Jax Wechsler

About Co-design

Expanding upon my last post about the initiative by EU governments to encourage design driven innovation within the EU, I found some videos explaining what co-design is from UK service design agencies Think Public and Engine. This last post had many examples of this drive within UK and both these videos discuss Service Design work they have done for the UK government.

This first one from Think Public :

Interestingly, within this video after talking about Think Public’s work with the NHS someone describes the rise of ‘co-design’ in the video as the “collaboration movement”.

(NOTE: Having not lived in the UK myself….I can only quote by  English friends reaction…”It’s great that the UK government is trying to find new ways to improve their public services ‘cos they definitely need a re-think!”)

This 2nd case-study for Kent County Council by Engine looks at how co-design was used to design local government policy.

Engine helped the Kent local government find new ways to personalise services and help understand the people that they serve.

The people from Kent County Council think that design provides a structured approach for generating ideas and mentioned the value Engine provided by making things tangible, and their ability at identifying and communicating patterns between what a  broad spectrum of customers need.

I recently wrote a post with a collection of quotes about design which seem relevant here:

Herbert Simon – “changing existing situations to preferred ones”

Donald Schon – “a dynamic knowing process”

Buchanan, Richard – “the subject matter of design is potentially universal in scope”

Check out the videos:

Another video about the Kent County Council and Engine collaboration.