Co-Design: barriers and enablers
Public services have seen some significant increases in investment in the past ten years – for example, 90% higher spending in the NHS, and 65% higher spending on schools. But this has done little to shift our stubbornly low levels of satisfaction and trust in public services overall. In response, the attention has turned from efficiency to experience – or in other words, from stressing the government’s financial ins and outs, to what the public takes from services like health care and education.
Co-design has become an important tool in the effort to develop better relationships between people and the public services they need and want. It means putting the needs of service users foremost by using collaborative principles in the design of a service. From the Comprehensive Spending Review to the Local Government White Paper, from the capability reviews to David Varney’s report on service transformation, there is little doubt that government has placed a lot of faith in ‘co-design’ as a route to better outcomes and more legitimacy.
There is a real acknowledgement that by getting users, designers and providers of services together, there can be significant improvements in how that service works and is experienced. But the practice of co-design is in danger of undermining the promising theory and rhetoric; there remain significant gaps between the aspirations and reality of user engagement in service development and design. Co-design is like spinach. Government knows its good for them - but they don’t always like it.
This project, in partnership with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, will focus on the state of play in co-design work internationally and in the UK, and it will seek to identify what it is that enables and prevents co-design from happening. By exploring the realities of co-design practice, the analysis will look to further explore how services really can, through co-design principles, be designed with user experiences and needs at their heart.
How the project will work
The project is split into two phases.
Phase one involves an international survey that will help us develop an understanding of what co-design looks like in practice across a number of organisations, in a range of countries. It will also draw on an extensive international literature review that maps . These will both form the basis of a working paper and a set of slides / presentation to be published in February 2008, which will be designed to develop interest in the work and provide a sound basis for the next phase.
Phase two of the work will explore the qualitative exploration of how co-design currently works. It will focus on:
• The barriers and enables to co-design in a range of public service contexts (for example, procurement, human resources systems and training)
• The identification of the most cutting edge practice (in the UK, and beyond)
• Lessons from the commercial and third sectors about effective co-design
The research process will involve:
• a series of case studies with organisations, involving site visits to understand the interaction between organisational dynamics, culture and co-design
• a number of seminars, facilitated development sessions and workshops with key decision makers and leading designers to share and develop our thinking
• a series of semi-strucutred interviews with ‘lead practitioners’ across a range of sectors
Outputs
Phase one will see a working paper published in February 2008, along side a set of slides.
Phase two will involve the publication of a pamphlet reporting on the findings of the pamphlet in 2008.
Be involved
We will be posing thoughts on the project blog, and bookmark what we’re reading. There will be occasional outputs such as the working paper and presentation that will be posted free on the Demos website. We’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the work - and we would like to hear from you if you are involved in or have experience of examples of co-design, from any sector or service. You can email us here.
This project is running in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers
