Dredd to Hope

When the first Judge Dredd film, starring Sylvester Stallone was in production, I was working for London prop-maker Martin Adams – I band sawed out the formers for the armour, cast and engraved the epaulettes, and did the polishing strategy for the helmets. As the second Judge Dredd film is released I’m sewing  fabric fobs to enable children who can’t communicate share their stories online, teaching co-design – enabling everyone to be involved in designing the things that make our lives better and working on design strategy with the NHS, Social Services and businesses. It’s the same thing in a way, you make things to help people imagine a different world.

Transforming Outpatient Services

Transforming Outpatient Services – Design for Service

Recently I’ve been working with NHS Scotland and the Scottish Government and colleagues and students from the Master of Design Programme at the University of Dundee to re-imagine outpatient services.

In the year ending March 2011 there were 4,558,000 visits to outpatients in Scotland. This is the equivalent of almost every person in Scotland being seen in outpatients once a year. To create a service which meets the expectations of users, providers and commissioners, some radical re-thinking is necessary.

In 2012 the Scottish Governments’ Government’s Quality & Efficiency Support Team (QuEST) and NHS Scotland brought together consultants, GPs patient representatives and service managers from Scotland’s 14 health boards in two half-day workshops with the objective of a radical re-think of outpatient services. I was invited to facilitate the two innovation sessions to develop principles for the 2020 vision of Outpatient Services as outlined by the NHS Primary Care, Community and Outpatients Quality and Efficiency Support Team. A range of design methods were used, including RIP + MIX, speed networking, patient personas and backcasting to enable participants to think creatively about the future. My key takeaways were that the people that we want to take the flak when things go wrong are the people who have the best ideas about how we can be enabled to move beyond a patriarchal system to a place where we can understand and manage our own health. We need to listen to them.

A paper I’m preparing for the Faculty of Pubic Health conference discusses the results of the two workshops, both in terms of the efficacy of the methods which led to rapid sharing of leading-edge practice and the development of themes focussing on empowerment, flexibility and the creative use of technology and draws conclusions on the role and value of design as part of an innovation process in healthcare.

Keywords: facilitating innovation, outpatients, design, innovation methods

Pecha Kucha

Thanks to Gillian and Lyall at Creative Dundee for organising and doing such a great job of bringing Pecha Kucha to Dundee and making it one of the best reasons to get a babysitter. You can see my talk here about our new Design for Services course.

KISTproject gets underway

The KISTproject brings together design researchers from the University of Dundee with The Children’s Hospice Association Scotland (CHAS) to co-design, develop and test a prototype of a system which enables access to the internet using simple hand held objects as ‘remote controls’. Many CHAS residents have conditions which cause their motor functions to diminish over time, making it increasingly difficult for them to use computers for socialising and entertainment, without assistance.

Craft workshops in March and May 2012 bring together children, parents and carers at CHAS to imagine and make toys and accessories which enable children to independently access their favourite websites.

The outcome of the this stage of the project is a prototype device which enables young people in CHAS to independently access online content using engaging co-designed toys and accessories.

The project is funded by the Scottish Funding Council through the Interface Innovation Voucher Scheme

The project has been co-developed by Hazel White, director of the Master of Design programme at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (DJCAD), University of Dundee and Jo Hodge, PhD student at DJCAD.
CHAS have contributed time, expertise and enthusiasm through CEO Maria McGill and activities co-ordinator Alison Blair and the many CHAS staff and volunteers.
Paul MacKinnon from DJCAD has looked after the programming and technical development
Sara Nevay, Master of Design student at DJCAD is project managing.

SDN Members Day at Adaptive Path

Untitled, a photo by hazelonewhite on Flickr.

Stefan Holmlid and service learning opps

MacDonalds / Byron Stewart

MacDonalds / Byron Stewart, a photo by hazelonewhite on Flickr.

#SDNC11

How MacDonald’s use theatre to understand customer experience.

Download the presentation here http://bit.ly/yhWq5H

protopartners _ zilver_ virgin

protopartners _ zilver_ virgin, a photo by hazelonewhite on Flickr.

#SDNC11 Service Design Network, San Francisco

Damian Kernahan, protopartners and Erik Roscam Abbing, zilver discussed working with virgin to improve customer satisfaction. Protopartners describe themselves as a ‘keeping promises business’ rather than service design.

How do you embed empathy in customer service?

Question from company:

“The primary question behind the
“Intensive Care” programme is how do we
lift the customer satisfaction score from
7.XX to 8.X by Sept 2012, whilst delivering a
differentiated experience that our targeted
customers rave about.

But the key question which needs answered is:

“how do we install the internal processes
and capabilities and behaviours that will
guarantee that we’ll be able to predictably
DELIVER this customer experience.”

The key to improving customer services is to ensure that all the processes and systems are in place to deliver the service and that everyone is

Don’t need to redesign a whole customer journey, focus on the painful bits. Brand is the promise you make, customer experience (CEX) is the promise you keep (oh that Oz humour)

Told compelling story of customer running out of credit whilst calling her mother and having an asthma attack. The mother called the (offshore) helpline to put more credit on her daughters phone, but was bounced at the ‘account number/password’ details – leaving her distraught at being unable to call her daughter back. A video interview of the mother recounting the experience was used as an artifact to communicate the experience back to the Virgin board (alongside a range of quantitative and other qualitative data). This experience was a tiny part of the overall customer experience, but told such a powerful, potentially tragic tale, that it led to protocol changes in call handling. The daughter was okay. I think. You can download a .pdf of their presentation here

Then later informal chats in the Haight with Eric, Ross, Damian, Rishi, Aiden and Thomas.

Nokia_Bas Raijmakers_STBY_DA Eindhoven

Nokia_Bas Raijmakers_STBY_DA Eindhoven, a photo by hazelonewhite on Flickr.

#SDNC11 Service Design Network, San Francisco
Selling Service Design through telling stories

Takeaways – films to create shared stories of experience – ‘day in the life’
Films put on USB keyrings for Management to use at presentations
http://www.stby.eu/2011/02/05/design-documentaries/

Notes From Continuum/Forrester #SDNC11

Notes From Continuum/Forrester #SDNC11, a photo by hazelonewhite on Flickr.

Service Design Network, San Francisco. Key takeaways – gap between service expectation and delivery – eg. United’s promise to take ‘Dad’ on a flight on a white bird, slaying dragons as opposed to budget JetBlue’s more pragmatic approach

Notes from Richard Buchanan’s keynote at #SDNC11

Richard Buchanan Notes, a photo by hazelonewhite on Flickr.

Buchanan’s four domains of design summarised to posters, toasters, environment and now services.  Thinking of management as a design discipline – how we organise ourselves to do the things we do is a design issue.