tasks, teams, transparency, mapping, micro-metrics and motivation (TM x3)

I had a discussion recently about small-scale, grass roots community building and how to motivate collaborative, social and even selfless behaviour. It began with noting how a 1970’s large-scale urban block of flats may differ in terms of community and knowing your neighbours from say, houses around a village green. It reminded me of a book I bought a few years ago, full of tips and actions to make your local and wider world a better place.

"It is an ingeniously executed book aimed at galvanising alienated Britons to do something for a society devoid of fellow feeling and good neighbourliness." - The Guardian

All well and lovely, but beyond smiling and nodding in agreement, it's hard to find the time to actually do it. Whilst I could have been enriching my life, the lives of others and the general universe, I've been doing other things like watching rubbish films or mucking about on my iPhone. In fact, a Solitaire application has an horrific function on it which tells you how many games you have won (very depressing once you hit 100) and more alarmingly, how much time you have spent in a social coma, transfixed on a 4x3" screen.

shameful...and I can't believe I lost that many times!

Motivation and incentivising is the key to service design, as services simply don't exist without users and providers being engaged. It's crucial to create value and benefits for everyone involved, as well as ensuring the service as a whole is sustainable. Now If I had a widget that could use the power of such a metric positively to help make me more productive...

In fact, many services are now harnessing this power, from Nike+ visualising your athletic progress to learningtoloveyoumore and wearewhatwedo's websites featuring to-do lists that you can create and join to collaborate on your do-gooding.


They also go a long way to allowing the user to personalise and evolve their own experience of a service, with their actions and input affecting a larger system or network of people or generating visual feedback.

The balance is difficult, but I think the title of this article can be used as a guide (and is by no means a definitive list) of how to encourage user participation.

tasks - find a way of visualising or organising things to be done
teams - allow people to network, share their successes and even compete
transparency - put the users in control by giving them all the information
mapping - use location, time, speed, efficiency, happiness...anything!
micro-metrics - visualise progress and present data in compelling ways
motivation - should come naturally in a user-centred or co-designed system!

And while I await the iPhone SortYourLifeOut App, I'll begin with Google Calendar and some more detailed and frequent blogs.

Ethnography 101

Some of us at Engine are getting ready for a very intensive series of ethnographic studies for the Southwark Rise Project, set up to compare Southwark Council's support provision with the end experience of users, and to establish a framework for developing a user-centred approach. Ethnography is the practical end of anthropology and involves immersing yourself in the environment, community, society or culture you are observing and recording very qualitative information regarding how people live their lives. It often uses film and photography to quickly document the subjects without interfering with their natural habits and asking too many questions. It's somewhere between Lois Theroux and a human safari.

Ethnography is powerful because it offers so much qualitative detail on people, creating a compelling and personal account of people's everyday lives. In order to capture everything in its immediacy, from the contents of someone's fridge to a family argument, film, photography, sound recordings and even sketches are often used. This rich visual evidence adds to this power and reality when presented back.

Thankfully for those of us who are less experienced in front line ethnographic research, the studio has been sharing some advice and resources. Here's a summary of what I (and you) may find useful when planning, carrying out and reviewing front-line ethnography.

Erick gave me a really entertaining (if a bit long) movie of Luis Arnal's experiences as an ethnographer, reinforcing a sound set of principles and ethics with some great anecdotes which was presented at IIT last year. He had a simple illustration of the paths of conversation in an interview, probing and branching and gradually becoming more productive:

Empathy - with both participants and clients
Teamwork - briefing everyone and making participants feel on your side, create a buzz
Creativity - reacting quickly and finding a way to get people to open up
Discipline - observing the social code (Arnal covers everything from high society to the favelas)
Courage - know your rights, coping with emotionally demanding research
Social Responsibility - follow an ethical code, all work should improve people's lives, don't engage participants but leave written recommendations; don't keep them
Passion - believe in the project (see Social Responsibility!)


RECOUP, the Research Consortium on Education Outcomes and Poverty provides a useful checklist to prepare you for ethnography and the process of disseminating and discussion what you've seen. The full manual can be downloaded here.

And finally a list of the great and the good, from beginnings of armchair anthropology based on archeaology and 'collecting' exotic material items to what we now see as ethnography.

Franz Boas - developed a theory of cultural relativism, rather than seeing culture as an evolutionary line
Bronislaw Malinowski - participant observation pioneer
Marcel Mauss - worked on reciprocity and gift exchange
Claude Levi-Strauss - structuralism and mythologies

I'm itching to get out into the field now!

Criminal Designerminds

The Design Council with help from Live|Work have been working on a project to 'design out crime'. The site is filling up with examples of systems and product re-designs that have help make crime or theft more difficult or less appealing, summarised in this Pdf.

The project takes a number of approaches, from encouraging public vigilance to co-ordinating manufacturers to make products more difficult to sell on (Schools requested that equipment was made bright orange to stem a tide of thefts)

When beginning such a design process, it's easy to talk to, observe and design around the experiences of the victims and also to look at the official data to see which may be the most fruitful areas to tackle. However, I'm intrigued by 'anti-user-centred design' instances like this, where designers have to make a situation as un-appealing or difficult as possible for one user group whilst not compromising the experience for legitimate users. So shouldn't that user segment be included in the process?

At a recent conference I spoke with Thinking Spaces about their work with prisons. When interviewing inmates, they always found the armed robbers and fraudsters the most interesting to talk to.
Such criminals have the potential to be excellent designers. They can spot opportunities, think quickly and laterally and some have proven to be expert systems analysts and exploiters. Their ingenuity is often borne of necessity and from the ground up.


A fantastic example of product design involves an acquaintance's mother, who lived in a flat with a coin-operated electricity meter that was checked every month to be emptied but was always found to have no coins in it at all, despite energy being used. The flatmates had created a ice tray with pound coin sized holes and were dropping these ice "slugs" (fake coins) into the meter, where they would melt and evaporate!



After a mugging, I had a hopeless series of experiences with Lewisham Police, and after six weeks I was finally invited in to identify any of the eight strangers I met late at night in a stressful circumstance. Needless to say I didn't manage to recognise anyone, but I did encounter some excellent resourcefulness to play the identification system.

Mug shots are so-called because the suspects being photographed used to gurn to distort their faces to avoid identification. Amongst hundreds of photographs of frowns and straight faces I was taken aback by someone leaning towards the camera with a beaming smile! The chances are that if he had done anything wrong, he didn't have quite so happy a demeanour at the time!

So if you truly want to attempt to 'design out crime' I'd recommend starting with those who have committed crimes to understand the motivations, drivers and barriers that can make the rest of us so unhappy, but also to harness the creativity and ingenuity of their unique and underestimated perspectives.

Just Coping

Esro have produced a insightful report written by Sophia Parker and Robin Pharoah with Tamara Hale on their ethongraphic research into families on the borders of poverty, in partnership with Kent County Council and the SILK lab, set up by Engine. It takes a thoroughly qualitative stance, but the stories used and rawness of the situations of the participants of the research makes for incredibly compelling reading.

It is positioned as a policy development guide, with the end experiences of those 'just coping' in mind, rather than a top-down set of guidelines and approaches. Essentially, this user-centred report puts people before statistics.



The book is inspiring both in the insights it picks out, and also its ability to force to you question your pre-conceptions about people living 'on the breadline'. From some very harsh case studies, there is hope built on the observations of the researchers that the subjects are incredibly entrepreneurial and resourceful, in order to make the best of what they have.

There are also some blatant flaws in the systems and services of local government, which although are set up to protect and support people struggling to make ends meet, can in fact obstruct that very goal and turn vulnerable situations into spirals towards much more serious ones.

Key insights include:

No matter who you are, poor people are always seen as 'other'. No-one wants to admit that they are in that bracket, which would be seeming to concede that they are not trying to get out of poverty.

Prevention strategies can be much more effective both in costs for the providers (councils and national government departments such as the job centre and benefits) and in the experiences of the users, who hopefully can get support in avoiding worse situations before they arrive at them. (Surprise surprise)

Preconceptions of others who are not in poverty (the general public). There is an interesting comparison made to the purpose of the 1970's disability social model, which "demanded that economic, environmental and cultural barriers were recognised as constituting the disability as much as the condition itself."

Putting children first. The book contained some powerful examples of children who were growing up before their time, with responsibilities and situations they should not have to be forced to cope with. However, parents commonly will do whatever they can to ensure their children get the best 'life chances', even if that means skipping meals to ensure their child can get a new school uniform or take the bus to school.

The book ends with a number of opportunities and system challenges to realise them, and calls for a 'Copernican shift' in the way services are delivered, from a top-down approach, to designing services from the ground-up. It can be downloaded for free here.

McMixed Messages: The Breakfast of Champions?

I went to McDonald's last weekend. I always feel guilty about it, but currently I am interested in childhood obesity and its causes. (And it was convenient, quick and cheap). Although the health of children is greatly affected by the food children receive at home and until recently, the terribly unhealthy options they had at school for lunch and snacks, I wanted to explore the attraction of fast food.

