Adaptive Path MX 2007: Design for Social Good: designing new public services

RED, a project of the UK design council, was a project to promote design.

An interdisciplinary tema was set up to run the project. In the past they did work on redesigning prisons. Looking at how they could be designed to actually work for rehabilitation. They are expensive, don't work, and lead to recitivism.

Also spent time on household energy consumption and a design workshop with members of parliament on how citizens can interface with their government (if only we had this in America...)

There was a big push on public sector reform. Much money was put into reorganizing the public sector to improve the experience of the end user. They did some large scale project on secondary schools to create better learning environments. This led to extra investment from the government.

Also looked at designing out medical accidents in hospitals. In the end this led to improving preexisting services. But there are limits to modernizing what already exists. Most public services in the UK were created in the 1950s.

But society has moved on and technology is completely different. If you redesigned to put people at the heart with what we have now it would be completely different. Moreover, the rising demand will cripple the current system. The interesting thing for designers is that we are looking at a new range of issues (chronic disease, climate change, anti-social behavior). These problems can't be fixed with more money, they are problems that require citizens to modify their behavior.

But people aren't rational, they make emotional decisions and this is a challenge for policymakers and traditional economists. They are used to dealing with rational. Its easy to say build five nuclear power stations. Its hard to say turn down the thermostat or eat a healthy diet.

This messy irrational emotional stuff is hard. This is why the public sector needs a new generation of services cocreated with individuals for individuals. These would be preventative to focus on causes not symptoms. A design approach is a fantastic way to do this.

Three case studies.

Two years ago they ran a large project about chronic disease. They have a National Health Service. It is the third largest organization in the world. It was designed to treat infectious diseases but those are very different than chronic diseases. The NHS must rely on people self managing their long term conditions. It has nothing to do with hospitals and everything to do with daily life. Investing money in hospitals and nurses won't fix this.

A new model must harness the energy and expertise of ordinary people to deal with this. In software you have open sources, you have P2P finance like Grameen, flickr, etc. These systems rely on ordinary people to generate content themselves. Non-hierarchical, user-driven, solutions strengthened by greater participation, not burdened by demand.

Two partners and two problems were engaged [VIDEO re: diabetes and physical exercise]

Use agenda cards to prototype experiences. Work toward taking action to solve problems. Active mobs are a group of people who build on existing interests. Group dog walking for fitness. They harness the power of social groups. Any activity can be mobbed to build social support structures to sustain motivation. These help people to see the immediate benefits of activity. The web can help to connect and motivate people in these social contexts. Contact with a personal trainer is cheaper and more effective in the context of a group.

The research revealed that people know what to do but need support. But someone other than a nurse or a GP is needed. Web sites, catalogs, and other prototypes allowed participants to experience concepts as prototypes. This short work shows that design can quickly lead to new solutions to insoluable problems, to help cocreate solutions for people.

The process ran for nine months with hundreds of people. It included economists, policy experts, etc.

Type 2 diabetes impacts people later in life and if it gets bad can lead to blindess or could require amputation. It is not curable but its impact can be mitigated. These ongoing tasks cannot be achieved through a ten minute consulation with a doctor.

User experience research > Character profiling

Looking for common paths but found that there isn't one. Any solution must be segmented on character types. Interactions are dynamic, personal, and collaborative. Tools and services need to support people in their daily lives.

The current interactions encourage patients to lie to their doctors. The deck of cards was made from statements that ordinary people made in interviews. They pick out statements that are relevant to them and then take those into an interaction to determine what they want to talk about that day. It forces a different kind of behavior that gives the individual control over the interaction.

You just deal a new hand when you have new issues to work on.

Doctors and nurses resented this and too game like but when they tried it they liked it because it got straight to the heart of the problem with the patient in the first two minutes.

Also enabled people to talk about hidden issues to eachother.

They divided people into a two-by-two to see how people break down and then move from one group to another. As they tested the cards they found that people needed a coach to help them through the process.

This led to the idea of creating an independant network of life coaches.

The NHS lacks person centered accounting so it was hard to determine the cost of this. They worked out that having a coach available for nine months is much cheaper than putting a patient on insultin.

Another case study focussed on exercise.

Activemobs came out of the idea that social groups lead to pressure. This is positive pressure to benefit your life in the way you want. They are self organizing and built on social software.

Protoyped with live mobs. Worked with dog walking groups, neighbors who had back problems, etc. Learned about designing a system that will help people change their lifestyles. Groups are very useful in this context. It is a group of friends, not a class, not led by an instructor. Having a personal trainer is highly aspirational.

A woman was scared to try salsa but always wanted to. With her friends she was comfortable with this. People show up because they don't want to let their friends down. That social dynamic provides the design materials. Need to tap into and sustain motivation and this is different for everyone.

Some people are motivated by not being able to do something they used to be able to do and can't. Tools can be developed that increase self awareness of change. Well-being cards were developed to track whatever the individual wants. They then got bank statement like reports on these metrics.

Collective metrics are also helpful. Ten inches lost off the collective waist.

The importance of making things visible can't be underestimated (voting, energy consumption, etc.)

The solutions to these problems depend on people changing their own behavior.

Go beyond shaping products to shaping behavior/ experience.

• meaningful metrics from the perspective of the person, not the system
• co-created services because you can't deliver this product. people must shape the service themselves. you can't design is totally from the outset. you must instead build a platform and distribute tools with different rules and roles to emerge.
• must make the service really aspirational. you can't force people to do anything. as designers we need to understand what motivates people.

Go from improving public services to using the design process as a key method to create new services. Designers are uniquely placed to do this. There is a shared set of skills and characteristics that mark this discipline.

See: LiveWork

They needed people, clients, and competition. Their philosophy is about shifting society from ownership and consumption to the use of things. In order to do this they realized that service experiences needed to be more desirable than owning itself.

Cars are the ultimate challenge. They began to work with streetcar, a car sharing service, to make this more desireable than owning (zipcar made me feel this way when I lived in DC). Live|Work is now working on transport services in rural economies.

Transformation design.

1. redefine the brief
2. collaboration between disciplines
3. fundamental transformation
4. participatory design work
5. building capacity not dependancy
6. non-traditional outputs

Good strategy always must start from the perspective of the user. Design the offerening and then redesign the organization around that offering (think Target ClearRX).

Orgs are struggling to adapt and to continue to adapt. The only way to do this is to embed a culture of innovation within the company itself. Can't fall apart when they leave.

Orgs can't predict from the outset what the nature of the solution is, could be a service or product etc.

The last two in the above list is a real challenge. Where is the solution and who will do it. This is far away from the rockstar designer, this is about nitty-gritty problem solving in collaboration with real people.

In the UK the cabinet has put out guidelines on service design.

look at www.designcouncil.info/RED

look at participle (need to find URL)

[QUESTIONS]

Q: govt has history of botching this. Do people (employees and citizens) come with skepticism? Do challenges come with using the web for a diverse audience?

A: Lot's of community groups are already innovating. The problem isn't having ideas, it's in scaling it up. The skepticism is about making it work in more than one place, outside of personalities. Planning to broker partnerships between local government and technology companies. There is thus a commercial and social imperitive at the same time.

Q: In the design solution cards were used. How did you settle on this?

A: Not the answer to everything. But a useful tool, an artifact.

Q: How do you get it to not just be outsourcing?

A: Look for gaps and build partnerships. The hope is that you can construct it in such a way that people join the process in a real way and then take it back to organizations. Look at healthcare or transport. The people are held ransome by outsourcing. By using design process as a conduit for different expertise to be brought into the solution.