1. Connecting people: How better relationships, networks and connections between people in a community can improve wellbeing and enable individuals to get the support they need from within their community.

2. Giving and Confidence: How enabling people to provide mutually beneficial activities and be part of their own solutions, rather than defined as a ‘problem’, can increase their confidence, self-esteem,self efficacy and coping strategies.

Inspiring Scotland has identified 10 communities in Scotland that are typically defined by the problems and issues people face. Locally based charities have been recruited to work in partnership with Inspiring Scotland as Host Organisations. Community ‘catalysts’ have then been employed to facilitate activites where people in the community come together, participate and help each other – or simply have fun.

Snook are working with the team of ten Community Catalysts to design and deliver a package of support and guidance that presents new, creative and engaging ways for the workers to do what they do and think about what they do.

Our first engagement was a day with the ten community workers. The day kicked off with a presentation that was designed to make sure the workers “left feeling like they could change the world” – I learned a lot putting this together and would like to thank Tessy Britton and her team at Social Spaces for sharing their research and connections the way they do!

We then spent time understanding how the workers currently do things – everything from gaining the trust of local gatekeepers to learning from their mistakes. This gave our team a strong understanding of what kind of tools would really make an impact in the day to day life of a community worker.

We introduced the workers to journey mapping as a tool they can use on the ground with local people they are meeting and hoping to build up a relationship with.

The team then shared specific, individual experiences they have encountered in doing this kind of work. There was certainly recurring issues around the ambiguity and uncertainty of doing this kind of community work – it seems it can be lonely and overwhelming at times.

Snook are now synthesising all the information gathered to design the next session we will have with the workers and designing the foundations of a valuable outcome we will create. It is clear the outcome will be focused on reporting and capturing, sharing and learning, community relationship management, visualisation tools and building up trust with stakeholders.

Hear what the workers had to say about the day in the video below…

…don’t forget to follow Link Up on twitter !

We followed up the immersion day with a couple of workshops on Thursday 12^th April; one using a community safety day to access a variety of residents and civil servants, the other at the Factory Skate Park with a group of 7-10 year old children.

Our immersive interviews were based around three key questions: “What’s happening now in Douglas?”, “What makes your community unique?” and “What would you like to see in Douglas?” The workshops sought to go deeper into what makes their community by asking for “A happy memory from Dundee”, “What or who is community to you?”, “What would be your Dundee heaven?” and “What would be your Dundee hell?”

Core points we learnt about Douglas were the strong contrast in quality of living from western to eastern areas and discovering good, valuable resources that seem to be underused by residents. There were many parallels with the topics revealed in Whitfield, but the following ‘realities’ reflect the stories we heard.

Positive ‘realities’ acknowledged how there is a neighbourliness in areas of Douglas and that everyone knew everyone around the community. Some groups around walking, cooking and conserving green areas have developed into proactive social activity for residents across the East end of Dundee. Regular buses and good shops seem to make Douglas a comfortable and suitable place to walkabout. The Factory Skate Park was a particularly respected and well-attended resource due to excellent facilities and a valued youth group is provided for kids from Douglas to attend for free. Making more residents within Douglas aware of some of the good work and activity going on was seen as a key in people’s hopes for the future, as well as providing safe communal spaces and more activities for young people.

Negative ‘realities’ were revealed through the youth encountering a lot of fighting, mainly due to having little to do, but in part due to familiarity between each of the residents. A lot of the participants to community groups, events and activities are the same small catchment of people, many of whom are actually from outside the area. As a result an older generation seems to claim ownership of a lot of activity, providing fewer opportunities for younger people. The sense of community spirit is said to be diminishing due to a lack of family events and a lack of jobs, so many leave to get work.

What we intend to do

This all paints a broad picture of what’s happening in Douglas and is limited to what we were able to learn in the short time we visited. The workshops will aim to produce a selection of ideas, developed and presented by the participants, with an understanding of how community members could help make it happen, alongside a map of the assets and issues within the area from which the ideas emerge.

A final showcase event will be delivered by Snook, inviting residents from both Whitfield and Douglas, council and social workers, local businesses and other stakeholders, in Whitfield Shopping Centre on Tuesday 1^st May. The Showcase event is a milestone within the wider project and presents a chance for Snook to prototype a process that may evolve into a full project proposal. The event will prototype the tools and process for residents of Dundee communities to design their own future. Our objective outcomes are for attendees to leave with a project proposal they can use to make it really happen, having been exposed to tools and techniques for making a project real. We aim to get feedback on the process and tools in order to write a business plan based on the processes tested. We wish for council/other project owners to feel reassured their projects and organisations are recognised within our process and to see possibility that everyone (from leaders to locals) can be talked to in the same way regarding their future.

