Design's Role in the Satellite Applications & Transportation Systems Catapults.

A six month scoping study exploring design's contribution to two of the Catapults: the Satellite Applications Established in May 2013 and the Transport Systems set up in March 2013

Mapping and Developing Service Design Research in the UK.

This report is the outcome of the Service Design Research UK (SDR UK) Network with Lancaster University as primary investigator and London College of Communication, UAL as co-investigator. This project was funded as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Network grant. Service Design Research UK (SDR UK), funded by an AHRC Network Grant, aims to create a UK research network in an emerging field in Design that is Service Design. This field has a recent history and a growing, but still small and dispersed, research community that strongly needs support and visibility to consolidate its knowledge base and enhance its potential impact. Services represent a significant part of the UK economy and can have a transformational role in our society as they affect the way we organize, move, work, study or take care of our health and family. Design introduces a more human centred and creative approach to service innovation; this is critical to delivering more effective and novel solutions that have the potential to tackle contemporary challenges. Service Design Research UK reviewed and consolidated the emergence of Service Design within the estalished field of Design

A Design Anthropology of Place in Service Design: A Methodological Reflection

This paper proposes adopting a Design Anthropology perspective when considering the design of community based services for the elderly. Drawing on two service design projects located in the Byker area of Newcastle, which brought together Ordnance Survey, Age UK Newcastle and a service design Post Graduate Masters programme, this perspective utilises anthropology’s ethnographic method and a specific anthropological theory, to expand service design discourses and reframe the importance of place and place making in the design of community services. In particular, the paper takes the work of Ingold and a phenomenological perspective to explore notions of life as lived to reveal alternative conceptual frames that can often be overlooked in service design. These methods and concepts adopted from anthropology both reveal and theorise the messiness of everyday life. The work goes on to examine the challenges of commensurating these community practices, with the values that the research revealed and to integrate them into viable services of the elderly

Amplifying Relationships through Place and Locality in the Design of Local Government Digital Services.

This paper presents an action research service design project that took place as part of the Public Collaboration Lab (PCL), a one-year, AHRC funded research project between Camden Council and Central Saint Martins (CSM), University of the Arts London. The project focused on the Council’s Home Library Service (HLS). With UK central government reducing budgets for local authorities, and increasing pressure from societal challenges including an ageing population, the HLS offered a speculative design space to reconfigure possible co-designed service futures. Visual ethnographic processes, framed within anthropological concepts of locality and place, traced the routes travelled and the interactions that were enacted between the HLS team members and its housebound readers, revealing the hidden nature of the relationships and knowledge that existed across the borough. I conclude that as governments look to reconfigure services—and often do so using abstract policy language—new frames of understanding of locality and place must be explored to deliver digital solutions that amplify the social and cultural dimensions that constitute a community. Published in a special edition of She ji, edited by Ezio Manzini and Adam Thorpe

Public Collaboration Lab

This paper describes the exhibition that introduces the Public Collaboration Lab (PCL), a one-year research project that explores the potential for, and value of, strategic collaboration between design education and local government to better engage council staff and the citizens they serve, in the development and application of design-led approaches to social challenges and to inform policy. It displays a selection of practice-based PCL collaborative design engagement tools that provide a site for argument, debate and exchange between participants in the process of creative engagement. Taking these tools as a starting point, the mini-workshop explores the various definitions of such tools (thing, boundary object, cultural probe, etc.), discussing their role in participatory design research

Design for Service Innovation & Development. Final Report

This is an AHRC research report exploring design's contribution to Service Innovation and New Service Development

Creative Methods to Envision Nursing Practices Addressing Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR): a report on the use of arts and humanities approaches to co-design healthcare service innovation

Re-envisaging Infection Practice Ecologies in Nursing (RIPEN) through Arts and Humanities Approaches is a collaborative research project that has used a novel combination of methods to explore and develop nursing’s engagement with the pressing problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This report presents an overview of the rationale for, and design of, the project before featuring the methods used in the workshops that were central to its progress. In the third section we reflect on the learning that has accrued and this is then summarised in the final section along with specific recommendations. In presenting this material we hope to give the reader insight into how we have addressed RIPEN’s central question: How can relevant arts and humanities-based approaches help nurses to re-envisage their infection control practice ecologies in response to antimicrobial resistance? We believe this should be of relevance to four main audiences: Nursing and healthcare professionals engaged in practice, education and/or research to address antimicrobial resistance and infection prevention Designers, artists and researchers using and developing creative methodologies applied to healthcare practice and service improvement. Policymakers, activists, public officials and funders seeking to further understand and explore the creative potential of innovative approaches to complex healthcare challenges. Communities of practice interested in exploring the use of co-design and visual methods to understand complex challenges and opportunities in healthcare

Civic engagement as participation in designing for services

In spite of the increased interest on collaborative and participatory design approaches to design in public sector, less attention has been paid to the contribution of design into civic engagement in local decision-making. This paper takes an organisational perspective to explore the role of civic engagement activities in local decision-making cycles, drawing on literature and insights from a workshop with local authorities’ representatives and art and design academics. Zooming out from specific civic engagement activities, the paper outlines local decision-making as a design process, proposes four scenarios, and provides insights into better understanding the decision-making cycles that lead to service transformation in local authorities. The authors argue that while design can facilitate civic engagement practices, an increased understanding of local decision-making cycles can enhance the adoption of participatory approaches in designing for public services in local authorities

Anatomy of Local Government/Design Education Collaboration

The Public Collaboration Lab (PCL) is an action research partnership between the London Borough of Camden (LBC) and the University of the Arts London, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The research explored the potential for, and value of, strategic collaboration between design education (DHE) and local government (LG), and how design research and practice can contribute to service, policy and social innovation in the LG context. The project prototyped and piloted a new way of working that identified and leveraged synergies in the operational objectives of LG and the learning objectives (research and teaching) of DHE. The poster shares findings from the research in the form of an ‘anatomy’ of LG/DHE collaboration, which articulates and visualizes the internal workings of LG/DHE. The ‘anatomy’ serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to reflect on collaborative projects by inputting data to the models to visualize their activities; and as a generative tool, providing a set of templates that focus discussion around the planning of collaborative projects