I was reminded of the very worthwhile It Gets Better project and cause by a retweet that @mstephens7 did earlier today on Twitter. There was a fair bit of publicity around World Aids Day, but it is a project that deserves ongoing support and attention. It seems to be pretty much US-focussed, but I believe there is probably still a significant challenge in Australia for many LGBT youth, especially in remote and isolated areas where they may well feel like they are from another planet.

Panel: Faruk Avdi (FA), Peter Wright (PW), Anelie Ekelin (AE) & Jeremy Walker (JW)

FA: (full transcript available here) And to entice you to view the full transcript, here are my selected highlights from Faruk’s short presentation:

• Customers or end-users are the people I have been working for. The “user” is an esoteric concept and my desire to get to know who they are has always been tempered by less esoteric, practical constraints.
• I believe clearly defined roles in projects involving design are important, along with hierarchies for decision making – such is our cultural custom. But I’m also fond of a rhizomatic notion of design in this context – where the end product – be it a service or otherwise – is actually the fruit of the entire ever emergent ‘organism’ of a project over time. UCD + Agile development helps with this enormously.
• . . . one cannot design something new for customers other than by, in some way, getting into their skin and seeing the world from their perspective. (I really liked that remark. MMB)
• It isn’t just about users: The people who should be involved in service design are the owners and sponsors of a project, design, technical, delivery and support specialists, end-users, key stakeholders (eg. representative organisations of end users) and other specialists in terms of skill or interest as may be required. But above all the imagination of the overarching designer of the service.
• . . . design must embody the contexts and work that people seek or wish to do, and extend them as appropriate to organizational needs.
• . . . we very deliberately sought to provide a service that people could walk up to and start using, without any prior technical knowledge, . . .
• I am an acute idealist and pain-in-the-arse evangelist when it comes to UCD. In my mind, UCD broadly embodies humanitarian values. When it comes to joint negotiation of project goals, my main experience on this front is with sponsoring individuals and influentially significant stakeholders at the early stages of a project.
• User participation in design is but one of many considerations that must be dealt with along the way.
• End products and services must be a result of entire organic process involving users and designers.
• User-participation is but one of many considerations along the way to service design.

JW (first part is his journey):

• He went from not listening to people to frustration to development of sharper tools – via working with colleagues & customers -> (BA) concepts to detail -> went to Live|work and worked on prototype development, but still missed experience prototyping – proposition development to experience prototyping (he talked about Google Maps vice UK Ordnance Survey mapping – an old and established business model became invalid because for most people GMaps is OK & free – this seems to be something like what is happening to some libraries).
• You can only really learn how a service works by giving it to people and let them use it. Design to Beta.
• It isn’t about wowing a VP, it is about instigating change.
• Let the design team and customer evolve the brief for implementation.

AE:

• She is interested in the co-creation of e-services (if there is a distinction).
• Anelie said she went from being a practitioner to an “academic fortress” (i.e a university – now I know how she feels)!
• She is driven to bringing all forces together democratically and flexibly.
• Sustainability comes through a local perspective, need and within one’s given capacity.

PW:

• Products differ from services (as far as design is concerned).
• User experience is key to unlocking the complexity of a user’s end-to-end experience.
• A key participation driver is ethics and this is also a need in health services.
• There are also important financial drivers.
• Bring users and staff together leads to shared learning and co-design improvements. Then this can be followed up with shared evaluation.
• Journeys can be mapped through touch-points revealing rich stories.
• Challenges: keeping people engaged; crucial to have insiders; people in the middle; campaigning that change is worthwhile; participant requests cannot always be met; & design expertise needs are v.diverse.

Questions/discussion:

FA:

• The role of service design in large urban environments (vice small communities)?
• You should not hand-over all responsibilities to specialists (this creates silos).

PW:

• Simple UK services that hand over public data to the public have allowed for sharing of information. (E.g.s include transport updates, location of potholes, etc.)

FA:

• An accountability framework = ownership by another person (this is important).

PW (I think):

• Should politicians or systems always be responsible – or people? (Drs, nurses, etc have motivation, but they too are victims of the system)

FA:

• Desiging to, with and for people is important.

