WRITTEN ON November 3rd, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, What do we want?

I couldn’t make it to Dott07 but Ian Brown could:

Last week I spent a happy 30 minutes browsing around the Designs of the Times 2007 festival in Newcastle. Lots of fascinating projects including a climate change “weather forecast”, OurNewSchool, Urban Farming and accessible sexual health services.

What all of these projects had in common was the involvement from start to finish of the users of their services. You might think this is the obvious way to design new systems, but if so you clearly haven’t spent much time in the IT world — particularly in the design of large public sector information systems. The more usual approach is that a system is hacked together to a constantly-changing specification from consultants and officials who may have never used the service in question (e.g. collecting child benefit or jobseekers’ allowance), and fine-tuned by programmers who are similarly disconnected from their users.

Interaction design is a key new field between design and computer science. John Thackara and his Dott team have done a sterling job of putting it into practice, both here and in the Juice workshop I attended earlier this year in Delhi. I hope that visitors from the North East and local and central government were enthused and will build co-design into their future projects — as we are doing in Fair Tracing, e-Curator, and hopefully a forthcoming ID management project.

I do think John Thackara is spot on in bringing together the service design community and focussing on theme of co-creation which in idealgovworld we call co-governance. First he did it in Delhi with Doors of Perception, and here, thanks to some NE enterprise body funding, in Newcastle (which might as well be Delhi as far as Whitehall is concerned).

Come on John: we’ve got to get this stuff into the corridors of Whitehall. Come on Whitehall: don’t be scared! Use the service design community to help you invite your customers to say what they need, what the problem is, and help you design, monitor and evaluate the solution! Once you’ve got over the initial discomfort of confronting reality and that inevitable stage of thinking “How could we have been so inept and ineffective for so long”, you’ll find It’s easy and fun. It’s not too late. It’s high time.