I was really thrilled to be invited by our fantastic Research and Design team earlier this year to submit a workshop to the SDinGov conference in September in Edinburgh. Our topic? Creating ‘footholds’ for future humans –interventions that Designers can make to create better social, environmental and long-term economic benefits for citizens.
Brilliant news - the workshop submission was accepted, so we got to build it out into a full 90minute interactive session, where we shared our Net Positive Proposition, our take on the myriad of guidelines and standards that design folk face in their day-to-day… and our take on synthesising and distilling this down into the principles that really matter.
We primed the participants with 4 very thorny problems from across the public sector – ranging from a complex housing repair experience, to gaps in mental health support, to local authorities taking vulnerable people to court over non-payment of council tax. Each was cross department and multidisciplinary, with issues creating a compounding ‘doom loop’ – recurring negative social economic or environmental effects for citizens.
Participants were encourages to see ‘triple win’ interventions, where focus in a specific area could reverse the negative effects of the doom loop, generating social environmental and economic wins. This is exactly the type of ‘AND’ thinking we’re so fond of at Transform.
We got some wonderful feedback on the day from the attendees, plus a score of 4.67 (out of 5!) for the session in the feedback forms, significantly higher than average.
We have released the workshop online – and would love contributions to the problem statements and for folk to try the workshop and feedback on contents, suggesting amends or new ideas to develop it. And of course, if you’d like us to come and run if in your organisation, we’d love to! Just register interest.