Fast food advertising aimed at children was banned in the UK in 2006, although these rules are often flouted, particularly online, where fast food websites contain branded games and 'kid-zones'.

Whilst tucking into my burger and chips, I noticed the olympic logo and 'Official Sponsor of the London 2012 Olympics'. Intriguing. Are they suggesting anyone actually taking part in the olympics would have a Big Mac in their nutritionist's regime? Shouldn't the olympics be more responsible for the sponsors it partners with?

Sponsorship's an intriguing proposition, particularly when it marries a brand and context that sit uncomfortably together. Since the advertising of fast food joined the outcasts of alcohol aimed at children and cigarettes altogether, the big fast food retailers have clamoured to recoup the profits lost with the resultant dip in custom from children.

I'll centre this article on McDonald's not for the sake of bashing it, but because it is probably the most interesting and prominent example. They have run sustained campaigns of football coaching, sports sponsorship and touring 'festivals' to encourage children to play football.

But is such sponsorship self-defeating? I imagine the bottom line reveals that such sponsorship is still worth it as kids and parents return to the seemingly less health-hazardous restaurants, ignoring the PR-friendly 'healthy' choices (I did hear a myth that the dressing in McDonald's salads contains more fat than a burger) and having the usual burger, chips and sugar-packed drink. The danger, of course, is that companies such as McDonalds are now being let through the school gates, where they can target all children, interested in sports and exercise or not. 1 - 0 to fast food.

It is too early to tell if legislation has been effective, and it will surely be affected by the resourcefulness and determination of fast food chains to find routes around. The other half of the coin is the need for innovative alternatives.



Education and transparency can help people make choices: healthy foods may not have the single identity, PR machinery and ad budgets to compete, but the product is decidedly better. Lecturing and awareness drives are only part of the battle, and an ugly method at that. Although healthy food may not be as instantly appealing as fast food, the longer life span and healthier body and mind, and what you can do with those things, is decidedly so. Change4Life is trying to sell these longer term benefits, fighting obesity and chronic illnesses on several fronts. They have a difficult task ahead. I'm sold, anyway, and made my way to the running shop and bought these - so is Change 4 Life or McDonald's responsible for that one?

The Big Red Book

Whilst working in Portugal the other week, our team was presented with what is possibly the most broadly used service refinement tool I've ever come across.

The complaints book is required in all Portuguese businesses which deal directly with the public, from banks to cafes, shops to train stations. It is required by the Portuguese government, who also stipulate that all complaints are replied to within 5-8 days and that completed books be returned to the relevant government department. Suddenly I could see it everywhere; at cash desks, in shop windows and information points.

I am yet to understand further the provider's inevitable loopholes, the government's powers to remedy bad practice and the complainant's experience and ideally, results. However, given that the UK service sector contributes more to the its GDP (73%) than most countries, that we don't have an independent or state run system like this is lamentable. 'Watchdog', a 30-minute BBC TV show which publicises poor practice and campaigns for resolution just doesn't cut it.



Benefits of a unified, independent body to oversee complaints and responses are obvious, although the methods are complex; they maintain a baseline of performance and should ideally accompany the power to fine or shut down repeat offenders. Services that don't deliver are essentially cons. The baseline could work to guarantee a minimum standard of service, as the kitemark is the official UK mark for safety in products.

A rhetorical poster: Performance on the provider's quantitative terms

Standing in London Bridge Rail Station on my way home from portugal, I don't know where to begin. I look around for a generic complaints form. Nothing. This highlights two key cultural problems.

The first problem is the domain of the service provider. Some forward-thinking organisations use complaints forms (often spun as 'your suggestions') as the opportunity to gain free customer feedback, troubleshooting and the figures to justify an improvement. These organisations are less likely to have regular entries to a red book. Many others put up barriers to discourage complaints, skew figures and in some cases, ignore them. A favourite example is retailers Next, who dealt with a 3 month backlog of complaints swiftly and efficiently by deleting all complaints on the computer system (source: a fantastic article by Anna Tims).

The second problem is ours, the customer. A look at the surreal and shocking behaviour of organisations in Timms' article linked above will show how easy it is for customers to be worn down, to see complaining as futile and to not bother. Indeed, it's not beyond reason to suggest that some of the larger, sector dominating organisations prefer to silently encourage this culture. If we were to introduce such a system, have we become too cynical to embrace it?

