Last week Engine took part at Innovation Live!, a collaboration between NESTA and the NHS, which focused on how to develop a culture of innovation within all areas of healthcare.
It was an opportunity for NHS management to exchange best practice between themselves and health related charities, but also to meet creative organisations , invited by NESTA, who could hopefully shed some light on how to innovate within the health industry.
The NHS is a fantastic institution in concept, but the reality falls woefully short of the potential and performance possible. Gill Hicks delivered an uplifting speech on her experience of the NHS after she was critically injured in the June 7th Tube bombings. Her story of how she was supported in learning to walk again, and to gain the courage and confidence to keep going was very inspiring but touched a raw nerve in the room, which was the subject of the conference.
Many examples she gave of the things that best helped her recover both mentally and physically were moments where staff went not just above and beyond to help Gill's recovery, but they went against protocol and even directly broke the rules to help.
The image I had of the NHS as a bureaucratic monster, reinforced by stories I had heard from people who worked within it, and fuelled by the British media, seemed disappointingly accurate. The NHS is falling behind as the health issues and challenges change towards longer term, chronic illnesses. The NHS is an organisation full of ideas and running on philanthropy, but held back by the archaic nature of the institution and crippling bureaucracy.
As a service designer, it seems almost too complex and enormous a problem to take in; where do you start in the fifth-largest organisation in the world, which belongs to the public sector and deals with the most critical moments and experiences of all our lives?
mmm...engaging biscuits.
Since a brief experience with RED's Activmobs service and preliminary roll-out which stalled soon after I've been aching to get stuck in. I don't need to blow the user-centred innovation trumpet again on this blog, but if you want to find out more, England's Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Liam Donaldson explains why he believes the NHS could learn some lessons in customer care here.
mysociety created fixmystreet, a link between people and their councils which did actually fix my street (well, Deptford High Street which was a near impasse on my morning bike ride to work), and also theyworkforyou , which is a channel for the public to identify and contact their MPs and officials. And their code is open source. Nice chaps.
They’ve made dozens of simple tools in collaboration with councils and charities that work primarily through their transparency – they could publish which MPs reply to or ignore emails, who are the best and worst performing councils from the public’s perspective, which forces councils to act from a user-centred perspective.
With people taking such direct action to change their local environment, is this eroding democratic processes or empowering members of the public to overcome the UK's world-renowned bureaucracy? Is it right that the active minority should be the ones to shape their streets, parks and local amenities?
I believe that these tools are not undermining or bypassing democracy, but making the interface between politics and the public more dynamic and personal.
Electing a government and MP is a small part of a citizen's potential. Culturally, we are focused on the few big, general decisions and how they will affect everyone and not the small, myriad personal ones. A top-down operation can lack understanding of it's end users' needs - our everyday experiences can be much better affected with a ground-up approach. The majority of eligible people in the UK vote, but many people never contact their councils to say a streetlight's broken or to inquire what happened to the plans to clean up our local park or even to propose improvements.
Cultural issues aside, one thing keeping us from contacting our councils was the feeling of the hopelessness of bureaucracy. Now that the barriers are being removed to allow for a more fluid, user-friendly and frequent dialogue, we shall see with time whether the majority becomes more active, and how governments can utilise this vital feedback to inform more responsive, robust and relevant policies.
This week I participated in a talk at the Science Museum entitled 'Future Flight'. Held at the Dana Centre, with three other speakers who were engineering luminaries from Manchester Met, Cambridge and Bauhaus Luftfahrt.
My talk covered the evolution of the design of airports and aeroplanes from a product-based and engineering-driven model, to an experience and service-based and user-driven model.
It described how with most airlines using similar technology (planes), the thing that differentiates them is the services they offer. This was then followed by a description of the complexities of designing experiences, particularly for such massive spaces such as airports and airplanes, which is seen when you take the needs, desires, abilities and mindsets of all the different passengers that will use them at the same time.
The brief introduction to the subject was rounded up with some details of the different methodologies that could be employed to research, inform and design such complex experiences such as working from the bottom up rather than the top down, placing the user at the heart of the design process.
Emotional journey mapping and the principles of co-designing with end users were used as examples of such methodologies, with quick case studies such as Engine's Connections Experience or T5 info zone included to illustrate.
The presentation stuck out from the other three who gave interesting insights into the future of aerodynamics, sustainability issues and how technology is falling behind in comparison to user demand and sheer numbers of people in the air and the environmental effects as a result. However, the marathon one-hour per speaker q & a session that followed was reassuringly passionate, as everyone there has had some good, bad, weird and wonderful experiences of flying, and it is precisely those human experiences that I am interested in.
This weekend I took part in the London Design Festival's Goldsmiths-spawned 24 hour Design Challenge, based in Deptford on the site of a new development beside the high street. Teams were originally allocated by discipline, but the thirty or so designers organically re-shuffled as new projects emerged. Interdisciplinarianism, eh?
It was an experiment to see what such an intensive experience could produce, with the aim of the exhibition being to showcase the pieces that emerge from it and also the process of designing itself. The site was open to visitors throughout, but a low level of awareness with the non-design industry public outside caused a number of us to seek out ways in which we could engage with the local community.