Audience member:

• Community connections are very important and often result in the sharing of knowledge that may not otherwise be shared.
• Primary empathy is a critical factor in creating services.
• There are many side-benefits from collaboration in co-creation processes.

JW:

• Wikimedicine – a good or bad place? (Drs have no time and some concerns about contributing, so nurses are mediating in a bit of a vacuum.)

This was a thought provoking panel session and the panelists offered a wide variety of views. I doubt my notes are very comprehensive as quite a bit of the discussion was very distracting from note taking. I’ll happily correct or add clarification to anything I’ve written above.

DE’s Tools: human-centred design, PD, agile & ethnographic research.

Amongst other tactics they:

• ask questions & challenge assumptions!
• Break-up problems into small chunks
• encourage risk taking & celebrate mistakes

Immersion Phase

• workshops include co-design for shared understanding, helps bring all perspectives together
• synthesize outcomes to define scope
• desk research (some is usually already done)
• observe research & interviews
• workshop ideas with communications teams
• they gave out packs for people to record diaries in their homes (incl cameras, diaries)
• co-design activities brought people together, so insights were gained & shared (I think this is extremely beneficial and therefore very important for libraries in educational institutions to recognise)

User Experience Strategy

• working with community (not just a Council)
• synthesising findings & keeping users at centre of process
• develop personas (to represent different user perspectives)
• iterative approach to features (tested & feedback built in)
• branding was a challenge – simple terms are important (not jargon) – and this changed brand “personality”
• testing the first release with small group of users also “seeds” the product & they were surveyed
• ambassadors become champions (checking posts, etc.)
• statistics were given about the difference a small change can make
• iterated on design & site architecture also (addition of events & tags stretched design in a final stage)
• agile & participatory approach worked very well with this process delivering transparency
• they released often got feedback & improved services
• the client was happy, good results came, and a new platform was born

Some debate followed about whether “agile” design is good method to use for conservative/cautious clients.

People like to trial and see how things go.

How to engage skeptics or the uninterested? People segment on values, so there is a range and some people are going to be desensitised to the green message. Feeling of being part of a social norm really helps – being part of something, a growing movement. Not just preaching to converted, but giving voice to those who want to get involved. In this project it was not about (do this ) “because” but about “how to” (do something), so when ready, people could consult.

DE are doing some great work around town and in the social innovation and web-design spaces. They were one of the sponsors for Industry Day and are a company to watch in Sydney for sure.

Collabforge work mainly for the government sector and they’ve made a lot of progress re gov2.0 and in stakeholder engagement. In fact I think they’ve made more progress in that respect than any bureaucracy that I’ve ever experienced or could imagine. In only a brief presentation he illustrated his principles with just a few amazing examples of their work that almost blew my mind.

Collabforge has three design principles:

1. Lifecycle management

• All communities have a lifecycle: establishment (creating initial conditions), maintenance (keeping people involved) and transition (they could be shut-down or ongoing).
• E.g. Future Melbourne (a 10 yr planning process). It grew community around the development of a plan using a wiki-based platform and is possibly the world’s first collaborative city plan (all users/contributors have add, edit, delete rights!); it is open 24/7; it facilitates city planners working with public; and there has been no spam or off-topic offensive contribution (it worked much like Wikipedia) because it takes more energy to disrupt process.
• Post-implementation review is online.
• He said that life-cycle management was critical for a design process.

2. Community as investment

• This relates directly to digital literacy.
• There aim is to reduce the number of those who are disconnected and to reuse & recycling community members.
• Apparently they moved from a blog to a wiki.
• See wePlan Alpine

3. Community Management

• This means working with community to get good outcomes.
• They used Facebook for Vital Valued Victorians (c21k fans) for the CFA as it stuck with those concerned & seemed most effective.
• It allowed for a personal level of engagement.
• Also, for EPA Victoria they developed a web2.0 framework to assist in internal engagement of EPA staff in a 5 yr planning process.

Mark’s was probably one of the most impressive short talks that I heard on Industry Day.

In response to a question : He had made some use of mapping technologies in the Parks plans too. This meant people could drop/sharing photos on points in parks using maps.