Deprivation at its most fundamental level impacts everyone’s reality, the level of impact depends on the multiplicity of deprivation experienced. Statistics are important yet there is little understanding of what the people who are these statistics can and want to do to change their reality. This initial phase of work is focused on allowing articulation of people’s reality and enable the beginning of a process of changing realities. This is the first step in a wide-scale project around the future of Dundee that will:

• Link with people living with deprivation to hear and understand their reality
• Use innovative approaches to include all members of the community
• Learn from the most deprived what the key issues are and what they want to change
• Give people living in deprived communities a real voice to change their future

In addition we will work with a team of innovative business leaders who will:

• Provide drive and innovation to a city wide initiative
• Provide expertise on how and where to make the connections using all media
• Have influence and provide guidance on funding opportunities

Our process began by spending time with the core team and two local communities to ultimately define the questions this larger piece of work will answer. We took tours of the communities and spent time immersing ourselves in the physical environment. These communities were not chosen for any particular reason as this project is about the whole of Dundee and it’s 150,000 residents. It has been vital throughout this journey to be aware of and understand all the work that is currently happening from local groups to council initiatives – this work is not about what services can be better or what isn’t working very well – it’s about re-imagining the future.

We are now working to establish a brand around the project whilst holding gatherings in Whitfield and Douglas to focus on asset mapping and identifying untapped resources and co-designing ideas.  We have spent time simply listening and gathering stories to enable us to frame problems as well as create solutions.

Meanwhile we are working with civil servants and local people to identify key champions in the community who will play a vital role in creating a ‘co-creation city’.  The project team are making connections with players from all the different sectors that make Dundee the city that it is ranging from music to catering.

Snook are holding a showcase event later this month to bring all the stakeholders back together in a neutral space. We will show a film to tell the story of the voices we have captured and also host conversations around key elements such as ensuring this work joins up strategically as well as makes sense on the ground to the brilliant work that is already happening. This event will ultimately showcase what a new future of Dundee could look like. We will be inviting all the residents we have met from both communities, public servants, local businesses and other stakeholders, to tell the stories of the resident’s ‘realities’ and a direction for a ‘flag’ under which the key issues and ideas can be represented and supported by local stakeholders.

Snook are looking forward to working with the various partners involved to shape and influence what this will ultimately become.

Perhaps, the opportunity to work with some of the most creative and talented, coders, designers, branding and marketing professionals, business analysts, and festival managers in Nigeria.

I was delighted to be invited by the British Council to take part in Culture Shift Nigeria, a project ran in collaboration with the Co-Creation Hub & Social Innovation Camp.

If you haven’t been to an SI camp, Global Service Jam or Hackathon, well, you should. Try and imagine putting together six groups of ten strong minded, enthusiastic and driven individuals, all strangers, and ask them to work together over the course of a weekend to design, code, prototype and pitch an idea (in this case for substantial investment opportunities) and you begin to get a picture of how exciting an environment it can be.

For this particular project the groups were working on six identified challenges established by festivals managers from across Nigeria in workshops ran earlier in the week. These managers were then put in a room with about forty of the aforementioned creatives and together strived to create new technology ventures that answered the issues and supported the development of the creative and cultural economy in Nigeria.

Before the British Council officially invited to me go, I had already identified this opportunity as “a dream project” – for lots of different reasons. I could elaborate, but I fear a self-indulgent introspective blog post isn’t the flavor of the month. However, the learning potential that a short, intense project has cannot be undervalued.

1. Different county, different culture, different design approach.

I’m not advocating radically different techniques – I was invited to support the project based on my existing skillset. But the examples you use, the context – and the resulting impact all require a complimentary understanding, or ability to adapt to an approach that you might feel ‘safe’ with.

My understanding of the Nigerian festival landscape was minimal, coming in as in neutral outsider gave me the opportunity to really listen to the teams, hear, (and question) their barriers. You then begin to get a sense of the different challenges facing them culturally, technically and practically. It’s in these situations being a designer has an impact; sharing process and techniques to help articulate these challenges and facilitate development through them, towards an idea and an outcome.

I thoroughly enjoyed being a part of this project, and want to say a BIG thank you to Carly & Rebecca from the British Council, and Glen from SI Camp for giving me the opportunity to go to Lagos and be involved.

If you want to read more, I contributed to a few extra blog posts which explore; “The Art of Supporting Innovation”, and “Adding Investment to Innovation” written in collaboration with Kelly Clark, MD of Marmanie Consulting. You can read these here.

The Civic Crowd is inspired by the Compendium for the Civic Economy, Hand Made, the Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe series, and the Britain’s 50 Top New Radicals project by The Observer and NESTA; but the map belongs to everyone…

This infrastructure was designed by 00:/ and our good friends Social Spaces and Cassie Robinson. Special thanks to NESTA and the Hub Islington. The Civic Crowd is sponsored by Design Council.

We are proud to announce our  two speakers for the evening : Hazel White and Rohan Gunatillake.

Hazel White will be talking about:

Designing for change in an educational context. Hazel will focus on projects with the Children’s Hospice Association Scotland (CHAS) and working with the NHS and communities in Dundee.

We have stand at the event are are really looking forward to talking to people about the work they do in Scotland. You can join the discussion on Twitter at #SocEntEx and get involved!

