Blog: Is doing co-design a lead into co-production or the other way around?
Peter Grigg, CEO Home-Start UK explores family support from a co-design perspective.
Recently we held a webinar/workshop on this work with Children in Scotland. The film captures the whole journey, design work options and systems issues before settling with the what we did and why during these strange and challenging times. I would encourage you to view the film as it goes through the whole design process as well as the avenues we did not pursue at this time and why.
Further here is a quick summary of what occurred, why and what was done next.
Under lockdown, access to community groups and social support became especially challenging for parents of newly born babies. With over 12,000 children born each week, six months of lockdown would see 300,000 new babies born across the UK cut off from crucial services during the precious first 1000 days. Home-Start UK decided to ask organisations working in this field what we might do together to address this.
We wanted to know not just what could be done quickly but what might be done systematically across the family support landscape to derive a longer term joined-up solution. We were determined to add value to amazing work organisations were already doing and not duplicate anything already in existence. This was of course all far easier said than done!
With funding from Nesta, we worked with the design agency Shift, supported by Dartington Service Design Lab, to embark on a collective journey of discovery with over 16 brilliant charities. Additional funding from Catalyst helped us enlist the support of a digital agency Clear Honest Design.
Through this design journey, we identified a central theme so many of us heavily rely upon – community connectors; those in informal and formal roles in communities that help connect families with available support. Our challenge then focused on how we might add value to this vast array of “parent people” to help them do their job even more effectively.
We created parentpeopleboosts.org as a small gift of thanks to being to more adequately recognise parent people in communities across the UK. Perhaps just as significantly, the project helped start a conversation about how systemic design approaches across the family sector might help inform the future landscape of family support.