The winning school, St Ives, collected a prize of more than £6500 from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to help refurbish its 1970s art block with large roof windows and energy-generating photovoltaic (solar) panels. Helen Brooks of RLT Architects in Penzance is now working with St Ives School on the plans.
Away from the concerns of energy usage, sustainability also underpins many of the decisions made in other Dott Cornwall projects. Designing Communities, for example, was a codesign project led by Sea Communications which aimed to ameliorate some of the intractable problems of deprivation that affect the Pengegon ward in Cornwall. Numerous techniques of co-design and collaboration with residents led, among other things, to plans for a new community building in Pengegon.
‘We investigated new design solutions for community buildings including prefabs, self-builds and sustainable building techniques – helping us to explore how local residents might build a community centre,’ says Sea’s project report, adding: ‘Residents agreed that building the community centre themselves would foster a feeling of ownership from the start and teach people new skills such as sustainable construction, plumbing, carpentry, painting and decorating.’
Residents agreed that building the community centre themselves would foster a feeling of ownership from the start and teach people new skills such as sustainable construction, plumbing, carpentry, painting and decorating
Sustainability clearly runs as a thread through Dott’s co-design projects and ethos, but the Dott methodology itself is also intended to be sustainable. Although the possibility of other Dott programmes running in different regions of the UK is uncertain, Dott Cornwall programme director Andrea Siodmok hopes that the approach to service innovation taken in these projects might propagate with or without the official Dott stamp.
‘I don’t know if more Dotts will take place, but participatory working remains very relevant,’ says Siodmok.
‘We are looking at what Dott’s own sustainability could be: is there a toolkit we could make “airborne”, so that it is transmitted from person to person, as it were? I think the approach is extremely relevant to the times.’