We are looking forward to hearing the fantastic speakers and meeting new people – Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna, Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark, Jim Duffy of Entreprenurial Spark, Sophi Tranchell, Divine Chocolate and Paul Monaghan from the Co-Operative Group along with more than 1,000 of the UK’s social entrepreneurs and business people at the Social Enterprise Exchange.

Be sure to come and say hello to us! You can tweet me @redjotter and Snook’s @andyyoungdesign will be there too.

The future of textiles is very much about science and technology, social innovation and sustainability.  This means that the role of a textile designer is changing. It’s not about solo designers reaching fame – it’s about disciplines coming together to think about textiles as a catalyst to make an impact on the world we live in. There are many PhD students are asking social questions in the world of textiles – Jen Ballie and Clara Vuletich are brilliant examples!

Here is a video of the team giving their thoughts on how Service Design is relevant to the work they do.

Service Design for Fashion is a relationship I think has massive potential to make change. What began as a conversation to show the TED Textiles team new, creative ways to engage stakeholders in their project became a much wider conversation about Service Design for the fashion industry and Service Design being embedded inside Universities to better the student experience.

TED are a research group in a new climate and it’s clear to me that the old academic ways of gaining credibility don’t really fit here. The world isn’t getting to hear their brilliant story and learn from their journey. There is a ‘body’ dedicated to this stuff but I get the impression they could be more engaging and open to new thinking -Ethical Fashion Council 

TED’s ten drivers are driven by environmental, social and economic factors and the team behind it are made up of researchers, designers and teachers. TED’s ten are designed to encourage all ‘makers’ to think about the life cycle of the products they create. This undoubtedly lends it self to a design thinking mindset. This thinking becomes fuzzy when you start moving into other disciplines – for example when you talk to fine artists about TED’s ten there is debate around the use of the word ‘design’.

There are many tool kits available for fashion designers concerned with auditing but I got feedback that they are not very inspiring. They are used by internal design teams rather than the designers who work at the very beginning of the design process. Of course, there is nothing new here in TED’s ten and it’s quite obvious but I get the sense from the team that the tricky part is making it doable and actionable.

I have really enjoyed learning about the great work that is happening out there in this space .Shaun Samson is a designer who is known for the way he uses every single piece of material in his work (and I do love the tartan thang he has got going on too )

5 ways  is a project by Becky Earley and Kate Fletcher made up of five inter-connected approaches to fashion textile design. It brings together creativity and ecological thinking in fabric form and offers a range of starting points for understanding more about what ecological qualities such as diversity, participation and efficiency might mean for fashion textiles.

“The No Wash project is concerned with designing and wearing a garment that is never laundered. Quite simply washing clothes is a chore. It is also a habit and an activity closely tied in with social acceptance, personal and romantic success and happiness. Keeping clean used to be about disease prevention, but now the culture of whiter than white has weakened our immune systems, lined the pockets of detergent manufacturers and led to the startling fact that the energy needed to wash your favourite garment is about six times that needed to make it. Just by washing clothes half as often, overall energy consumption is almost cut by a factor of two.”

 Melanie Bowles is a digital textile designer who involves people in her work. One of her projects The Plaid Shirt illustrates how to create your own signature plaid using Adobe illustrator, print preparations and final printing process using a local digital print bureau.

Platform 21 in Holland showcases Remarkable Repairs. Otto Van Bush is an artist, activist, fashion theorist, designer, a PhD-candidate in critical fashion design at Göteborg University (Sweden).

“Saying ‘no’ to the fashion industry will not work. Playing around within it just might do the trick. According to Otto von Busch – Swedish, Hacktivist and Engaged Fashion Designer, actively having fun with fashion will not only bring about change within the industry itself but will ultimately transform our wardrobes into things of creative individual beauty. What is needed are new  connections between high fashion and DIY craft.”

The notion of “What’s mine if yours” and the rise of collaborative consumption  Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented through the latest technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces in ways and on a scale never possible before.

I worked with the TED team to design a workshop that we delivered on Wednesday. We invited fine artists, graphic designers and textile designers to create their own versions of TED’s ten and really think about how the tool would influence their design process. This in itself was tricky to manage as fine artists often produce installations and don’t have a tangible outcome they way other disciplines do.

I introduced them to basic service design tools such as journey mapping to visualise how their process would change. I asked them to journey map the last time they were a ‘dirty consumer’ to understand that they are consumers but also human beings, this helped the designers to understand the importance of the emotions of users when interacting with a product or service.

We wrapped up by asking the participants to share how they would use their customised TED’s Ten in the future.

This work has raised big questions for me on how service design and the way we focus on people can add value to traditional disciplines. How do we make Art and Design schools resilient and sustainable in the current social, economic and ecological climate?Should we create a degree in design and repair?

I feel as if this space needs a systems thinker to join the dots and look at the service holistically. Last year, I delivered a keynote at Craft Scotland’s event called Craft: The Secret Service. Highlighting the relevance of service design and design thinking in this sector.

Jen Ballie has written a great summary  of a workshop led by Lucy Kimbell about how service innovation and design thinking links to this space.

Do you work in this space? What do you think?