At Snook a core strand of our work for the past several years has been within the health and social care sector.  Valerie Carr, our senior designer is currently hard at work on a variety of healthcare projects ranging from technological innovations to service evaluation in cancer support services.

RITA (Responsive Interactive Advocate) is a project funded by Innovate UK (formerly the Technology Strategy Board) where Snook are one of the partners in a consortium led by University of Kent. The other partners are University of Portsmouth, Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries, and Affective State. Full details of the partners and the thinking behind the project can be found at www.rita.me.uk. Basically the project aim is to develop a comprehensive digital support system, complementing and supplementing other care systems, and fronted by an interactive avatar, making interactions much more intuitive and natural.

This project was funded for nine months up to end September and we are currently looking to access further funding, from Innovate UK and other potential funders, to take it forward to the next stage. In nine months we have developed a proof of concept and a few scripted demos of what RITA might look and feel like in action.  Snook’s work in this project has focused on the user engagement, the branding and website and the development of the scripts for the demos.

Macmillan Service Evaluation. We have been working on an evaluation of the Macmillan at Glasgow Libraries Service for the past year and a half with Social Value Lab. Snook’s contribution has been mainly focused on understanding the service user experience, and we have had creative conversations with service users in many of the libraries across the city. Social Value Lab are currently preparing the final report for this evaluation to feed back to Macmillan.

Coventry Early Action Neighbourhood Fund. We are currently working on a bid with Coventry Law Centre and Grapevine Coventry for the Early Action funders Alliance. Coventry are down to the last five in an open bidding process where three local authorities will be funded for five years (sums of up to £2 million) to redesign local services to provide early intervention and support to their communities. We are being funded to develop the proposal which is to be submitted early November, with decisions made by end November. Snook will be developing some branding for the proposal and will be working with CLC and Grapevine to develop a strong service redesign framework for the project proposal. If the proposal is successful we will be heavily involved in the user engagement and service design aspects of the project.

To talk about how our design process can support innovation in health services and products contact valerie [at] wearesnook.com