Point of view blog

24.11.2011

Mary’s point of view

Zoe and I have just returned from Poland where the Social Innovation eXchange (SIX) winter school brought together 70 social innovators from across the world. Uscreates was asked to talk in a session on celebrating solutions of social innovation in practice.

My presentation focused on co-design as a method for social innovation and explored the benefits of collaboration and design separately and together. These include:

Collaboration

• Bringing together people with expertise of the topic area
• A range of perspectives to consider and work with
• Public empowerment to address challenges and build on opportunities
• Ownership of the outcomes

Design

• Visual communication skills (to enhance the collaborative process and the outcomes)
• Seeing things differently / lateral thinking
• Risk taking
• Generation and facilitation of others creativity

Collaboration and Design
In our work at Uscreates, collaboration and design are interwoven. We use design to create tools that enable collaboration, and we use collaboration to enable the design of social innovation. Many of the tools that we have designed to enable collaboration were shared with the SIX participants, as well as case studies of our work.

Alongside celebrating co-design it is important to acknowledge that it is not a new method for social innovation. For example take the ‘community architecture’ movement in the 1960s when a number of pioneering architects began to find new ways of working with the public, helping them develop ideas for their own homes and community facilities. Although the (re)emergence of co-design for social innovation can, and is learning from the successes and failures of the past, it is operating in a very different political, social and economic environment which poses new challenges and opportunities.

In light of this we also shared a few of our considerations / areas for exploration, as these need to be taken into account and discussed to progress co-design in social innovation:

• Understanding co-design’s reach, limitations and the social topic areas that it can have most effect
• Practice of ethics in co-design
• Clearer understanding of accountability and responsibility of co-designed outcome
• Evaluation of the impact of the co-design process, not just the outcomes

If you have any further ideas on this topic and would like to discuss, get in touch.