We were keen to avoid a behind-the-scenes 'designers doing some wacky shit then having an exclusive party that is an essentially intimidating environment for locals' and leaving having kept the neighbours up and a mess behind.
Our first task was to use £10 in the local (excellent, amazing and project-saving on several occasions) flea market to bring back objects that interested us and then create devices that helped tell their story. Ours was a beautiful, hand-written title deed to a field in Kent form 1853. Over a couple of thousand words were used to explicitly explain the extent of the estate, without any diagrams, maps, co-ordinates or tables of measurements. It was almost indecipherable.
We did however try to re-interpret it and visualise it in our own ways, which led us to our first design - a table which people from the local community and visitors to the exhibition could use to map the are in their own way. The docking station consisted of a compass made from a clock with the minute hand saying 'north'. This constantly changing north would give us a random sample and spread of the area, with participants heading in 100m (as they estimated) before recording what they could see, who they have spoken to there or are with, what they think of that place, what colours, textures they could see. These 'x' shaped pieces of paper would then be collated, computed and exhibited as a very human, abstract map of the area.
This initial design was a step in the right direction, but our group (installation) merged with product to see how we could develop something that asked less of the participants and offered more interaction and reward. What we came up with was two projects commencing around 10pm - 'Polenta Politics' - a sophisticated voting system involving a catapult, some issues on a board and some messy painted polenta balls and 'Deptford Cares' - some items made to help the community care for its public spaces and express what they like and dislike about them.
At the heart of these projects was the potential for a much larger project, should we choose to undertake it - how to engage a local community to communicate its feelings about where they live in innovative new ways and to provide the tools to co-design, improve and sustain public spaces. Hmmm.
Target practice gathers an audience in the wee hours...
Computer Arts magazine invited me to a 'round table to discuss the future of UK design education', which can be found published in this month's edition. It drew an interesting and prominent crowd who were passionate about the state of education in the UK and offered some great insights into their experiences of design students, internships and also some shared their knowledge of being tutors at various universities.
The debate was interesting, but was not the heavier discussion into the future of design education I had expected, and the resultant article was so truncated, misquoted and condensed so as to offer little in the way of advice for the industry. It did however reveal some valuable lessons and things to bear in mind for students and recent graduates trying to establish their work, skills and thinking in the design industry.
Elspeth Belden wrote a similar article for Neoco, the studio she works at, commenting on the mis-quoting and even derogatory way she was represented. Myself, I just thought I was made to sound like a bit of a prat trying to sell out the UK's world-leading creative educational system to corporations. Eesh.
This is a long term gripe of mine, finally given some air at a new project space in collaboration with Jo Harrington, Silke Eiselt and Roma Levin - we're designing a design manifeso to provoke future major design festivals. see ld-if.org for more... Design is a process not a product. It unnerves me to see the Heat magazine style hype of the modern superstar designer. Not that I'm jealous. Or snobbish for that matter. I feel like the commercialisation of design and the mystification of the designer into a unfathomable abstract genius who performs such magic to be entirely detremental to what design and designers are capable of. It alienates it from people (all people) who have so much insight to offer about how their world can be improved. Frankly it fuels my fire.
A designer said; "It may be the designer's duty to suppress any desire for self-expression" and so I ask you; is it the duty of a designer to be a conduit for people's needs and to take responsibility to ensure you are not corrupted into compromising people's needs into desires imposed and persuaded to by your ego or other, larger influences?
Beneath the newly vacated Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo Station, a huge creative space has been made of a tunnel handed over by the owners, who invited Banksy to create an installation. He responded by inviting a small army of graffiti artists to take part.
From Stencilling to freehand to tagging to just making your mark, every surface is covered with messages. Within this seeming chaos there are mutual respect for fellow artists, unspoken etiquettes and expectations, or rather limitations on content.
There are common themes such as corporations, the war on terror, and particularly the spectacle of power mediated through consumerism, tv, cctv and visible authorities such as the police. The space has a haunting feeling of presences and activity that was evidently once there. This keeps the dialogue live and sustains it both by perpetually encouraging participation and, ironically for this subbversive context, enforces the rules. Indeed banksy is seen as the head of this community, and without directly defacing his defacements, others question, comment on, praise and criticize his work and ethics.
What banksy has created is a community with ideas sharing, communication, rules and most importantly, the sustaining and keeping alive of this society by constantly creating new stuff.
This arrived through my letterbox today, though it may as well have arrived through my window tied to a brick.
Not content with staggering price rises and outrageous profits for its shareholders, it seems British Gas has diversified into running a protection racket. The delivery of the proposition is an insult to even the most ethically-loose advertising designer.
Whilst tugging at the heart strings with its use of stories of families being saved in a hand-made cut-and-paste genuine newspaper article aesthetic which is as semantically subtle as a sledgehammer in the face, it warns us that the solution to this invisible, un-smellable, un-tasteable killer is forking out for 'Homecare(TM) 100 for just £15 a month' which is just a subscription to boiler maintenance.
It finishes with 'Don't wait, sign up today and ensure you are protected.' In context it psychologically translates as 'your family might die in a nasty accident tonight. Give us money and we'll make sure that doesn't happen.'
Rather than pay them da money, I'd plump for a carbon monoxide detector for about £3 a year and check it.
Engine, Live|Work and ThinkPublic set up
mmm...engaging biscuits.
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