Dott Cornwall New Work | Communities | Our work

People in Cornwall earn about 20% less than the UK average. They are more likely to be out of work - 3.3% of Cornwall's population are unemployed, compared to the UK average of 3.1%. Combine lower than average wages and higher than average levels of unemployment with the above average cost of living and of property in Cornwall, and you find the county is one of the poorest areas in the UK.

So Dott Cornwall, a year long series of projects which is bringing together local communities and world-class designers to work on projects that improve everyday life for people in Cornwall, is tackling unemployment with the New Work project. It's looking to design a solution that will link people at real and perceived risk of redundancy with new, long-term work opportunities in Cornwall.

"The New Work project is about designing ways to enhance people's skills and getting them back into work," says Robert Woolf of SEA Communications, the design agency leading the project. "We want to help people get the skills and support they need to get into jobs in Cornwall's growing businesses and industries. Simple really but we can't do it alone." SEA is using a multi-disciplinary co-design approach that has co-ordinated teachers, support workers and unemployed people to work together to diagnose the problem and generate ideas for solutions.

Design research

The designers have created engaging ways to research the job market and people's perception of finding new work in Cornwall.

To help them talk to hard to reach workers - on industrial estates and out of the way offices in Cornwall - the New Work team hijacked a sandwich van from Cornish Ovens and spent lunchtimes giving out free fruit and information about the New Work project in exchange for a chat about work opportunities in Cornwall.

See photos of the sandwich van design research on flickr

To attract attention in crowded public spaces, the designers used their big red camper van as place to meet people, to talk to them about their employment needs and to show them some of the support services they could access if they were unemployed. "It helped us engage with 150 people," says Robert Woolf, and gave the designers three key insights:

awareness of support services for the unemployed was low
people received little support to find a new job from their employer when they were made redundant
people were scathing of the Job Centre

You don't need a camper van. We're doing the same thing tomorrow with carboard boxes. Robert Woolf, Director, SEA Communications

See photos of the red camper van design research on flickr

To engage the community in the whole design project, from design research to designing a new product or service creation, SEA trained community reporters to interview people where they lived to find out whether they were in or out of work, or facing uncertainty in their jobs. "Because they are trusted by their communities they get insights we wouldn't" says Robert Woolf.

Because there are 250,000 searches online for "jobs in Cornwall" each month, SEA has created a website and social media campaign to aid their research.

Find out more about the New Work Cornwall website

Interpreting research

With the help of unemployed people, recruiters and employers, the New Work design team found out that:

only 35% of job vacancies are advertised through the Job Centre
60% of the job vacancies advertised by recruitment agencies in Cornwall are filled by candidates from outside Cornwall.

SEA has created an infographic which details and analyses Cornish industry and its employment market. "We wanted to understand where the future jobs in Cornwall might be. So to understand the future we've looked at the past and at 10 years of gross value add and at where the jobs have been in Cornwall. We created an infographic that shows the sectors as different sized circles. The tourism sector is the biggest job market for Cornwall. The environmental technologies sector is growing rapidly, at about 200%. But it's still a dot compared to the tourism sector. Diagrams like this have been a revelation to some people. We've gone on to use it to engage with employers in different sectors to really understand where future jobs will lie in Cornwall."

They have also prototyped a map of the unemployment support that's available to people across Cornwall.

Co-designing New Work services

"We're just at the point now where we're going to a lot of very targeted workshops based around very specific new support service prototypes," says SEA Communiations' Robert Woolf.

Product development key themes that are key to Cornwall's future include:

low carbon
next generation broadband
enterprise and entrpreneurship

The designers have found that people need support in different ways. They want to:

understand employment, skills, support opportunities
increase their confidence
have a clear action plan.

"We're looking at developing services that don't exist at the moment in Cornwall or anywhere else in the UK that can support an individual in whichever path they want to follow to new work. We've identified about 12 key mechanisms whh can help them do this. We're now co-designing and taking those ideas forward with people in Cornwall," says Woolf.

Dott project: New Work

Design research

Interpreting research

Co-designing New Work services

Our work