Innovation is a liberally scattered term these days. As product designer Richard Seymour has remarked, ‘I’ve counted more books on airport bookstands on the subject recently than even books on macroeconomics and global financial suicide.’ Although most examples of the word’s usage reveal little that is fundamentally new, Designs of the Time Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly has laid the groundwork for what could be a genuinely innovative approach to the development of public services.
Through Dott, the UK is leading the world in testing and refining these new approaches, starting from the simple premise that citizens should be involved in the definition, design and even running of the products and services they use. ‘Our role is to kickstart new ways of thinking about problems by bringing different experts, protagonists, designers and citizens together. Our approach is intensively practical, working simultaneously on up to ten small to medium-scale experimental projects, focusing our effort on the issues that matter to people,’ says Andrea Siodmok, Dott Cornwall programme director.
These experimental projects have been popping up all over Cornwall for the past 18 months and their objectives, effects and legacies are discussed throughout this publication. Taking a bird’s eye view of the Dott approach reveals both the innovative way in which community issues have been tackled and how the Dott process itself is a framework for innovation in public services.
According to James Crabtree, former associate director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, this kind of innovation is rare in Britain. ‘[We have] the most centralised state in the western world, so it’s not surprising it’s hard to innovate… Traditionally, the British public sector has been strong at “Soviet-style” innovation. That has advantages – you can quickly roll out certain leading-edge innovations by putting a lot of money into them. But this isn’t as good as taking small innovative local projects, recognising what’s good about them and migrating them into other areas,’ he told the Design Council Magazine in 2008.
Bringing together citizens, designers, service providers and other experts, Dott’s projects are specifically formed with scalability and portability in mind – successful ideas should be able to travel way beyond Cornwall
Bringing together citizens, designers, service providers and other experts, Dott’s projects are specifically formed with scalability and portability in mind – successful ideas should be able to travel way beyond Cornwall. For true, impactful innovation this is necessary. Local success stories may provide good case studies, but if their models cannot be propagated through the political and public sector systems, broader benefits may be negligible.
The Big Design Challenge
So how does the Dott design process work? Projects begin with a diagnosis phase, where the nature of the problem, existing research and current services are all examined by the project team. After this there is a period of co-discovery, bringing in the wider community to work together to frame an issue and begin to lay out possible ways to tackle it. From here, each stage of development is run collaboratively, as co-design, co-development and co-delivery. Because the methodology acknowledges (and can influence) Government policy, as well as incorporating grassroots knowledge and community engagement, it is both top-down and bottom-up.
‘Dott works on the premise that change will involve breaking down the boundaries between “end users” and “service providers”, allowing people and professionals to work together in new ways. In this new paradigm, the public become the “change makers”,’ says Siodmok.
Not only does this method demand an innovative approach to the creation and running of public services – by local councils, for example – it also demands a new approach to design. A typical design process involves the client delivering a brief to a consultancy and designers returning with a creative response to the brief’s requirements. But in the Dott methodology a refined brief comes not at the start of the process, but in the middle, following the co-discovery phase, and it is formed by everyone involved, not solely by the ‘paying client’.
Robert Woolf is creative director of Sea Communications, a Penryn-based design consultancy that has worked on a number of Dott projects. He believes that this co-design process allows a much greater variety of viewpoints to contribute to what the design brief should be. ‘It’s not market research – standing with a clipboard and saying 500 people thought this – it’s asking people with different points of view and perspectives to pinpoint an improvement or innovation and using the evidence to make a robust, objective case that your solution is what users want,’ he says.
Perhaps co-design is a natural progression of the designer’s role, a role that has gradually expanded from artisan, to technical service provider, to consultant to strategic partner. Maybe it is also a natural progression in the way the public sector will develop its services: Dott’s projects certainly chime well with the Government’s proposals for a Big Society. And as Design Council chief design officer Mat Hunter suggests, the future may hold even greater degrees of collaboration and responsibility sharing: ‘Now we’re thinking about co-production. It’s not even enough to design things together,’ he claims. ‘We must also produce them and run them collaboratively.’