Designing for the social challenges of better health
- Client
- Southwark Council, London
- Agency
- Engine
The Southwark Rise project was set up in partnership with Engine as a platform for developing a multi-disciplinary, cross service approach for connecting strategic policy making with the everyday lives of families in the borough. Working with a core team of policy strategists, Engine was asked to explore two related and complex areas: childhood obesity and the challenges of creating better life chances for children from the most deprived backgrounds.
The briefing
Exploring new ways of working
Southwark is one of 33 boroughs in London. The Southwark Alliance provides a multitude of services to their 278,0000 residents.
The Southwark Rise project was set up in partnership with Engine as a platform for developing a multi-disciplinary, cross service approach for connecting strategic policy making with the everyday lives of families in the borough. Working with a core team of policy strategists, Engine was asked to explore two related and complex areas: childhood obesity and the challenges of creating better life chances for children from the most deprived backgrounds.
The project was carried out with a view towards enabling Southwark policy makers, through the transfer of skills and knowledge to:
- build a more complete picture of the complex lives of families living with economic hardship
- and become smarter in the way they identify and act on opportunities to support their residents.
Generating a 360 view of families lives in Southwark
Painting a rich and useful picture of the challenges faced by the most disadvantaged families is not easy. It was important to understand topics such as employment, health, community, faith, and relationships in concert. To generate a deeper understanding of these interrelated topics we employed design ethnographies to study eight families in the borough.
The process
This qualitative approach encouraged open and natural dialogue and enabled us to gain access to day-to-day lives through the use of comfortable (home) environments, extended engagement periods and objective observation. Informal stimulus materials helped to unearth perceptions of support, mindsets towards staff and services and permit conversations around sensitive or complicated issues inherent to health and family.
Collaborative service development with service users and health experts
Building on insights revealed through design ethnographies we moved to the conception of preventative health services that can support Southwark families in addressing the challenges of childhood obesity.
Through a series of collaborative design workshops we lead an action research programme involving a design team of 20 parents and frontline Council staff interested in the topic of childhood obesity as a dimension of public health.
Design activities challenged team members to look at problems as opportunities and supported them to generate services that involved new partnerships and approaches. A series of unexpected services were developed, evaluated, refined and modelled using tools such as service sketching, idea templates, customer journey mapping, desktop prototyping and voting. This revealed underlying values related to provision, desired service journeys and considerations for new and existing touchpoints.
The result
From the many service ideas and propositions emerged a series of key areas of support around health. The image of a remarkably different notion of health support was defined, one that shifts the emphasis from providing support by health professionals to providing platforms that let residents support themselves in different ways such as:
- Support the exchange of information and experiences between people.
- Support individuals to create tailored solutions for themselves through resources that allow them to organise, manage and deliver themselves.
- Support the creation of new, combined and informal service roles.
These insights have provided the basis of the Southwark Alliances (Local Strategic Partnership) new work programme, which forms its approach to Total Place.
Engine Group – Designing for the social challenges of better health