The economic prosperity and sustainability of any region or country is partly dependent on the skills and knowledge of its workers. For largely rural areas, such as Cornwall, it is often difficult to prevent a ‘brain drain’, as people move to urban centres in order to train, find jobs or launch businesses. As well as experiencing this problem, Cornwall also faces the pressing issue of an ageing workforce – 28.1 per cent of the population is aged 60 or over, compared to 21.8 per cent across the UK as a whole, and the proportion is set to rise.
In an era focused on knowledge and information, rather than industry and manufacture, education and skills are more important than ever. With this in mind, learning has formed a vital strand of Dott Cornwall’s programme of public service innovation. Dott projects have worked with both older people and the next generation of workers – from schools to universities – to help increase skills and encourage talent and knowledge to remain local.
Perhaps the most concrete educational legacy to emerge from Dott is the Academy for Innovation & Research, which will be housed in a new building on the Tremough Campus of University College Falmouth in Penryn from March 2012. Air will not only incorporate some of Dott’s co-design methodologies and skills in its educational programme, it will also act as a creative hub for research and innovation work with local businesses.
‘Academically, there will be a Dott legacy at UCF through Air, although Air will not just be about Dott-type work, it will be focused on multidisciplinary teams and more commercial products, looking at some classic business innovation work,’ says John Miller, director of design at UCF and Air projects manager.
A Tea Party Workshop, looking at ways to improve and employment opportunities for older people
As well as training the next generation of designers in new methods of collaborative design and service innovation, Dott’s learning programme addressed the skills and education prospects of Cornwall’s population at large, through the New Work Cornwall and Cornwall Works 50+ initiatives.
New Work Cornwall, which was sponsored by the Skills Funding Agency and led by design consultancy Sea Communications, tackled the question ‘How can Cornwall create a world-class workforce while combating unemployment?’. The project examined the current and predicted employment landscape in Cornwall, as well as the range of local and national support services available.
The picture of services that emerged was a familiar one: more than 80 different services, often working in ‘competition’ and creating a confusing and inaccessible system for citizens. As well as this, many people were found to feel anxiety and stigma when approaching formal employment services.
In what Sea describes as ‘one of the most user-centred studies of redundancy in the UK’, New Work engaged with more than 500 people in a co-discovery process to identify the issues affecting those who face redundancy or low job security. This co-discovery gave participants the opportunity to apply creative thinking to the problems they face, as well as see how their issues were a part of a bigger picture. A subsequent co-design phase, which brought New Work participants together with employers, solicitors, civil servants and service providers, led to concepts for seven services focused around skills, support and employment (see left).
Another Dott project, the Eco Design Challenge, also carried a strong educational element. Led by St Austell design group Leap, the challenge asked Year Eight schoolchildren across Cornwall to generate ideas for reducing their school’s ecological footprint. As part of the scheme, Leap Media brought in an education consultant to write teaching resources specifically designed for the challenge. And by teaming up with design and enterprise mentors, the pupils and teachers also gained direct experience of using collaborative design processes.
As these projects show, education and learning benefits have been delivered by Dott Cornwall in two main ways: through initiatives which directly tackled skills and employment and through the wider legacy of embedding the co-design methodology in those who have taken part in the programme. In this last regard, it is not just citizens, public sector professionals and businesses that are learning, but also designers, as Dott programme director Andrea Siodmok remarks.
‘In working on Dott projects sometimes it is the designers who are the least flexible, not the citizens. Designers have invested a lot in getting the knowledge and skills they have and don’t always want to relinquish that, whereas citizens can often spot a good idea and just get involved. Some of our design teams have really gone on a journey of learning how to lead a collaborative process, which is not really something that’s taught in abundance in design schools. The brief in Dott work is in the middle, not at the start, and that’s not something that most designers are used to,’ she says.