These are some notes from some sessions at Industry Day of the Participatory Design Conference, held for the first time ever in the Southern Hemisphere at UTS 28 November to 3 December 2010. From the conference website:

Participation is the complex, contested, changing, creative and celebratory core of participatory design. The theme calls us to explore the current and emerging equivalents to the pioneering Participatory Design focus on involving people in the introduction of technology into their work. This PDC will take up the challenge of extending the design approaches and understandings of participation that informed the first 20 years of Participatory Design towards those that were needed to enable the field to continue to generate major innovations in design in the future.

Shaping Practice – Mariesa Nicholas, Inspire Foundation (Industry Day keynote)

http://www.inspire.org.au/ A youth suicide prevention program.

They built their service by having youth design it themselves. Participation is used there to promote mental health & wellbeing. Involvement of youth is seen as critical to the success of the service.

How Inspire’s practice is shaped (principles):

1. Being flexible and responsive

· Completed a year long evaluation on impact, service development & health/well-being

· Diversity of youth reflected to increase engagement

· ROMP (reach out to an MP) uses social networks

· RO has youth reporters telling stories.

· Hard to reach groups are specifically targetted.

· Using social technology to take message to youth (they use Habbo http://www.habbo.com/?migrate_from=AU). Face-to-face workshops proved unpopular, but Habbo was! People waited up to an hour to get access to a 15 minute facilitated online discussion in Habbo.

2. Communicate openly & often

· Very important & often forgotten

· Youth are OK not to be involved in all decisions, but want to understand reasoning, and need to know their role (else they get frustrated and cynical). Also want to know who else is involved & they want updates. Process must be transparent.

· Empowerment is important for youth or they become cynical

· Must be clear and open! Tokenism is to be avoided at all costs

· Mistakes: roles were not clear/checked; participants not kept updated; mistakes not addressed publicly (this is seen as a good thing).

· Conversion of one-of participants to engaged participants is important & then they become involved longer term.

· Frank & personal communications are important to build trust & genuine relationships.

3. Building a foundation for sustainable participation

· This offers opportunities for professional development is important for young leaders

· Barriers were removed to (to becoming a Youth Ambassador) in order to increase diversity & improve participation but it didn’t translate to much long term participation . . .

· The emphasis on just letting users take the initiative (alone) was wrong. Inspire found they had to provide structure & direction

· Formal staff-led programs were important

· Being a youth ambassador (YA) was seen as a privilege (so opening it up to all took away status)

· There is potential for some YAs to become over-commitment/invested and this isn’t healthy – staff needed to manage these challenges

4. Participation is properly resourced

· Not a hobby or something to do in your spare time

· It needs the resources it deserves

· Initially they underestimated what was needed including time

· Participation is difficult, does not come naturally, is costly and it is complex. But the benefits are potentially great.

· Staff training was very necessary & the appreciation of time to engage youth were underestimated.

· Effective participation isn’t spontaneous or a natural process (something that just happens of its own accord)

5. Fostering a culture that values participation

· This is the secret to their success

· Inclusiveness is an organisation value

· Everyone participates in this including the CEO and they enjoy that part of their work.

· Leading by example is very important and valued by colleagues

· They include a youth rep on interview panels – to identify people (staff) who relate to, and work well with youth. (Maybe we could at least try that too with students on panels for reference librarians?)

· They have surveyed stakeholders: and the YA program is central to meaningful participation

· Staff & youth seek opportunities and improve their work

Concluding remarks

The leading mental health service in Australia is ReachOut now.

Inspire now has program, research & policy and consulting arms.

Staff get an extra week annual leave called “reflection leave” – how can it be introduced into other not-for-profit organisations?

They are now also consulting to the NFP sector & Government

They have an “exit strategy” for young people post 25 & they’re developing an alumni program (as advocates) – “setting them free” is seen as critical.

This is a presentation I gave on 22 November to the Kur-ing-gai Rotary Club.

I wandered around with a friend just after dawn on a week day to get a better view of some of these amazing installations. And recently I’ve been going through all of the images and adding the titles and artists’ names. I’m nearly finished.

This tour was organised by the Historic Houses Trust of NSW. I’m very grateful to them for encouraging us to get out and see these buildings and stunning views.