Designing Public Services Together

Engine have produced a great video around their project with Kent County Council explaining the establishment of SILK (Social Innovation Lab Kent) - a partnership between Engine and KCC to provide service design knowledge, tools and expertise for all areas of the council. It shows Engine in the studio demonstrating some of the processes and ways of working deployed through the project. On my day out of the studio too!

The video was also posted on the Local Government Channel. Let's hope we can widen the great work we do in the public sector by getting the attention of some new councils and government bodies...




The project was also nominated for the London Design Museum's Design of the Year! Though sadly, as with the excellent service design projects that were up for nomination last year (including Velibre, the fantastic pay-as-you-go urban cycling scheme), there isn't a suitable category for service design, which is inter-disciplinary by its nature, and we have consequently been entered under 'Communications'.

This all comes at a very important time for service design in the public sector. The growing awareness of the power of user-centred design in improving and developing new services, coupled with the sad reality that as the recession deepens, more and more people will rely on some aspects of the services their councils and the state provide, mean that innovation is fundamental to meeting the demand and the challenges faced.

Recently, the Design Council launched a new capaign; Public Services By Design, underlining the huge task and huge opportunity before us. The linked article covers a great deal of the issues - personalisation of services, inclusive design processes, and in particular the the call for action below stands out:




"We need to be conscious that today’s problems are just not going to be addressed by yesterday’s ideas and yesterday’s solutions...we need a whole new approach to policy over the 10 years.”

By a 'new approach to policy', I hope that the intention is to develop a culture of innovation, amongst other things such as sharing best practice. Service design's real power is not it's ability to pull from all disciplines of design to create the more tangible elements of a service, but the ability to transform an organisation from the inside out. In order to develop successful, relevant, sustainable services, it's vital to instill a culture of innovation and encourage the open-ness and willingness to change and test new ideas so that a service is never a finished product, but an evolving, constantly refined solution.

use-value vs exchange-value in public spaces

Over the past two years that Engine has been located just by Tower Bridge, we've enjoyed the small park outside the Mayor's building, which has a great riverfront view of Tower Bridge and the Tower of London. It's a perfect place to have lunch in the summer and a pleasant walk to and from the studio.

Being designers, we're always analytical about what could be improved (i.e. whingeing)- from the strip lighting that is exactly at eye level so that you can't see into the park in the evening because of the glare, to the increasing yuppification and commercialisation of the site with tourist-priced cafes.

In particular, it seems the architects have had a dramatic lack of vision when it comes to sustainability - from the slate paving which requires the employment of two people and bristle-cleaning machines to be run across it every day to clean out the lichens which would make the surface slippery, to the fact that the mayor's building needs a bespoke crane (with its own housing) to clean it's uniquely awkward windows.

so many ruined photos...

However, a much more disconcerting and entirely avoidable trend of selling the park as advertising space has been on the rise recently. We've seen cars emerging from synthetic meteorite craters complete with lighting rigs and auditoriums, guest only Budweiser 100m races, sculptures such as a giant swimmer gliding through the ground as if it were water, and the space was enjoyably overrun by multicoloured Sony bunnies.

Perhaps it's the council trying to milk the space's prime location for some cash as we enter a recession, but the moments when the line is overstepped are sometimes painfully obvious. I doubt that any of the architectural renders, with semi-transparent families playing and relaxing in the park featured mega-scale PR stunts or the space completely fenced off.

The closing off of the park is a textbook example of how getting the use-value, exchange-value balance wrong can have keenly felt effects for all users.

The space generates money which goes back into the government pot, which is a good thing. A constantly changing space can be entertaining. But this is a publicly-funded park, fulfilling a need for relaxing breathing space in the city and something which no doubt secured the planning permission to counterbalance the massive financial buildings built around it at the same time. The public aren't consulted on these changes, probably due to the sheer number and ephemerality of them.

Poor, poor nature.

The sponsorship of the space is its effective temporary privatisation, meaning that the public lose the benefits, and sometimes, entry to the park altogether. This is most acutely felt by those who live or work locally, and generates bad feeling towards the council, and particularly towards the sheepish-looking Mayor's building directly overlooking the park. In fact, the park is owned by the Potter's Field Management Trust , with a mix of public and private sector directors. It's mission statement to maintain the park in the interests of public welfare, with specific mentions of appropriateness of events may have been subject to some bending because of this mix of interests on its board.

Looking at the recent backlash to a saturation of billboards and advertisements in Sao Paulo, how do we gage the revenue generated against less tangible factors, such as the experiences and annoyance of the public, the loss of trust towards the authorities and the perception of the thousands of tourists who pass the site everyday to see we're selling out (and in the case of the giant New Zealand rugby ball, obscuring) our landmarks?